Spanish pre-service teachers of English: Perceived use of language learning strategies and its relationship with proficiency

This study examined patterns of perceived strategy use among prospective Spanish primary teachers of English and the relationship between those strategies and the prospective teachers’ English proficiency. A total of 116 student teachers were administered the Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) version 7.0 (ESL/EFL). The Oxford Placement Test was used to obtain a measure of proficiency in English. Descriptive statistics, a post hoc thematic analysis and Spearman correlation coefficients were used to analyze the data. The results showed that the participants were medium-to-high strategy users overall and that they reported using metacognitive strategies and those relating to understanding most frequently, while memory and affective strategies were used least frequently. According to the self-reported study data, the most frequently-used individual strategy involved paying attention to language whereas the least-used strategy involved writing down feelings in a learning diary. Findings indicate a generally low correlation between strategy group scores and English proficiency. In addition, there is no significant correlation between the SILL and proficiency scores; however, when the low-use strategies are not computed for the measure of frequency of language learning strategy use, a significant positive correlation is found between self-reported frequency of strategy use and proficiency.