understanding) have to be necessarily reduced to a minimum, and eventually disappear,
in order for proceduralisation to take place. My reflection on the practice stage, after
realising the problems the learners have with this, made me change my way of
conceptualising awareness. Needless is to say further empirical research needs to be
carried out in order to delve into these matters.
Finally, reflecting on what happened during the Oaxaca/97 project and adjusting
this experience to my own schema of self-directed learning, made me think that I was not
just describing a learning culture that already existed in Mexico. Instead, I was
describing something that was being originated by the participants of the Oaxaca/97
project and myself, along with the thousands of SAC users and counsellors that are
nowadays working in self-access centres in Mexico. This is the topic of the following
chapter: the creation of a learning culture.
NOTES
1) However, nowadays people keep using this type of instruments as it can be seen in
the inventory called Building Excellence ™ The Learning Individual developed by
Rundle & R Dunn, 1996.
2) Although in most of the cases, alertness and orientation do not refer to actual
strategies but to states of mind and approaches to learning, most of what was said
about alertness and orientation relates to the learners’ concept about planning as a
metacognitive strategy. O’Malley et al use the terms planning and directed attention
to refer to some of the strategies mentioned above.
3) I need to say that when I wrote these field notes, I had not realised which learners
belonged to the “guided learning” group. However, the learners of the other groups
(independent learning and optional counselling) accepted the “imposition” in a very
open-minded way.
4) Although Batstone (1994) is only considering awareness as an element of noticing in
its attentional dimension, here I am also referring to the two other elements of
awareness (intention and awareness of understanding) as the term was defined in
Chapter 4.
5) Finally not all of them are capable to do the top-down∕bottom-up combination that
K suggested in her strategy to Ieam phrasal verbs.
6) Johnson also makes reference to the different use of the term ‘proceduralisation’ in
different sources. While for Anderson, proceduralisation is a sub-process of the
knowledge compilation stage, for Johnson is a macro-process that involves
declarative and procedural knowledge.
7) I am aware of the potential problem of drawing this parallel, for it underlies an old
Discussion on the parallel between CompetenceZdeclarative knowledge and
performance∕procedural knowledge. Such a discussion falls beyond the limits of this
research.
8) This phenomenon is reinforced by the fact that, as Ridley has found, “it is learners
with experience of learning languages who are more likely to be able to give their
own insights into how they approach specific tasks” (1997,39)
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