Page 120 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

104 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Literature review

Mozzon-McPherson (n.d) defines counseling in language learning as one-to-one interaction between
a teacher and a learner in order to support the learner and help him/her find the most effective and
efficient way of learning in a variety of learning environments. With the emergence of various self-di-
rected learning schemes and the focus on learner-centered pedagogies, the role of the classroom
teacher as counselor plays a significant role (Tudor, 1997, cited in Clemente, 2003). Therefore, there
is a need to train future teachers of English to perform the role of counselors whether they would work
in a self-access center or in a language classroom.

Little (1995) wrote that trainee teachers must be provided with the skills to develop autonomy in the
learners who will be given into their charge, but they must also be given a first-hand experience of
learner autonomy in their training. That is why; trainee teachers were trained to perform the roles of
a language counselor. Gremmo and Riley (1995) of the CRAPEL at the University of Nancy, France
state that teachers as counselors have two main roles: first, that of helping learners develop their
learning competence, and second, of creating the resources favorable to self-learn languages.

Based on the information given by language learners, trainee teachers were expected to provide
conceptual information which could help learners to develop their representations, metalinguistic and
metacognitive notions; the methodological resources that responded to the learners’ learning objec-
tives and needs, as well as the support and motivation for the language learners who were trying to
achieve their learning objectives by themselves (Gremmo and Riley, 1995).

The trainee teachers also learned to carry out a personalized needs analysis following Ellis & Sinclair’s
(1994) recommendations to identify their learning objectives. This meant not using a ready-made
needs analysis format but gathering information from the learner to identify their learning needs. A
learning styles questionnaire was used to consider the best ways for the learners to work on their
learning needs. This was considered essential because Skehan, (1991, in Brown, 2007, cited by
Reis Alves, 2008, p.8) defines learning styles as a “general predisposition, voluntary or not, toward
processing information in a particular way” and these reflect the manner in which learners approach
and react to learning situations.

One important message learnt by the students of the course is that learning autonomously does not
necessarily mean learning alone, especially at the start of this process. A learner needs the guidance
precisely of someone who can give his/her counsel on how to achieve the learning objective. Often-
times, an autonomous learner, after being aware of his/her learning objective, does not know where
to start, how to start, what materials to use and where to access to these materials. Little (1995)
states that “the learner’s acceptance of responsibility for his or her learning entails the gradual devel-
opment of a capacity for independent and flexible use of the target language”.

A very important point of this study was to have both the language learner and the trainee teacher
as counselor reflect on the learning process. Self-reflection was meant to help both the learner and
the counselor move towards the attainment of the learning objective. Allwright (1991, in Little, 1995,
p. 178) observed that in “the promotion of learner autonomy the teacher’s task is to bring learners to
the point where they accept equal responsibility for this co- production”.