Grup 4 : Meilda Lestari, Dewi Martila, Romy Hasyim Z

AUTONOMY, AWARENESS, AND ACTION

Autonomy has come to be used in at least five ways:

• for situations in which learners study entirely on their own;
• for a set of skills which can be learned and applied in self-directed learning;
• for an inborn capacity which is suppressed by institutional education;
• for the exercise of learners' responsibility for their own learning;
• for the right of learners to determine the direction of their own learning.

Metalinguistics can be classified as the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language, by using the following skills:

1. an awareness that language has a potential greater than that of simple symbols (it goes beyond the meaning)
2. an awareness that words are separable from their referents (meaning resides in the mind, not in the name, i.e. Sonia is Sonia, and I will be the same person even if somebody calls me another name)
3. an awareness that language has a structure that can be manipulated (realizing that language is malleable: you can change and write things in many different ways (for example, if something is written in a grammatically incorrect way, you can change it)).

Metalinguistic awareness is also known as "metalinguistic ability", which can be defined similarly as metacognition ("knowing about knowing"). Metalinguistic awareness can also be defined as the ability to reflect on the use of language. As metalinguistic awareness grows, children begin to recognize that statements may have a literal meaning and an implied meaning. They begin to make more frequent and sophisticated use of metaphors such as the simile, "We packed the room like sardines". Between the ages of 6 and 8 most children begin to expand upon their metalinguistic awareness and start to recognize irony and sarcasm. These concepts require the child to understand the subtleties of an utterance's social and cultural context.

STRATEGIES

            Strategies are those specific “attacks” that we make on a given problem, and that vary considerably within each individual. They are the moment-by-moment techniques that we employ to solve “problems” posed by second language input and output. Rubin (Rubin and Thompson, 1982) later summarized 14 such characteristics. Good language learners:

1.      Find their own way, taking charge of their learning

2.      Organize information about language

3.      Are creative, developing a “feel” for the language by experimenting with its grammar and words

4.      Make their own opportunities for practice in using the language inside and outside the classroom

5.      Learn to live with uncertainty by not getting flusteredand by continuing to talk or listen without understanding every word

6.      Use mnemonics and other memory strategies to recall what has been learned

7.      Make errors work for them and not against them

8.      Use linguistic knowledge, including knowledge of their first language in learning a second language

9.      Use contextual cues to help them in comprehension

10.  Learn to make intelligent guesses

11.  Learn chunks of language as wholes and formalized routines to help them perform “beyond their competence”

12.  Learn certain tricks that help to keep conversations going

13.  Learn certain production strategies to fill in gaps in their own competence

14.  Learn different styles of speech and writing and learn to vary their language according to the formality of the situation

Teachers, on the one hand, can benefit from attending to what might indeed be very common strategies for successful learning across many cultures and contexts, but on the other hand, they need to be ever mindful of individual needs and variations as well as the cultural context of learning.

LEARNING STRATEGIES

Typically, strategies were divided into three main categories :

a.       Metacognitive is a term used information processing theory to indicate an “executive” funcution, strategies that involve planning for learning, thinking about the learning process as it is taking place, monitoring of one’s production or comprehension and evaluating learning after an activity is complated.

b.      Cognitive strategies are more limited to specific learning tasks and involve more direct manipulation of the learning material it self.

c.       Socioaffective strategies have to do with social mediating activity and interacting with others.