Social/affective strategies concern the ways in which learners interact with other leaners and native speakers or take control of one’s own feelings on language learning. Examples of such strategies are cooperation and question for clarification.
O’Malley and Chamot’s three-way distinction is useful and has been generally accepted (Ellis,1994). Perhaps the reason is that this classification is more consistent with a learner’s use of strategies. It implies that second language acqusition is active and dynamic mental processes. For teachers, the classification is found to be useful for describing how to integrate strategies into instruction (O’Malley and Chamot, 2001).
Their classification of strategies still remains problematic, however. First, like other classifications, this classification still has the problem that it is not clear whether the range of strategies is finite or infinite in number. Second, even O’Malley and Chamot talked about their problems (2001, p.144). In fact, the distinction between metacognitive and cognitive strategies is obscure without precise boundaries. Possibly what is metacognitive to one researcher is cognitive to another. “Directed attention” (deciding in advance to attend in general to a learning task and ignore irrelevant distractors) is classified into a metacognitive strategy and presumed to occur prior to the beginning of a task. But actually it is ongoing when students direct their attention to the task. Another example is “selective attention” (deciding in advance to attend to specific aspects of language input or siruational details that will cue the retention of language input.) , which sometimes has the feature of being an integral aspect of task performance, rather than the type of skill recognized as an executive function.
Obviously, there is no agreement on what constitute learning strategies. Ellis (1994:558) analyzed the phenomonon as follows: There is no widely accepted theoretical basis for identifying and describing strategies. The work done to date has been essentially descriptive, reflecting the corpora of data that different researchers have worked on. No wonder that there is a state of confusion in the classification of strategies.
These problems are serious blocks to reliable research(Ellis,1994). Because of different sets of strategies and the lack of agreement, it is impossible for the studies to reach any general conclusion. What can be done to solve the problem? Maybe some useful suggestions can be obtained from the study of vocabulary-learning strategies made by Brown and Perry’s study (1991) .The study of vocabulary-learning strategies is very promising. The success of the study lies in clarifying the learning targets and classifying strategies very precisely. Their study also shows that it is possible to locate vocabulary strategy research within a strong theoretical framework (Ellis). For the purpose of conducting research, specific strategy terms and operational definitions to describe strategic processing should be used (O’Malley and Chamot, 2001 ). On the other hand, perhaps criteria should be taken into consideration when developing an taxonomies of learning strategies. Rubin (1987) once proposed four criteria when developing an inventory of cognitive strategies. It might be a feasible approach.