Personal Perspectives

In 2005, Zoltan Dörnyei asked the provocative question ‘Do learning strategies exist?’

Of course they do! We need strategies for everything we do in life, from arranging a holiday, to passing the exams we need, to managing our job, to buying a house or a car (or anything, for that matter), to planning for a comfortable retirement, down to the most mundane things such as how to sort our rubbish. Why should developing a language be any different?

Personally, I learnt about the importance of strategies at a relatively early age. Up until the time I was about twelve years old, my school life had been very happy. I had been blessed with kind and patient teachers who encouraged me with praise and good advice. Therefore, I had done well at school and had enjoyed my time there.

Shortly after my twelfth birthday, however, my father changed his job. My new school was very different from my old one. Instead of the kindly teachers I was used to, Miss Campbell was a strict disciplinarian who seemed to take great delight in finding fault with anything I did. She never called me by my name: I was always ‘the New Girl’ to her. Discipline could be extremely punitive, from writing out many pages of repetitive lines to long periods of detention, though only the boys got the strap, for which, at least, I was grateful.

Although I found the whole atmosphere of the school repressive, this was not my major difficulty. The main problem was the curriculum. My previous school had emphasized creativity and self-expression, whereas my new school had a much more formal approach. I found myself being expected to answer questions on nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, subjects, objects, complements, predicates. I had never even heard these terms, and had absolutely no understanding of what they meant. If Miss Campbell had been talking Martian I could hardly have been more bewildered.