SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

my colleagues experienced. Actually, for administrative reasons, I spent more time in the
self-access centre than in the classroom, a fact that allowed me to concentrate fully on the
SAC. By that time, I also started studying an MA in TESOL, which allowed me to carry out
empirical research on the area of self-learning.

All these changes were very important not only because I was able to see things from
a different perspective. They were also important because people saw me in a different way.
I was not an authority any more. For the teachers, that meant that I no longer had the power
to decide. With that in mind, they started being more open and even much more critical
about the way the SAC was functioning, and what was more relevant to me, about the way
the SAC had been implemented.

3.2 ON-THE-JOB EXPERIENCES: PRACTICE VS THEORY

As I said before, the on-the-job experience was the best way to gain confidence in the
doing of the job. There were two reasons for this. First, when the formal training was carried
out I did not have any practical experience, everything that was presented to me was too
abstract. Second, the formal training was mainly other-directed, whereas, the informal
training phase was inevitably self-directed. The result of this was that, when working in the
SAC, with 'real' learners, I was in the position to understand and judge both, the specific
elements of SAC and the project as a whole.

After some months of working in the SAC I realised that things were different from
what I had expected. The following paragraphs describe some of the "unexpected".

First of all, I noticed that most of the students enrolled in SAC did not want to be
there. They were there because they had not been accepted in the Language Centre. The
SAC was their only possibility to study languages but not their best one. A few, I must
admit, were there because they were too busy to attend a course in a fixed schedule. But, in
any case, they would have preferred to work with a teacher.

Second, I became aware of the fact that learners were not learning much from the
input we gave them during the users' course. After having taught the course to hundreds of

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