asian international journal of social sciences, vol. 16...

Asian International Journal of Social Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2016 Copyright © 2016 Asian International Journal of Social Sciences

The use of self-regulated learning strategies by science and technology students in English language learning contexts

Piyarat Pipattarasakul Ph.D. Candidate Department of Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts King Mongkut University of Technology, Thonburi, Bangkok, Thailand

Wareesiri Singhasiri Assistant Professor Department of Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts King Mongkut University of Technology, Thonburi, Bangkok, Thailand

RESEARCH DRIEF

Piyarat Pipattarasakul and Wareesiri Singhasiri

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Pipattarasakul, P. & Singhasiri, W. (2016). The use of self-regulated learning strategies by science and technology students in English language learning contexts. Asian International Journal of Social Sciences, 16(3), 75 – 92.

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the degree of self-regulated learning strategies (SRLS) employed by

science and technology students in the tertiary level. Academic Self-regulated Learning Scale (A-

SRL-S) and teacher diary were used to find the degree of SRLS and explore in depth in terms of the

behaviors of using SRLS. Frequencies of SRLS and their concordance information were obtained

using AntConc software. The results from the questionnaire revealed that the least SRLS employed

by students were goal setting, while the most SRLS used were self-evaluation. Based on observed

behaviors, from teacher diary, similarly the students were unlikely to employ goal setting strategies;

they however frequently employed the memory strategies in the form of taking notes in class,

memorizing and reciting their notes and scripts. The seeking assistance strategies were employed in

the form of asking their peers to receive feedback about their performance and searching information

using their mobile devices.

Keywords: Self-regulation, Self-regulation learning strategies, Science and technology students

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As the world has become economically globalized, English is considered the most widely used

official medium of communication around the globe. In effect, this has vigorously drawn

attention to Thai educational realm in teaching/learning English to enhance individual main

language skills particularly listening and speaking. It is crucial to ponder about the future of

teaching and learning the English language in the 21st century. One promising key solution

pertaining to enhancing language proficiency is the importance of knowing and using listening-

speaking strategies to help learners improve their language development for the pursuit of

effective spoken communication. To achieve the desirable goals, the concept of self-regulated

learning has come into play. This concept is important to the learning process (Jarvela &

Jarvenoja, 2011; Zimmerman, 2008) in a way that it can help the students create better learning

habits and strengthen their study skills (Wolters, 2011), and apply learning strategies to enhance

academic outcomes (Harris, Friedlander, Sadler, Frizzelle, & Graham, 2005). Self-regulated learning

(SRL) has been an important area of research in the fields of education and psychology over the last

few decades, but is still a relative newcomer to the foreign language learning sphere (Collett, 2014).

Hence, self-regulated learning has become an appropriate milestone of learning/teaching English in

all four skills. The essence of meta-cognitive processes and self- regulated learning strategies

employed by students is paramount because it helps explain the individual differences among

students and serves as a means to improving student’s achievement (Mahadi & Subramaniam, 2013).

Investigating the self-regulated learning strategies (SRLS) employed by science and engineering

students is essential to understand both strengths and drawbacks of English language learning

strategies and behaviors. Thus, this study reveals significant information for the English language

stakeholders to understand SRLS applied by the students in the classroom and help eliminate

unfavorable behaviors that impede academic success.

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Literature Review

Self-regulation has become an important consideration in language learning (Cohen & Macaro,

2007; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001). The concept of self-regulated learning (SRL) developed in

the 1980s and began receiving widespread attention in the 1990s (Dinsmore et al., 2008). The

term self-regulated learning and self-regulation can be used interchangeably. Being suggested as

a successful learning process, the term self-regulated learning is defined in different ways by

different scholars. But most of them seem to define it similarly, or with very little differences.

