Finding out about students' learning strategies by looking at their diaries: a case study

The concept of learning strategies has become quite familiar to most professionals in teaching English as a foreign language. However, one of the main difficulties of working with strategies is related to the lack of appropriate tools to measure strategy use by language students. In this study a checklist is presented and tested to see whether it can help to shed some light on students' use of strategies as reflected in their diaries. Some interesting differences between successful and less successful students appear which, in their turn, open up questions about strategy training in general.