A CRITICAL STUDY OF ENGLISH LEARNING STRATEGIES USED BY IRANIAN HIGH SCHOOL EFL LEARNERS

Although much experimental work has been done in the field of learning strategies, investigating these strategies is a continuing concern within the field of second language acquisition. To date, a number of taxonomies have been proposed to portray the type of common strategies that are used by L2 learners. However, there exists little agreement as to whether these taxonomies could be applied equally and identically to any L2 learner population in various contexts. With this in mind, the present study was set out to investigate the relevance and validity of one of the well-established existing taxonomies (i.e., Rubinʹs taxonomy, 1981). To this end, a questionnaire adopted from this taxonomy was administered to 60 female Iranian English Foreign Language (EFL) learners at the age range of 14-17. The results of the Factor Analysis revealed that the first item of Rubinʹs classification (Clarification and Verification) stood far from other items. Furthermore, the forth strategy (Guessing and making inferences) as well as the sixth one (practicing) appeared to have overlapping areas. The findings indicate that there are redundancies in Rubinʹs taxonomy that require modifications; especially the first strategy needs to be extracted out and the fourth and six strategies need to be merged together. The results of interviews and questionnaires also showed that Iranian English learners must be informed and instructed on the learning strategies and consciousness raising must be made so that they could find and apply their own unique style of learning.