SRL can be described as “an active and systematic process during which learners specify the

aims for their own learning and try to regulate, control and supervise their cognition, motivation

and behavior (Pintrich 2000). A definition of SRL provided by Zimmerman (2000) is “self-

generated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the

attainment of personal goals.” Zimmerman notes that self-regulated learning is heavily involved

with the interaction of three major elements (a) personal regulation, which refers to the

adjustment of cognitive and affective factors; (b) behavioral regulation, which mainly takes into

account the process of observing oneself and modifying performance; and (c) environmental

regulation, which involves analyzing learning context, and making adaptations in a way that

optimizes performance. Students who are able to regulate their own learning perform and learn

better than their peers who lack self-regulatory capabilities (Pintrich & Zusho, 2002) and they

are more likely to be successful in school and become lifelong learners compared to non-self-

regulated learners (Zimmerman, 2002). Recently, the study of Lawanto and Santoso (2013)

showed support of self-regulation on improving learning performance. The results found that

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students who were reported to have greater awareness of planning, monitoring, and regulating

strategies showed an improvement on their grade performances.

Several protocols were developed to measure SRLS including questionnaires (Ekhlas &

Shangarffam, 2013), structured interview (Zimmerman & Pons, 1986) and teacher diaries. The

teacher's diary is a diary where the teacher records his/her classes, the strategies, activities and

problems. Teacher diary is also recognized as a useful method to record the students’ behaviors

as well as their strategy uses when they learn and perform language tasks. However, throughout

the diary study, considerable amount of irrelevant information was also recorded (Debrelia,

2011). To eliminate irrelevant information, efficient text coding and analysis methods have to be

developed.

Research Questions

The present study aims to investigate the following research questions:

RQ1: To what degree do the science and technology freshman undergraduates at King

Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) possess self-regulated learning

strategies (SRLS)?

RQ2: What SRLS do the students employ when learning and performing English language tasks

in the classroom?

Participants

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This research study examined the first year students majoring in science and technology required

to take General English (LNG101) in their curriculum. The skills that the students are required to

learn are listening and speaking. The total participants were 819 comprising 373 female students

and 446 male students at an average age 17-25 voluntarily asked to complete the questionnaires

pertaining to the use of SRLS. Then one class of 37 students was investigated by using teacher

diary to derive rich and profound data of SRLS employed by the students.

Research Tools

Academic Self-regulated Learning Scale (A-SRL-S)

To be congruent with the Thai academic context, the Academic Self-regulated Learning Scale

(A-SRL-S), a 55-item questionnaire developed by Magno using four likert scales to measure the

students’ self-regulation. The subscales was confirmed in a measurement model with good fit

with high internal consistencies. Convergent validity was established among seven subscales:

memory, goal setting, self-evaluation, seeking assistance, environmental structuring,

responsibility, and organizing strategies (Magno, 2009). The A-SRL-S was translated to Thai

language. The details of questionnaire items are shown in Appendix.

Teacher Diary

The researcher who was the teacher of this class wrote a 15-week course as data analysis to

introspect on teacher’s perspective towards the students’ SRLS from one class of 37 students

while they were learning and performing a variety of activities. A 15-week diary was recorded

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during the class and immediately right after the class and it was used as a qualitative source of

SRLS investigation. The diary was coded based on self-regulated learning scale (Magno, 2009).

AntConc

AntConc software is a freeware corpus toolkit used for concordancing and text analysis.

AntConc (Version 3.4.4w) developed by Anthony (2014) was used to find the word frequency

representing SRLS occurring in teacher diary. Before the SRLS analysis, additional tokens

including the symbols ’, < and > were added to the token definitions to make the software treat

these symbols as English characters, similarly to the letters a-z and A-Z. The occurrence of

SRLS in the teacher diary were coded and analyzed. The frequencies of each strategy in each

week were found and concordance lines of each strategy were obtained as shown in Figure 1.

A Coding Method

This study developed a coding method and used Magno SRLS categories (Magno, 2009). Self-

regulated tags were added to define the boundary of text representing the self-regulated strategies

and eliminate irrelevant information. The coding text was analyzed using AntConc software to

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extract the self-regulated learning strategies found on a weekly basis. Frequencies of each

strategy tag occurred in each week were found and concordances of strategies were derived.

