Metacognitive strategies in foreign language teaching

Abstract

The research about the perception of nominal phrases in English as a foreign language has shown that the more marked phrases require a burdensome processing job on the part of the FL learner, who tends to either avoid them in their oral productions, or realize a negative transference of L1 patterns. The attitude of avoidance lowers as the learner advances toward proficiency in the FL. As a result, markedness and, consequently, the complexity of cognitive processing, is inversely proportional to the learner´s fluency. Working with metacognitive strategies can minimize the negative effects of transference, without, however, getting it supressed from the learning strategies.