SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

the task. Most of them were not sure that what they were doing was “true introspection”:

A: I don’t think that this is introspection

Or that they were making any sense:

F: I hope I was concise and clear

T: I feel awkward...this is an attempt to do introspection.

In short, the introspection activity was not effective in terms of adding
information to the project or helping the learners to be aware of their learning processes.
I strongly believe that much more needed to be done in terms of protocol analyses and
backing up matches (matching verbal reports with actual behaviour, for instance)
(Ridley, 1997, 9) in order to reflect on the outcome of introspection. From the
participants I learned that they wanted some kind of feedback, and I certainly needed a
lot of clarification from them. It is also evident that for this type of verbal report the
participants need more time for training. Further research needs to be done in order to
find out the potential of introspection in a self-directed learning scheme.

The following IS introduced them to the concept of metacognitive knowledge and
the three categories (person, task and knowledge). Then, in the following I∕GS they work
with some questionnaires (see appendix 5) that have been developed in order to help the
learner to know herself better. Although I do believe that this type of instruments have
several disadvantages (Ridley; 1997,8) (close questions mainly restrict the responder¹). I
thought that I could take advantage of them in a different way. Based on my experience
with the written biographies (they didn’t write much about themselves) and taking into
account that the questionnaires covered the three categories of metacognitive knowledge
(they ask about person, task and strategy), I told the participants to answer them and to
evaluate their answers. With the answers as a basis, they had to write a profile of
themselves as learners. I told them that I was not interested in the answers but in the
actual profile, which was going to be the outcome of the task. After analysing their
profiles (see results of the “profile task” in section 6.1.1.2) and the session in which we
discussed them, I can conclude that the way I worked with the questionnaires was very
productive.

At this stage of the project, I realised that I only had left 8 I∕GSs with them. I had

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