Factors Influencing the Choice of L2 Learning Strategies ( Oxford 1990a)

Oxford made a classification about the factors that influenciate the choice that students make of the learning strategies they are going to use at the moment of learning. I want to share with you this classification:

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  Motivation. More motivated students tended to use more strategies than less motivated students, and the particular reason for studying the language (motivational orientation, especially as related to career field) was important in the choice of strategies.
  
• Gender. Females reported greater overall strategy use than males in many studies (although sometimes males surpassed females in the use of a particular strategy).
  
• Cultural background. Rote memorization and other forms of memorization were more prevalent among some Asian students than among students from other cultural backgrounds. Certain other cultures also appeared to encourage this strategy among learners.
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  Attitudes and beliefs. These were reported to have a profound effect on the strategies learners choose, with negative attitudes and beliefs often causing poor strategy use or lack of orchestration of strategies.
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  Type of task. The nature of the task helped determine the strategies naturally employed to carry out the task.
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  Age and l2 stage. Students of different ages and stages of L2 learning used different strategies, with certain strategies often being employed by older or more advanced students.
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  Learning style. Learning style (general approach to language learning) often determined the choice of L2 learning strategies. For example, analytic-style students preferred strategies such as contrastive analysis, rule-learning, and dissecting words and phrases, while global students used strategies to find meaning (guessing, scanning, predicting) and to converse without knowing all the words (paraphrasing, gesturing).
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  Tolerance of ambiguity. Students who were more tolerant of ambiguity used significantly different learning strategies in some instances than did students who were less tolerant of ambiguity.