Children's Learning Strategies in Language Immersion Classrooms

Abstract

This article reports on an investigation of learning strategy applications in elementary French, Japanese, and Spanish immersion classrooms. The focus of this article is on identifying strategies that more and less effective learners use for classroom reading and writing tasks in the target language. Think‐aloud data from 3rd‐grade and 4th‐grade students were quantified and compared through matched‐pairs t‐tests. Although there were no differences in total strategies used by high‐rated and low‐rated students, there were some differences in the types of strategies students relied on when reading. Low students used a greater proportion of phonetic decoding than did high students. High students used a greater proportion of background‐knowledge strategies (including inferences, predictions, and elaborations) than did low students. Potential differences in the quality and flexibility of students' strategy use are explored.