2. Holistic learner:

Rebecca talks in the same article about "Global" and "Holistic" students (p:6). They prefer "socially interactive, communicative events" where they are able to concentrate on what they need and avoid deep analysis of grammatical details. They are comfortable even when not having the information given directly to them as they prefer to guess grammar rules and meaning from the context. However, "Analytic students tend to concentrate on grammatical details and often avoid more free-flowing communicative activities". Their focus is on "precision" and "typically do not take the risks necessary for guessing from the context unless they are fairly sure of the accuracy of their guesses" (7). Being a "holistic" person, I joined a lot of conversation club as a way to assess my own learning process and to promote my communicative skills as there were some peers who helped me finding out my mistakes through their own language and the guidance of the teacher who supported me with the guidelines I needed to use of some structures and avoid committing grammatical mistakes while speaking. Being aware of my own learning style and my own objectives was an important feature in the process of my autonomy in learning English.

2. Learning Strategies:

Rebecca talks in her article about "Six Main Categories of L2 Learning Strategies" and I will talk about three of them which are relevant to my own learning strategies (the cognitive, metacognitive, and memory-related strategies).

1. Cognitive strategies:

They allow the learners "to manipulate the language material in direct ways, e.g., through reasoning, analysis, note-taking, summarizing, synthesizing, outlining, reorganizing information" (p: 12) to enhance their knowledge of the target language structures and practice them in naturalistic settings. By choosing what was useful for me from all the materials found on the internet, I was able to recognize what suited me best and met my learning objectives in speaking and listening. I gathered some stories and videos and outlined the main objectives of listening and speaking and possible ways to develop them. I divided the materials I found into categories of importance and used the pen and paper to write down important notes. I simplified target information by converting difficult or unfamiliar information into more simplified organized information and decided the pace of my own learning.

2. Meta cognitive strategies:

These strategies include "identifying one’s own learning style preferences and needs, planning for an L2 task, gathering and organizing materials, arranging a study space and a schedule, monitoring mistakes, and evaluating task success" of my learning strategies (p:12) I was aware of my goals and the learning styles suitable for me. I chose when and what to do with each material I found on net. I avoided memorization of rules based on the deductive way as well as memorizing large texts so that I could enhance my speaking abilities. I depended mainly on comprehension and analysis of texts. I decided when to study and continuously assessed my progress in the learning progress. I struggled in learning the good pronunciation of words and used www.naturalreaders.com to get the correct pronunciation of difficult words and phrases. I liked British accent and I wanted to adopt it so I chose it among the dialects available on this website and I copied each text I liked to learn about into this website. I was able to download the sound track of any text and put it on my mobile so that I could listen to it whenever I could. I knew the progress I was achieving by assessing how much time I had to spend on every text until I was able to talk about it correctly at the level of pronunciation, structure, and fluency.