Learner strategies have presented a basic concept within cognitive psychology since the 1960s. In the theory of second language acquisition they have been understood as “operations to acquire, retain, retrieve or perform” (Rigney, 1978) until nowadays. As conscious or potentially conscious “thoughts and actions that a learner takes to achieve a learning goal” (Chamot, 2004), they capture a wide range of linguistic behaviours like taking notes, planning for learning, guessing meaning and others. Learner strategies are most often classified according to their psychological functions into cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective (O’Malley & Chamot, 1990), or four language skills (Cohen & Weaver, 2006), i. e. reading, writing, listening, and speaking. In our research, Cohen and Oxford (2002, in Cohen & Weaver, 2006) and Oxford’s (1990) classifications are used. The last mentioned author, R. Oxford (1990), divided strategies into direct (memory, cognitive, compensatory) and indirect (metacognitive, affective, social) ones. One of the basic features of learner strategies is that they  are naturally not used separately, but in sequences and clusters (Cohen & Weaver, 2006) and each strategy group supports the others (Oxford, 1990). Therefore the quality of their strategy orchestration is crucial for effective learning (Cohen & Macaro, 2007).

It is also possible to infer the relationship between learner strategies application and achievement of learners. As some results of the Czech Republic national testing show (NIQES, 2013), many students do not reach the expected level of English language communicative competence even after many years of learning the foreign language. According to an explorative research study Eurobarometer only 11 % of Czech people perceive own English language communicative competence as a good one, 27 % perceive it as basic, not sufficient for natural communication. Czech results unfortunately are the worst within the context of European Union, together with Spain and Bulgaria. On the contrary, more than 50 % of self-confident language users were identified in Sweden and Denmark; very good results were further achieved in Finland, Cyprus and Austria (Eurobarometer, 2013). The unsatisfactory results of the Czech population are not even increased by the young population, which is quite surprising in the context of Eurostat data showing that in ISCED 1-3 same (in some levels even higher) amount of Czech, Danish and Finish learners study English language, however, their results differ greatly (Eurostat, 2012). This fact might be caused by the lack of students‘ knowledge about how to learn a foreign language, i.e. lack of language learner strategies and their natural sequencing (Lojová & Vlčková, 2011).

As it is little known about natural sequences and clusters of strategies, especially in the learner terminology, our main research aim was to uncover the typical clusters and sequences of learner strategies in typical foreign language tasks for the four language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking). To fulfil the aim quantitative and qualitative data collection and data analysis are used. In this paper, the focus is put on the qualitative part in order to answer the following research questions: What strategies do students use in different language tasks in the four language skills? What clusters and sequences can be identified in the reported students’ strategies use?  Furthermore, we will attempt to create a typology of learners based on their reported strategy use and their strategy clusters/sequencies.

This research was funded by Czech Science Foundation – Project GAP407/12/0432 Foreign Language Learning Strategies and Achievement: Analysis of Strategy Clusters and Sequences.

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