The promotion of explicit and implicit learning strategies in English instruction: a necessary aim?

According to Cohn, human beings are both a psycho-biological unit and a part of the universe. They are at the same time autonomous and interdependent (Cohn 1984). The results from this study show, however, that there are still many learners both at secondary school and at university who have neither learnt to think about their reading behaviour nor how to evaluate and change their reading processes and futhermore, nor how to aim at and achieve goals in a more purposeful way. Most of the subjects in the investigation claimed that they had not been required to think about their reading methods. This is certainly not intended to be primarily a criticism of teachers, but is seen more as logical consequence from the use of school texts, guidelines, homework assignments and exams within a hidden curriculum. The pupils may spend a lot of time on thinking, but very little on conscious thought about their own thinking.