Concordances help find where self-regulated learning strategies occurred systematically and the

sentences representing them. A part of the coding text is shown as follows:

<seekassist> while the rest of the students actively searched for the books <ENDseekassist>

<memory> read them quietly and took notes of the vocabulary they had learned.<ENDmemory>

Results

Self-regulated Learning Strategies Employed by Science and Technology Students

Figure 2 shows the distribution of SRLS scores. The average score was 3.12. There were a small

number of 18 students whose SRLS scores were lower than 2.50.

As shown in Figure 3, the results from the questionnaire revealed that the least SRLS employed by

both science and technology students were goal setting, while the most SRLS used were self-

evaluation. In general, science and technology students employed fairly high level of SRLS in

learning English. The average scores of self-evaluation (Avg_EVAL) were 3.24, seeking assistance

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(Avg_S) 3.20, environmental structuring (Avg_ENV) 3.19, responsibility (Avg_R) 3.14, organizing

(Avg_ORG) 3.14, memory (Avg_M) 3.02 and goal setting (Avg_G) 2.90.

Figure 4 shows the mean scores of various self-regulated learning strategies under seven main

categories as indicated in the questionnaire. Among the memory strategies, the science and

technology students were more likely to rewrite class notes by rearranging the information in

their own words (M3: 3.33), followed by taking their own notes in class (M15: 3.31), and using

note cards to write information they needed to remember (M1: 3.24). On the other hand, the

SRLS hardly used by the students were to record the lessons that the students attended to (M11:

2.37) and to summarize every topic in class (M8: 2.72).

According to goal setting strategies, generally the score of each goal setting strategy was not

high. Goal setting strategies involve setting plans and the schedule to achieve desirable outcomes

in a timely manner. The results showed that the students often kept track of everything they had

to do in a notebook or on a calendar (G5: 3.07), followed by planning the things they had to do in

a week (G3: 2.96). The least strategies the students rarely employed were making a detailed

schedule of daily activities (G1: 2.71), and they were less likely to use a planner to keep track of

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what they were supposed to accomplish (G4: 2.85). It is noticeable that the students solely kept

track of what they had to do.

For organizing strategies incorporate self-management and arrangements of the things. The

students appeared to prefer to study at their own pace (ORG4: 3.25). When they studied English,

they usually highlighted important concepts and information they found in their readings (ORG1:

3.22). However, they seemed rather not to concern about the study area (ORG6: 3), and not to fix

their things first before they started studying (ORG5: 3.06).

The evaluation strategies were the most SRLS employed by science and technology students.

They welcomed peer evaluations for every output (EVAL2: 3.48), and they opened to feedbacks

to improve their work (EVAL9: 3.46). They usually shared their opinions among the classmates

about their performance. However, they seldom took notes of the improvements on what they did

(EVAL5: 2.89), and evaluated their accomplishments at the end of session (EVAL3: 2.95).

Responsibility strategies should also be taken into consideration as self-regulated strategies. The

students strongly agreed that they were highly concerned with the deadlines set by the teachers

(R3: 3.36), and they rechecked their homework if they had done it correctly before submission

(R1: 3.21). The students did not do things as soon as the teacher gave the task (R2: 2.89). Many

students are likely to do things close to the deadline. In addition, they did not finish all their

homework first before doing unnecessary things (R5: 3.09). This may result from the fact that

the science and engineering students would rather focus on their major subjects.

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The majority of the students often seek information from peers, which is related to seeking

assistance strategies. The most seeking assistance strategies employed by the students were

looking for a friend with whom they could have an exchange of questions (S5: 3.27), and using a

variety of sources in making their research papers (S1: 3.27). The least used strategies were

calling a classmate about the homework that they missed (S4: 3.11), and using library resources

to find the information that they need (S2: 3.15). Due to the advancement of mobile technology,

students may use applications on the smart phones such as Line and Facebook to communicate

with their friends.

