How can pluralistic approaches develop pupils’ learning strategies?
Résumé
Language teaching should not only give learners opportunities to develop their proficiency in a second language but should also enable them to develop their cognitive skills. We hypothesize that the implementation of teaching methods based on the confrontation to unknown languages (pluralistic approaches as defined by Candelier et al., 2009) helps students develop their learning strategies (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990). Furthermore, being confronted to unknown languages without a purpose of learning allows students to apprehend languages differently.
We have explored the educational benefits of such pluralistic approaches on the implementation of transferable learning strategies. During the school year 2011-2012, teachers of five year-7 classes led nine sessions of pluralistic approaches: three sessions in Dutch, three in Italian and three in Finnish. 88 students performed, in turn, a metasemantic, a metasyntactic and a metaphonological reflection in groups of four. The sessions were filmed, the group sheets completed and the verbalization of their discussion was recorded and analyzed, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The aim is to understand the factors enabling students to implement these learning strategies and to check whether these strategies are transferable from one language to another, and even onto the L2 (English they are learning).
This workshop will mainly aim at demonstrating the classroom techniques. A short video will enable the audience to understand the way the pluralistic approaches were implemented. Excerpts from group sheets completed with transcriptions from group discussions will be discussed so as to underline the enhanced implementation of learning strategies and their transferability from one language to another. A later development, springing from the ongoing action-research, will be presented as the most probable solution to help students benefit from the pluralistic approaches.