The ADEQUA research project has gained empirical evidence on how the situationally adequate use of learning strategies can be facilitated during cooperative reading tasks in the EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom. Two video studies were conducted with ninth-grade EFL learners in German schools: the first (laboratory) study investigated the students' use of strategies while working in dyads and without teacher support on a given task. The second study, a field study, focused on teachers' actions to support their students while working on a series of tasks in their regular classrooms. In this paper, we present the findings from a specific subsample of students (n = 30 from the first study and n = 228 from the second one), focusing on (1) the extent to which the students employed specific strategies adequately and successfully, and (2) the types of support actions taken by the teachers and to what extent these actions facilitated the students' strategy use. The microanalytic approach adopted here allows us to identify those strategies which especially appear to require a teacher's support in order to be employed more adequately and successfully. Furthermore, by distinguishing between teachers' support actions which are more versus less conducive to self-regulation and facilitating students' strategy use, we are able to provide recommendations on how to fine-tune teachers' assistance.

So far, the quality of learning strategies has been considered primarily within the framework of the “description paradigm” by investigating the relationship between the use frequency of macrostrategies and achievement. The ADEQUA study is approaching the quality of learning strategic actions in a more finely grained fashion by rating the adequacy of discrete learning strategies at the microanalytical level. Specifically, the study scrutinizes the strategies used by secondary-level students of English as a foreign language while reading an English text in a self-regulated, cooperative learning environment. The strategies they used in overcoming comprehension difficulties were identified and rated on the basis of the students’ videotaped task performance as well as a stimulated recall procedure. In regression models, the adequacy of strategic actions is of major predictive power with considerable effect sizes for students’ achievement. The hypothesis-testing approach adopted here (i.e., to assess the adequacy of every discrete strategy used by means of highly inferential ratings), appears to be promising.

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Research on CALL environments that explicitly focuses on the development of strategic competence is almost non-existent. This chapter reports on an exploratory study which was conducted as a semesterlong, Web-based project to facilitate the development of L2 strategic competence by means of online collaboration among advanced EFL (English as a foreign language) learners who are students in an EFL teacher education program at a German university. The project—called the “Online Learner ABCs”—combines an autobiographic approach to raise the learners’ awareness of their own strategy use with data-driven activities to foster diagnostic skills with regard to strategy use. Overall, the “Online Learner ABCs” was found to be conducive to the students’ development of L2 strategic competence, in particular by raising the students’ awareness of a considerable number of language learning strategies. Deep-level reflections on strategy use, however, remained scant, indicating that further instructional fine-tuning is needed.

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