A Study of Learner Strategies Used by Students of Architecture

This paper presents the findings of a study on how the students learnt architectural terms in English. The sample consisted of 23 students in the firstyear reading for their degree inArchitecture. The issues related to learning architectural technical terms, inherent methodological issues in teaching those terms, their application in architecture and how the students learnt unfamiliar terms in architecture were investigated. The study aimed at developing practical and less time-consuming techniques to teach terms in architecture. Classifying the type of strategies used by the students, identifying what techniques work best in teaching architectural terms and reporting the type of difficulties faced by the students were the objectives. The data were collected through a researcher-administered data collection instrument. The instrument consisted of 63 Likert scale questions and the instrument was adapted to suit the study. Quantitative analyses were run on the data to obtain descriptive statistics. The results showed that the difference between female and male students, was significant (p<.05). The research insight indicated that the students incorporated a variety of strategies to learn terms related to architecture. More digital strategies are used by female students (m=3.57, SD=0.51) than male students (m=2.83, SD=0.41). Cognitive strategies are the least frequently used type of strategies by the female (m=3.19, SD=0.43) and male students (m=2.66, SD=0.29). Digital strategies are the most used type of strategies while the second most widely used strategies are determination strategies.

Another statistical measure run on the data showed that there was a difference between female and male students in the frequency of use of architectural terms. Based on the findings, some techniques to teach the terms were suggested as part of recommendations.