6.2 BELIEFS RELATED TO TASK
Flavell defines metacognitive knowledge about task in the following way:
The individual Ieams something about how the nature of the information
encountered affects and constrains how one should deal with it (Flavell; 1987,23)
In this section I will mainly deal with what students think about learning, which is the
cognitive task they are dealing with. As there are different elements related to this task,
the analysis is going to be organised into different sections: learning, learning a
language, learning a language in a classroom, learning a language in a self directed way
and learning a language in a self-directed way in Mexico. The information for this
section was mostly gathered through group discussions in which specific topics were
discussed. My main objective here is to find the features that make up the culture of the
specific group I am dealing with. Defining the group of participants as a small culture
(see p. 111), I consider that one of its main features is the "homogeneity of the members"
in relation to their "values, beliefs and norms" (Hargreaves, 1975, 90). According to a
socio-psychological view, the five main characteristics of a group are the plurality (more
than two people), the face-to-face relationship and awareness of membership, the
commonality of goals, the agreement of rules and the internal structure (ibid. 88,89).
Hargreaves acknowledges that there can be disagreement among the members, but "such
disagreement will be in matters of detail about accepted values" since "members of a
group tend to share the same or similar values and beliefs" (ibid. 91). The fact that the
group of this project, with a minimum of nine members and the counsellor, met in a
regular basis, was aware of the purpose of the project and agreed to take part in it, is a
good reason to imply that the first four features are present. The subscription to a set of
rules and the internal structure were two features that, though present, were very much
determined by the roles the participants assigned to the different members. Some aspects
of this fact will be analysed in detail in the following chapter. There will also be some
examples of the way the members agreed about values and beliefs but negotiated specific
nuances of them.