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A Mixed-Methods Study Exploring Effective Learning Strategies that Contribute to Successful Acquisition of Arabic as a Foreign Language among Adults

<p>Military adult learners enrolled in intensive language courses such as the Arabic Basic Course at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center may need to utilize specific learning strategies in order to reach high proficiency language achievement. These strategies are established in the literature as contributors to high language proficiency achievement. The problem addressed in this study was that the desired high proficiency levels defined as 2+/2+/2 on the Defense Language Proficiency Test remains unrealized. In order to understand how to help students excel in foreign language learning, this study compared self-regulated learning scores of students who met the proficiency goal of 2+/2+/2 to those who did not. The 2+/2+/2 are the scores of the listening, reading and speaking measured by Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. The Motivated Strategies for Leering questionnaire was used to compare the self-regulated learning strategies of the high and the low language proficiency achievers. Interviews of the Arabic learners to understand what self-regulated learning strategies these learners used and how they developed their self-regulated learning strategies were necessary to determine what the high achievers did and what the low achievers did not do so that this information can be used to improve the way that the foreign language learners are taught. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS and Interviews were analyzed following the Powell and Renner&rsquo;s (2003) five steps of data analyses. The results of this mixed-methods study showed that using more self-regulated learning strategies increased the students&rsquo; language proficiency levels and also revealed how the students developed and used these strategies to increase Arabic language proficiency levels. </p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10164151
Date01 December 2016
CreatorsBebawi, Gorge
PublisherNorthcentral University
Source SetsProQuest.com
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis

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