Strategies in use- Theory and practice : A study of teachers’ use of strategies in relation to the guidelines provided by the Swedish National Agency for Education in order to help teachers provide learning strategies for their students

Abstract: The aim with this essay is to examine how relevant the strategies compiled by the National Agency for Education are to English language teachers in Sweden.  The main focus is on the area of strategies in general but in order to go further into depth in a specific area, there is a selective focus on vocabulary learning strategies as well. Moreover, this study has been facilitated with the help from teachers. The teachers answered a number of questions through a quantitative questionnaire. The teachers selected to participate in this study all teach at high school level. A total of eight teachers participated as informants. As the main theory, this study used the original classification framework designed by Chamot and O’Malley (1990). The conclusions drawn from the results is that teachers found all strategies listed by the Swedish National Agency for Education to have importance even though some were more important than others. Furthermore, with regards to the vocabulary learning, the conclusion has been drawn that teachers use several techniques in their teaching. However, the summary of the vocabulary strategies shows the importance to vary. Some informants answered that they use the strategies frequently although in quite a few cases they answered that they use them infrequently, which awakens the question of relevance in the daily teaching practice.