Macaro, E. (2001). Learning strategies in foreign and second language classrooms. London: Continuum.

The book starts by providing some problems teachers recount of their students. The author gives seven mental processes that learners might use in preparing to respond to the teacher in class (12-13). He then gives 11 mental processes they may have used to do a reading task (14-15). He then repeats this with a writing task. Macaro offers a series of continua for classifying strategies (24-25). He puts cognitive at one end and metacognitive/social/affective at the other, subconscious-conscious, direct-indirect, and some other distinctions. He then briefly touches on motivation; sex; age; background and cultural differences; aptitude, learning styles, and beliefs about language learning; successful and advanced learners (29-31). He discusses research methods and then what we know about successful students. Ch. 2 treats the data gathering methods: diaries, questionnaires (and he expands here by finding fault with some SILL items and exploring ways of improving on questions), interviews, task-based self-report, observing the learners (think aloud protocols, looking for traces, use of L1 in strategy elicitation). Ch. 3 starts by reviewing descriptive studies of language strategy use. Macaro refers to his own Lingua study with 14-year-old learners of French in England and English in Italy. He makes the distinction here between direct strategies ("answering others' questions in your head") and indirect strategies ("making a note of new words in class or at home"). He points out that the indirect strategies require more conscious effort than the direct ones (p. 79). He reports on reading strategy findings from the literature, including Sarig (1987). He gives his own Lingua results, where students overused cognates in their reading (p. 85). He gives three of his respondents' verbal report on a letter in French, an interesting approach for a strategies book (pp. 90-94). Then he gives two sets of verbal report from Italian learners of English. He ends this chapter by discussing literature on listening strategies and on the language of thought. Ch. 4 is on intervention studies in general. He discusses strategies for interaction or communication, and then looks at memorization strategies, with a focus on his Lingua project. Ch. 5 looks at an intervention study in detail -- the Oxford Writing Strategies Project with 14-15-year old British youths learning to improve their writing strategies in French. He focuses on two learners, Laura and Katie, and gives their pre- and then post-treatment writing strategies in a methodical way. He provides an interesting array of data. There was improvement in their output, which he attributed in part to the way they planned, composed, and checked over their writing, three sets of strategies emphasized in the treatment. Ch. 6 is on learner training in language classrooms. Here he goes the extra mile and actually demonstrates how he might do learner training first with a reading text, then on listening comprehension, then memorization strategies, then writing strategies, strategies for organizing learning (222-226) (which is an area of concern to Chamot and others as well), strategies for speaking outside the classroom, social strategies, and note-taking strategies. Ch. 7 is a continuation of the remaining aspects of learning training: initial evaluation, removing the scaffolding, overview evaluation, monitoring strategy use. In Ch. 8 he gives his conclusions and 10 recommendations. Among the recommendations he notes the following: strategies need to be linked to type of task and to the task's cognitive and metacognitive demands; don't overdue strategy training but provide it in moderation; do strategy training according to the cycle -- initial awareness raising, explore strategies available to learners, modeling by teacher or students, combining strategies for a given task, apply strategies with scaffolding, evaluation by students, gradual removal of scaffolding, further evaluation, monitoring of strategy use by teacher and rewarding of effort; delicate balancing act of pointing up strategy deficiencies but not imposing inappropriate strategies on given individuals; teachers should feel free to do strategy training in the L1. The book has frequent boxes with "Pause for Thought" in them.