Last but not least, environmental structuring strategies have come into play in maintaining good

physical learning environments. The students strongly agreed that they switch off TV to

concentrate on their studies. (ENV3: 3.39), followed by isolating themselves from noisy places

(ENV2: 3.37). They agreed that they avoided watching TV if they had a pending homework

(ENV1: 2.94), and they could not study nor do homework if the room was dark (ENV4: 3.11).

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Figure 4 SRLS Employed by Science and Technology Students

Self-regulated Learning Strategies from Teacher Diary

The results were derived from observing the students’ behaviors while learning English and

performing language tasks in the classroom. During 15 weeks, the students were required to do

one speaking and one listening quizzes including performing the role play. Thus, based on the

diary, the most strategies the students employed were memory, seeking assistance, evaluation,

organizing, goal setting, and responsibility in a respective order. The most frequently SRLS used

were memory which occurred almost every week, followed by seeking assistance. The

environmental structuring strategies only occurred once when one of the students adjusted the

temperature of the air-conditioning probably due to high room temperature. Table 1 shows the

extracts of the use of SRLS found in the teacher diary.

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Table 1 Students’ SRLS Frequencies from Teacher diary

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Discussion and Conclusion

Students’ Perceptions towards the Use of SRLS

The questionnaire results reflect the students’ perceptions on the use of SRLS when they learn

English in general. The science and technology students employed fairly high level of SRLS as

evidently exhibited by the mean scores of all seven strategies. It is also obvious that the students

emphasize self-evaluation strategies in relation to academic outcomes. Nonetheless, the students

employed rather low goal setting strategies. This finding is similar to the results of one research

whose study investigated into the learning styles and self-regulated learning strategies for

computer science students in Australia and the findings supported that students were not aware

of the importance of SRLS (Alharbi and Paul et al, 2011). Thus, it appears that Thai science and

technology students tend to set their learning aims or plans on their own study field rather than

on English subjects. In addition, the outcomes of another study also confirmed two least

strategies applied by students which were memory and goal setting (Nami, Enayati & Ashouri,

2012). Therefore, it is essential to promote these two strategies for successful learning.

Students’ Behaviors in Using SRLS while Learning and Performing Language Learning

Tasks

From the findings as mentioned earlier, the diary portrayed how the students used SRLS while

performing language tasks. Memory strategies were used most frequently due to the nature or the

requirements of tasks i.e. doing role plays, speaking quiz, and listening quiz. The students took

notes, wrote the scripts and recited their notes and scripts for the role play. Hence, the nature of

tasks have great influential impact upon the students’ strategy uses, which is consistent with the

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results found in the previous study on tasks and the effectiveness of vocabulary learning

strategies (Gu, 2003). Seeking assistance strategies were the second group of strategies which the

students frequently used. They ask their peers when working in group, search information from

mobile phones and consult online dictionaries.

Moreover, the learning environment is more collaborative in the sense that the students are open

to discuss and share knowledge among their peers (Ongardwanich, Kanjanawas & Tuipae,

2015). The students also employed goal setting strategies, although they reported that they used

this group of strategies least. They have some plans before they start doing the tasks. Last but not

least, because the learning environment in the classroom is rather fix, there are not many things

that students could change to improve their learning performance. In conclusion, undoubtedly,

both the questionnaire and the diary show that the students used SRLS when they study English

and perform language tasks. This study still has some limitations because a questionnaire and

teacher diary cannot provide in-depth information and answer why the students use each self-

regulated learning strategy. Additionally, the diary can obtain only the observable information.

Therefore, to profoundly understand SRLS, other methods like interviews can be additionally

applied in the future work. More importantly, the findings could provide teachers/instructors

with clear and explicit guidelines to encourage learners with adequate learning strategies to

become more successful learners. The evidence has revealed that the students who are able to

manage their learning process together with the effective use of SRLS will know how to control

themselves and can ultimately attain the desirable goals.

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