Language Learning Strategies: What every teacher should know by Rebecca L. Oxford

Language Learning Strategies is a very well organized study of the techniques that learners utilize in order to master a foreign language. The results of Rebecca Oxford's research has yielded a four-level taxonomy of learning strategies, which she presents in outline form as well as in depth, and which is the great strength of this book. At the lowest level of her classification, there are concrete examples of every strategy in a number of different languages, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not think of a new strategy which wasn't already covered somewhere in her diagram. The book also contains strategy awareness surveys, and a mixture of adopted and original strategy training exercises covering all four language skills, which most teachers should find useful. It is well referenced and well cross-referenced, and there is a useful chapter on networking, should you wish to pursue your studies further. The only slight concern that I have about this book is that some of the exercises seem to require quite a high degree of sophistication in order to play, and that there may be a limit to which students want to spend time talking about such strategies in class, however useful they may be.

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