Strategy choice and the target language

This paper compares the strategies used by a group of English native speakers to develop competence in Japanese, a non-cognate language, and in a more familiar language, French. The participants were undergraduate students enrolled in both French and Japanese language courses. A verbal report procedure, the yoked subject technique, was used to gather data on strategy use by learners as they worked with target language materials. The data was analysed according to four dimensions of strategy use: metacognitive, cognitive, social and affective. The results indicated that the cognitive strategies learners used when learning Japanese diverged from those they used for learning French. The learning of Japanese was characterised by the use of repetition, writing out, and translation, with limited use of resourcing and no elaboration or inferencing strategies. The discussion of the results addresses the issue of the impact of language teaching methodology on cognitive strategy use, the effects of which cannot be readily separated from those of the structure of the target language.