the feeling that I still had not got in touch with their learning processes. They had talked
about them but not to the extent I wanted. I was not happy with what I had done. I was
anxious. I felt that I had not had a “proper” counselling session. In other words, because
we had been so busy in doing other things (input sessions and group discussions), the
learners had not got the chance to Ieam something on the target language. Hence, I had
not got the chance to Ieam more about them in this aspect. In short, I felt like we had
been talking about language learning most of the time but we had not actually learned
anything.
Moreover, the plans that I had for those sessions were a follow-up of the three
awareness sessions we had at the beginning of the project. However. I found that I was
not going to be able to do much because I had not got any solid clear outcome from the
awareness round.
Therefore, I decided to change the plans for the remaining individual sessions.
As I felt that the awareness round of sessions was somehow a failure because the
participants were not focused enough on something specific, I decided to assign a
specific content for them to learn. That, I thought, was going to give me results in terms
of a controlled research situation.
As we had worked within different approaches (tasks based on genres, e.g.,
messages, vocabulary, e.g. compound nouns, authentic materials with open tasks, e.g.
introspection watching a movie), I decided to work on a different perspective:
grammatical points (past tense and third conditional). The participants were free to
choose one of these points. My instructions were to choose the one that represents a
“challenge for them to Ieam and/or master”, as I put it. The more advanced learners went
for the third conditional while the others chose the past tense. Afterwards I learned it was
indeed a challenge for all of them since they felt that the chosen point represented a
problem in their learning.
The task of learning a grammatical point was aimed to trigger metacognitive
strategies. Throughout several steps, the learners were able to plan, monitor and evaluate
their learning activities and communicate them (during CSs).
First, they had to plan how to Ieam (or relearn) the chosen grammatical point
according to their own perspectives. The instructions were the following:
Imagine that you have all the possible resources you need in order to Ieam
the third conditional (or the past tense). Which one (s) would you choose
in order to Ieam it?
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