There is an old proverb which states: ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime’. Applied to the language field, this proverb might be interpreted to mean that if students are provided with answers, the immediate problem is solved. But if they are taught the strategies to work out the answers for themselves, they may be empowered to manage their own language development. It is this fundamental premise on which this book is based.

Over the years, a great deal of effort has gone into developing theories, methods and approaches for teaching language (such as the Grammar Translation Method, Audiolingualism and the Communicative Approach). However, for many years, issues relating to the learner were treated with ‘relative neglect’ (Dansereau, 1978: 78) and much less attention was paid to the language development process from the learner’s point of view (Tarone & Yule, 1989). Although valuable work was done on questions of how language is acquired/learnt/developed (for instance, Eckman et al., 1984; Ellis, 1986; Krashen, 1981; Winitz, 1981), when it is considered that the learner forms one half of the teacher/learner partnership, it might be considered surprising that, in general, the significance of the learner’s role was so long ‘underestimated’ (Larsen-Freeman, 2001: 12).

In more recent years, however, the learner perspective has received much more attention, an early example of this trend being Nunan’s (1988) The Learner-Centred Curriculum. Indeed, we might suggest that the learner-focused perspective had begun in the 1970s, when the possibility that success in language development might be related to how students go about the task was explored by writers such as Rubin (1975), Stern (1975), Hosenfeld (1976) and Naiman et al. (1978).