which I openly taught them. I am aware that the teaching content of this project was
planned to be mainly psycholinguistic and methodological (as it was described in
Clemente 1996b). However, I cannot see any reason why I should have had to restrict
myself to learning to Ieam matters as some authors suggest (Mozzon-McPherson; 1997,
for instance) and leave the linguistic material for the language teacher. Actually, on more
than one occasion I found that I had to deal with linguistic matters in order to get into
learning processes. The interaction on with K included in Appendix 6 is a good example
of this. I cannot see myself just telling her: “I’ll tell you something. Go to your ‘language
advisor’ and clarify your doubts about the third conditional and come back to deal with
your learning doubts, ok?”. If an important aspect of the rationale for learning to Ieam
schemes is that it should be based on specific content (‘learning’ used as a verb needs a
subject) (see section 3.3.2, p. 59), it is impossible to separate the roles of counsellor and
teacher in self-direction.
The other reason for teaching them psycholinguistic terms is the belief that the
more learners and counsellors share the same knowledge, the better their communication
becomes. CounsellorZleamer interaction has proven to be difficult in most of the cases
(Clemente; 1995a). One of the ways of enhancing it would be through the sharing of
technical language. I am not saying that the learner has to become a psycholinguist. I am
just proposing that she needs to manage the basic terminology which, in this case, would
serve as a metalanguage to discuss learning matters.
7.1.3 Individual and group sessions (I∕GS)
The individual and group sessions had the purpose of working in a one-to-one or
group interaction in order to make the link with the content of the input sessions. The
individual sessions either make the learner look backwards (in a retrospective mode) to
reflect on their learning processes or look forward in order to plan further strategies to
manage their learning.
The group sessions were of two types: workshops in which the participants put
into practice specific aspects dealt with in a previous input session or retrospective
sessions in which the learners share with the group their learning experiences.
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