According to my experience, the learner seeks counselling in order to either Ieam to
Ieam or Ieam about the target language. On the contrary, in a therapeutic context, "the
counsellor", write Cohen and Manion, "is friendly and receptive but not didactic” (ibid.,
288). As the reader will see, the three modes included in Fig. 5.5, teaching, counselling
and leading discussions, continuously overlapped, which means that, on several
occasions, when I was counselling I found myself teaching as well. Moreover, I want to
remind the reader that I am dealing with action research. This means that I was not only
interested in describing a situation, but also in changing it. Fig. 5.5 shows the
subordination of the interview and its place with other types of research resources.

In general, researchers have had to face the fact that any kind of research method
has its own limitations. Writers interested in interview research have explored some
constraints about interviewing. According to Block (1995b), these are the following: the
social Constmction of the interviewee, power imbalances, performing, and the nature of
discurse processes. When carrying out CSs, I noticed that some of these constraints were
reduced in certain aspects. For the most part, the participants did not seem to have the
type of major problems which Block outlines with regards to their construction of their
interactor, either me or another participant, or to the counselling event. (There still were
constraints, but these were inherent to the mode of counselling as part of their self-
directed learning scheme). Most of them were already familiar with counselling sessions
and did not have the necessity to ask such questions as : "Who am I talking to?" "Why is
Angeles talking to me?" "What is Angeles going to do with what I say?" (questions
adapted from Littlejohn, 1988, quoted in Block, 1995b,46) There were, of course, other
questions that might have been asked, such as "How am I required to express
myself?"(ibid). In the next chapter I will aso analyse some of the constraints on
counselling sessions for I think that this is a major issue when defining counselling as a
mode of interaction with SAC users. Contrary to the interview situation, in which the
interviewer hardly realises these elements (Block, ibid), I would say that counsellors
need to deal with these problems in order to enhance the communication with learners.
Fig. 5.6 summarizes the present methodology research in reference to the other three
approaches mentioned in the paragraphs above.

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