SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

aware that they can develop “behavioural capacities” for self-direction, that these
capacities are procedural and they can be Ieam through practice (Little, 1998,1). An
important difference to emphasise here is the fact that self-direction is not the gift of a
few (while autonomy is a gift of all human beings, as has already been stated on section
4.3.3), but a capacity that anybody has the potential to develop. I think that the belief that
the learners need to “be ready”, without being aware of the fact that they can always
“become ready”, leads to an attitude that may easily work against self-direction. Based
on the information and contact I had with the participants, my view is that although they
already have several traits that make them ready (high motivation, clear goals, good
strategies for self-regulating the first stages of their learning processes), these learners
need to work on certain aspects of their psychological and methodological aspects of
self-direction. In the following sections I will discuss the methodological element. For
now, I will say something about the psychological element.

At the beginning of this section I said that readiness is important in this context in
two different ways. The first, which deals with cultural matters, has already been
discussed. The second is related to the psychological aspect of learning to learn.
Becoming ready, as I see it, is in part a matter of working with attitudes. This means that
learners have to become aware of the attitudes that work counter to self-direction in
relation to metacognitive knowledge (self, task and strategy) and to reinforce and/or
develop the ones that may enhance it. Let me now say some things about attitudes.

On page 95,1 defined attitude, in the context of this study, as the stance learners
adopt towards self-directed learning. According to Mager (1990, 14), there are
favourable, which imply “moving towards responses”, and negative attitudes, which
encompass “moving away from responses”. From this he talks about subject matter
approach tendencies (SMATs) and subject matter unapproach tendencies
(SMUTs)(ibid,25). Basing his study on tendencies towards or away from subject matters,
he provides examples of learning subject matters such as mathematics, baseball, Bach or
writing. In order to be clear, within the context of this study, I would like to reserve the
term subject matter for the learning of a foreign language, and I would like to use the
term medium to refer to self-direction. With this difference in mind, in general, it is
believed that the SAC learners of languages have an approach tendency towards learning
English as a subject matter, but an avoidance tendency towards the medium, i.e., self-
direction as a scheme for learning it (which may have been developed before or during
their stay in the SAC). However, if one gives a closer look to the information gathered in

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