In my PhD project I investigate the effect of multilingualism on primary school students’ vocabulary learning strategies. In controlled settings, 35 participants carried out vocabulary learning tasks and verbalized their thoughts. In this presentation, I will discuss which strategies participants used in these tasks and which factors predicted their strategy use.
Alongside the development of linguistic competence, the promotion of language learning awareness is a major objective of foreign language teaching. It enables students to become self-regulated, life-long language learners. My PhD project focuses on the interplay of language learning awareness and migration-based multilingualism in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) at primary level. As part of language learning awareness, the aim is to investigate which strategies young monolingual and multilingual learners use for EFL vocabulary learning; in particular, if they use their previously-acquired linguistic knowledge. In addition to evaluating the success of participants' strategy use, I will investigate the effect of language background on vocabulary learning strategies. So far, data collection with 35 students has occurred in controlled settings, during which students verbalized their thoughts while (a) inferring word meaning and (b) nemorizing new words. Preliminary results of the inferencing task show that students heavily rely on the sentence context to discover the word meaning and rarely use their previously-acquired linguistic knowledge. If they use previous linguistic knowledge, they predominantly resort to the majority language German. Similarly, the multilingual learners do not reference their home languages. When memorizing unknown words, students make use of visual, audio and contextual input and often use repetition. However, they rarely utilize their linguistic knowledge. In this presentation, I will discuss further results on the strategies young learners used and factors that play a role in strategic learning.
