Comment: "Language learning: Teachers' perceptions and students' perceptions" by Carol Griffiths

In language teaching, to know students’ learning strategies is key to understanding how teachers can facilitate and guide their sudents’ language learning experiences in an effective way.  Knowing that sometimes teachers` perceptions of the students’ learning strategies usage differ from actual students’ strategy usage, Griffiths (2007) conducted a study whose purpose was to know how the teachers’ perceptions reported corresponded with the frequency in which the students used certain typified strategies such as using a dictionary or watching TV in English to learn English.

From a list of 32 strategies among which the ones before mentioned are included, the results of the research show that the students use three strategies which irrespective of their English proficiency level are employed very frequently. These are using a dictionary, learning from the teacher and doing homework. 

This research demonstrates that the students’ consider the dictionary as a highly important tool to learn a language. It is so important that it keeps the same rate of use in all the levels of proficiency according to the table shown. It goes without saying the fact that naturalistic theories of SLA take less or no importance in the use of the dictionary such as Krashen’s who claims no need of it since it is stated that under ideal conditions exposure to the L1 and comprehensible input is enough for SLA. 

In second place, learning from the teacher continues to be considered a highly important strategy used by the students to learn a second language. In fact, the teachers have a similar perception of their students’ learning strategies whose statistic variation differs in only one point. Both teachers and students claim language instruction is useful.  Even though this result does not demonstrate the usefulness of language instruction in SLA, it can contain information for researchers in the field of motivation to study students’ strategies preference which may play a role in the development of their teachers’ and own motivation..

In third place, another activity highly used by the students is doing homework. Some students expect to receive assignments from their teachers as a part of a teacher- guided learning process, however; their teachers assert that the students privilege other type of activities that are more students’ oriented such as writing a diary or listening to the radio (Interactional and communicative activities).

The results of this research allow researchers of the SLA field to discover the gap that still exist between teachers and students regarding the way in which the latter learn. It would be necessary, when designing syllabi, to state the importance of these strategies, the roles and responsibilities they both have, and what is expected from the course depending on its orientation, that is, tasked- based, grammar- based, communicative among other.