Planning
Making a preview of the organizing concept or principle in a learning activity. For example, when carrying out a cloze activity, the students should understand that two of the aims of the activity are to learn about the relationships between words, and to learn how to use contextual cues to guess the meaning of new vocabulary.

Directed attention
Deciding in advance to attend to specific aspects of the language input during a task. For example, when listening to a tape recording of a person recounting their experiences on holiday, a student might decide to pay attention to the speaker's usage of different past tenses.

Self-management
Understanding and arranging for the conditions that help one learn. For example, a student might realize he or she needs to spend ten minutes every day learning vocabulary. He or she would then make this time available every day.

Advance preparation
Planning for and rehearsing linguistic components necessary for a language task. For example, if students know that they are going to have to discuss French politics, they make sure that they know the names of the main political leaders and their parties. They might also look up words such as democracy, voting, elections, and so on.

Self-monitoring
Correcting one's speech and writing for accuracy or for appropriateness to context. For example, after having written an essay, a student might go back through it several times, checking for spelling, verb agreement, appropriate tense usage, register, and so on.

Problem identification
Explicitly identifying the central point needing resolution in a task. For example, before beginning an information-exchange task, a student might look through his or her own worksheet to establish how many pieces of information have to be elicited, which are the most important, which are most likely to come up first, and if pieces of information are related in any way.

Self-evaluation
Checking learning outcomes against internal standards. For example, if a student's aim is to speak with very few errors, then he or she might ask the tutor if the classes can be recorded, students can then listen to these recordings for errors. This would allow them to assess their own performance.