Pre-service elementary teachers occupy a dual position in English language education: they are learners of English and, simultaneously, its future teachers. This study profiled the language learning strategies of 248 Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El.Ed.) trainees enrolled at District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs) in Tripura, India, using Oxford’s 50-item Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL, Version 7.0; α = .96). Trainees reported medium-to-high overall strategy use (M = 3.58, SD = 0.63). A marked internal asymmetry emerged: metacognitive strategies were the most frequently used category (M = 3.77, SD = 0.73), whereas compensation strategies were the least used (M = 3.45, SD = 0.74), a difference that was statistically significant with a medium effect size, t(247) = 9.05, p < .001, d = 0.57. The weakest of all fifty items was avoiding word-for-word translation (M = 3.10), which 29.0% of trainees reported rarely or never doing. The findings depict a “willing but unable to repair” strategic profile, interpreted here as a legacy of grammar-translation pedagogy in Indian classrooms: trainees have internalised the drive to plan and monitor their learning but lack the communicative repair strategies (guessing, paraphrase, circumlocution) on which real interaction depends. Implications are drawn for explicit strategy-based instruction in elementary teacher education under India’s National Education Policy 2020.