Zoe Gavriilidou and Alexandros Papanis
Democritus University of Thrace

The purpose of the present study was to identify the range of strategies reported to be used by university students learning English as foreign language and to determine whether the reported strategies vary, depending on the proficiency in foreign language, gender, knowledge of more than one foreign language and career orientation of the students. 117 students filled in a questionnaire. The results showed that university students use learning strategies to a high degree. No significant effects of gender, career orientation and knowledge of more than one language was found. On the contrary, there was a significant effect of language proficiency on the use of metacognitive strategies.

Zoe Gavriilidou and Alexandros Papanis
Democritus University of Thrace

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of strategy instruction on the use of strategies by Muslim primary school EFL learners, when they engage in reading and listening comprehension as well as vocabulary learning. 122 students attending minority schools in Xanthi and Rodopi, aged from 10 to 12 years old, participated in the study. They were divided into an experimental group who followed a specially designed programme aiming at raising learning strategy use, and a control group who followed only the typical English language programme. Strategy use in both groups was evaluated with a standardized questionnaire based on previous work by Oxford (1990) and O’ Malley and Chamot (1990), distributed before and immediately after the intervention programme. The results showed that the learning of the experimental group, compared to the control group, significantly improved because of an increased use of metacognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective strategies. These findings stress the need for designing special curricula for raising students’ strategic use of language in second or foreign language teaching.