This paper examines the role of cognitive strategies in learning a foreign language witch has been tested on students at Tehran universities. It also analyzes the relationship between learning strategies and student independence. In other words, we try to understand whether learning strategies affect students' independent work or not. And what strategies are most used by them. All of them are necessary for a student to successfully learn a foreign language. For a more accurate result, students of a foreign language from Tehran universities were interviewed according to cognitive categories, which include the following factors: repetition, semantic relations and extracurricular practice, guessing, generalization, recording basic information, memorizing, deductive inference, classification, control. We used the self-integrated survey method, based on O'Malley's classification of cognitive strategies, in order to test our hypothesis. The hypothesis involves the application of cognitive strategies and the relationship between cognitive strategies and the independence of foreign language students. We came to the conclusion that students of a foreign language of these universities often use the strategy of recording basic information, the strategy of guessing and the strategy of semantic interrelation.