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Vanderlee Batalier Dalocdoc

Benguet State University, Philippines

 

Abstract

With the goal to produce multilingual Filipino learners, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) of the Philippines mandated the higher education programs in the country to include foreign languages as electives in their curricula. Thus, Benguet State University (BSU) offered subjects on Spanish, Korean, Nihongo, Mandarin and German languages. However, many students struggled with their language learning and long-term language retention because of many factors. To address this, the study sought for the strategies employed by the learners in developing their foreign language learning and retention, and the effectiveness of these strategies using a quantitative approach. The participants were 28 undergraduate students who responded to the questionnaires and participated in follow-up interviews conducted in the school year 2022- 2023. The findings showed that memory strategies and compensation strategies are used by the majority of the learners, while social strategies and cognitive strategies are the least used. Despite this, respondents still consider social strategies, memory strategies and cognitive strategies very effective in developing their language learning and retention. Also, they stated that cognitive strategies and all subcategories of indirect strategies are extremely effective. From these results, a training model for a language program or a crash course was created.

 

Keywords

Foreign language learning, retention, learning strategies