of the strategies they already used in that task and be able to use different strategies and
evaluate the difference. In general, this session dealt more with types of exercises than
with types of strategies. The suggestions of the learners were on variations of the
exercises that the task presented. I am aware that a different exercise may imply a
different strategy, and some learners were also aware of this, but I am not sure about all
the participants. Anyway, what was clear is that they talked in terms of exercises for the
obvious reason that this is the tool that they have been trained to work with when
learning a language.
In the following individual session, dealing with verbal reports, the participants
experienced introspection. They were told to watch a video in the target language for 15
minutes, with a tape recorder on, in order to think aloud and record all the thoughts they
had while watching the film. From the tapes I found out that the participants did very
different things under the name introspection (or instead of, because they did not have
any previous schema for this concept). For instance, S verbalised what he was watching
(what the characters were doing) and A filled his 15 minute tape with the reading aloud
of the verbs that he identified from reading the close captions.
F and Ga were very good at reflecting on their understanding of the points they
had chosen as objectives, however, in both cases, because they decided to stop the video
to record their voices, we can say that it was more a retrospective rather than an
introspective experience.
For J, the cognitive task he chose was too demanding (pronunciation work with a
movie without close captions). Therefore, the first part of the tape only contains phrases
such as “I don’t understand”, “They talk too fast”, “I am listening and watching but...”,
etc. In the second part, he tends to talk more about what he is watching, that is, the
actions of the characters (like S). His attention seemed to go more for the visual input
when he faced the fact that he couldn’t cope with the linguistic input.
T and E decided to work with other types of materials, a poetry book and a
magazine respectively (because they said that they felt too self-conscious about
recording themselves in the presence of other students), and generally, their comments
are in terms of their understanding and reaction to the exercises and content.
Ga’s data was rich in the sense that she reflects more on the understanding of the
linguistic input. This may be due to the fact that it was not the first time that she tried out
introspection as a way to analyse her learning processes.
Except for Ga, all the participants expressed their uneasiness when carrying out
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