SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

We cannot reject the contrived metalanguage of the classroom on the grounds
that it induces students to Ieam things they must subsequent unlearn since
learning depends on recurrent learning.. ..such metalanguage can be seen as the
teacher version of learner interlanguage in that it presents interim linguistic
expressions. These are not authentic in reference to what has ultimately acquired
by the way of competence, but they are auxiliary to the learning process (1997)

Much has been said against inauthentic metalanguage and the way it works against
proceduralisation. However, I believe that, first, the use of metalanguage is very
appropriate for noticing and structuring (and renoticing and restructuring), and second, it
is not the use of metalanguage but the lack of strategies that promote proceduralisation
(the lack of the other two PP’s, see Johnson, 1996,120) which prevents the learner from
going beyond a declarative stage. As one of the participants put it:

Ge: Teachers believe that if they give us grammar, we will take care of
the rest. You come to your classroom for your doses of grammar for you to
go out and apply it

7.2.2.2 Structuring

Structuring is the learning stage that follows noticing in the scheme of this study.

It is a moment of insight, or “penny dropping” (Ridley; 1997,56). Batstone defines the
process of structuration as “the progressive sorting out by learners of their knowledge
into hypotheses about its structure” (1994,137). Although Johnson does not use the same
term in his language learning framework, he describes the declarative stage in more or
less the same terms:

Learners store knowledge they are given in long-term memory as a data
base...The learners’ encoding is ...declarative, and consists of two
separate components associated with declarative models: (a) a data base
and (b) a set of general procedures (1996,93)

Johnson attributes two roles to declarative knowledge, one clearly located in the
declarative stage and one placed after proceduralisation. In this scheme, structuring
corresponds to the former, that is, it is the foundation for proceduralisation, which
according to Johnson, “needs to be simple, uncluttered, concrete, and easily convertible
into a ‘plan for action’” (104).

Basically, then, structuring is the process that follows noticing and consists of the
formulation of hypotheses that become stored as declarative knowledge in order to

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