Various mental processes the learner uses to work on, internalise, and automatise new language. These include repetition, organising new language, summarising meaning, guessing meaning from context, using imagery for memorisation. Which term describes these?

Various mental processes the learner uses to work on, internalise, and automatise new language. These include repetition, organising new language, summarising meaning, guessing meaning from context, using imagery for memorisation. Which term describes these?

• A. Cognitive strategies
• B. Chunking
• C. Acquire
• D. Antonym

Answer: (A)

These processes are cognitive strategies. They involve deliberate mental actions a learner uses to process, internalise, and eventually automatise language. Repetition helps the language become automatic and easier to recall; organising new language creates a meaningful structure that makes retrieval and usage smoother; summarising meaning distils information to its core, aiding comprehension and memory; guessing meaning from context uses clues around the word to infer meaning, which strengthens inferencing skills; using imagery for memorisation links language to mental pictures, making it easier to remember. Together, these activities show conscious manipulation of language content to learn and retain it, which is the hallmark of cognitive strategies.

Chunking is a related memory technique focusing on grouping items into units, but it’s narrower than the broad set of processes described here; acquire is simply a verb, not a category of strategies; antonym is a type of vocabulary item, not a strategy.