SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

but also the input from the participants, for it certainly influenced my own beliefs. The
difference from the previous chapter will be that, in the present one, I will analyse the
data from my own point of view, taking as a framework the theory that I put forward in
the first half of this thesis. In this regard, this chapter will give me the opportunity to
carry out other two important things: first, to exemplify my own theory with actual data,
that is to say, to connect theory with practice, and second, to examine if my practice is
congruent with my thinking, and in a more general sense if theory is congruent with
reality.

7.1 BELIEFS RELATED TO STRATEGY: THE WAY I SEE THE

PROJECT

The purpose of this section is to describe my own beliefs that underlie the
metacognitive strategies concerning the Oaxaca/97 project, that is to say, the procedures
I took for achieving my goals. As I stated above (Section 5.1, p. 125), in this project I
work with nine participants in order for them to be able to put into practice first, and then
into words, their learning processes concerning a foreign language. In other words, this
section deals with what I think I did when I worked with learners. It is my own version
of the project and the experiences and reflections that it generated.

As the reader may remember, the project consisted in the interaction with nine
participants during two months, working in a daily basis. This interaction took the form
of three different types of sessions: input sessions (IS), in which I basically gave the
learners information on learning processes; individual∕group sessions (I∕GS) in which the
participants and I analysed their own learning processes and group discussion session
(DS) in which general topics related to language learning were openly discussed.

These three types of sessions were distributed along a two month program that
started with a preliminary stage of individual sessions. The purpose of these sessions was
to get to know the participants on an individual basis (I have already discussed the
content of their written biographies and the corresponding protocol analysis in section
6.1.1.1, p. 147). After these sessions, I carried out the main stage of the project, in which
the three types of sessions were combined to support each other. I ended the project with

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