Summary:
This monograph reports on a longitudinal inquiry into mainland Chinese undergraduates' language learning experiences in an English medium university in a multilingual setting with a focus on their strategic language learning efforts. This book examines the issue as to what extent language learners' strategic learning efforts depend on their 'choice', if 'the element of choice' is the defining characteristic of language learners' strategic learning behaviour. The inquiry, using a qualitative and ethnographic research approach, reveals dynamic interaction between learners' agency and contextual conditions underlying the participants' strategic learning process. Such understanding informs pedagogical efforts to foster individual learners' capacity for strategic learning and their capacities in opening up and sustaining a social learning space for exercising their strategic learning capacity or utilizing their strategic learning knowledge.
Review:
In this engaging study combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches, Gao makes extensive use of a sociocultural research perspective to investigating second-language learner strategies. With theoretically-grounded rigor, he demonstrates how contextual realities (such as the threat of a given exam) mediate the language learning and use strategies of college students. A highlight of the study is his comparison of the same learners’ strategies and discourse about their experiences in studying in mainland China and then at an English-medium university in Hong Kong. What lends credibility to the study is that the author himself experienced challenges similar to those of his subjects, and that he was a participant observer by rooming for a year in a student dorm with one of his subjects.
Andrew Cohen, Second Language Studies, University of Minnesota, USA
Gao Xuesong’s book is the first in-depth account of language learning strategy use written from a sociocultural perspective. Showing how individuals’ strategy repertoires and use change over a period of years and across two settings – Mainland China and Hong Kong – it offers unique insights into the roles of individual agency and social context in strategic engagement with foreign language learning. The four detailed, and often moving, individual case studies included in the book are especially valuable in illuminating the human side of language learning strategy use.
Phil Benson, Hong Kong Institute of Education
Author Biography:
Xuesong (Andy) Gao is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Hong Kong Institute of Education. His research interests include language learning strategy, learners’ learning narratives and teacher development. He has published over twenty journal articles and book chapters in these areas. Some of his key publications can be found in journals such as English Language Teaching Journal, Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, System, Studies in Higher Education, Modern Language Journal and Teaching and Teacher Education.
Readership Level:
Postgraduate, Research / Professional, Undergraduate
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