Language-learning strategies are traditional strategies brought up by ancient story tellers. In old days, it used to take a long time for the people to learn a language, they used some mnemonic tools for remembering the words. Today, many people use these strategies as the best tools to develop the competence in the language.
Oxford has divided 62 strategies of language learning into two categories: one is direct and the other is indirect language learning strategy. In this article, I would like to brief you the direct strategies of language learning.
Direct language learning strategies
The strategies that upfront deal with the new language are known as direct strategies. The direct strategies are mainly of three groups they are memory, cognitive and compensation. These strategies are beneficial for the students as they help to store, recover information and helps learners for producing the language ever when there is a gap.
Memory strategies
This strategy is easy as it is based on simple principles like laying thing, making association between the things and reviewing them. This strategy especially helps the students who face challenges in learning vocabulary. Here, the words can be associated with visual images, sounds, motion, etc. that can be easily remembered by the students. This strategy can be applied in the early process of language learning.
Cognitive strategies
This is one of the most popular language learning strategy used by the learners. Here, the language is transformed by repetition and analyzing. This strategy consists of four sets, i.e., practicing achieved by sounds, writing and using patterns; analyzing and reasoning for adult learners; sending and receiving messages for skimming and scanning; and making structure for input and output. This strategy mainly helps you for understanding the meaning and expression of the language you are learning.
Compensation strategies
This strategy is used by the learners for learning the comprehension of the targeted language when the learners have insufficient knowledge in it and also to make up the deficiency in grammar and the vocabulary. Learners’ guess the meaning when they don’t know the meaning or expression of the language for this, the learners bring their own life experiences for interpreting the data. For example, the learner can identify the topic by recognizing few words that he/she knows in that language. This is how compensation strategies help people.
These are the three main direct strategies that help people in learning language. So, make use of this strategies and acquire the language.