“Oops, I don’t know this either”...
Ga’s inner guide seems to be very strong. As she explains, she does not follow
instructions:
Ga: How did I work? I usually listen to the words, I repeat them according
to the cassette. I don’t read the instructions, they all say the same. They tell
you to repeat but sometimes I don’t do it. It is useless, and sometimes
they say “Repeat once” and I repeat twice. Sometimes I do not
read the transcription but only listen to the cassette, to see if I am able
to repeat that way.
And she seems to be very aware of her priorities
Ga: IfI don’t take notes of my doubts, I forget about them, wherever I
am, then I come to the SAC and look for them. But sometimes I just want
to work with something at the very moment I notice it. I don’t even take
notes, because it is a priority and I know that I won’t forget it.
If we think of these two cases as the extremes of a cline, it is easy to place at the
middle of it the cases of learners that partially accept the guide of the materials. For
instance, F, whose strong inner guide was evident, still accepts the guidance of a
textbook:
F: In this material, I don’t do the exercises, they are not necessary
for me anymore, but I do the pre-reading activities in order to know
the context of the conversation and the language it is going to be studied.
That’s why I like this material. They contextualise the lesson. They prepare
you to be aware of the things that you are going to study...This is what I
like about studying by myself. If I was using this material with a teacher,
he might give more emphasis to the exercises than to the listening of the
language. I would be forced to do the exercises. By myself I know what
I do and what I don’t do.
J is another case of what happens when one is somewhere in between the extremes of the
guide continuum. Incidentally, he was using the same material F referred to, but,
differently from F, he was only interested in the transcriptions of the textbook:
J: I am only interested in the transcriptions, not in the exercises. I listen
to the cassette several times with the transcriptions. I listen to it and
repeat, reading from the transcription. At the end I copy the transcription
in my notebook. I don’t do the exercises, I don’t know why.
Another different case were the people who claimed to be “lost” in the SAC due
to the lack of guidance. This was the situation of A and E. However, even though they
were aware of this lack, they still knew the source of it. For E, the reason for her lack of
focus was this:
E: I didn’t know how to start. Nothing came to my mind. I was not prepared to think
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