Almost all of them agreed that they had used most of the strategies. However, they did
not say much and their comments were very scarce and poor. Apparently, it was difficult
for them to discriminate their use of strategies by analysing them so abstractly. Another
possible explanation may be that they were not aware that they were aware of them! (as
when looking a familiar image upside down and not recognising it). During the
counselling sessions, the image appeared in the right way, that is, they became aware of
their strategies. With a bottom-up approach, they talked about their strategies whenever
they considered it relevant for the learning process analysis they were carrying out. When
listening to the information from the other sessions, I discovered that these same learners
were referring to strategies in a very interesting way, in particular, when they were asked
to talk about specific tasks, either recalling or planning them. Let me give some
examples.
1) Ineffectiveness of strategies. E showed awareness about some of the strategies
that do not work for her. On the one hand, she mentioned strategies that she does not use
anymore because she has realised they are useless for her:
E: And, can I use different strategies to Ieam these words?...Because...I
have used some and...I know that rote learning works for a while but then
you tend to forget
On the other hand, E also mentioned strategies that she currently uses even though she is
aware of their ineffectiveness:
E: When I am speaking in English, I think it is like Spanish and I see
everything as cognates, but there are a lot of things that are not cognates!
2) Difference between strategies involving Ll. E also sees the difference between
two different strategies that involve her knowledge of her mother tongue:
E: I’ve been working with the difference (of the third conditional) in
English and in Spanish and I think that I have no doubts anymore....
This comparison was very useful, because I think now that there is not
much difference (between the use of the third conditional in both
languages). However, this doesn’t always work, well, the thing is that I
mainly translate from Spanish to English and sometimes it doesn’t work,
but in this case I compared it and that is different.
E seems to be aware that what she always does, translating from Ll to L2 in order to
produce the language, is very different from comparing both languages, which involves
the use of already acquired knowledge, in this case linguistic knowledge from LI. In