things, we made the decision of not forcing the students to attend a "first" counselling
session and tried out ways to get in closer contact with students. We had individual
interviews with them during the user's course whose objective was more psychological
(being in touch, getting to know each other, etc.) than technical (e.g. revising the study plan).
Another way to get closer was to be available, i.e. "on hand", while they were working.
In addition, I noticed that, in general, students prefer to work with certain types of
materials. New SAC users especially like to work with video courses, such as Ingles sin
Barreras and Master English. More advanced students generally spend most of their time
watching movies, especially the most recent ones. They hardly ever use the standardised
exercises with authentic materials and most of them absolutely love computer games, in
particular Hangman and Word Munchers.
Fifth and finally, although many teachers wanted to work in the SAC, their main
motivation was to have fewer classroom-hours. Working in the SAC is fairly relaxed and
they are free to choose what to work on. From them, I learned that, in general, teachers do
not like to give counselling sessions, but this does not represent a problem for them because
students do not like them either.
In conclusion, as I see it, students were not interested in learning the language in a
self-directed way and the learning support provided by the SAC was not effective, neither in
the form of a user's course nor in the on-going counselling service. That implied a very
distant relationship with the counsellors, highlighted by the fact that the counsellors were not
very positive about some of these supports. In short, students’ autonomy was reduced to the
choosing of materials, very much the same situation of Holec's first definition of autonomy:
autonomy as independence of consumer (see 2.3., p. 24). From the students' point of view,
the only problem, but a big one, was that they were not learning the target language and that
was their main reason for dropping out. So we had to face the fact that attrition was very
high, and it was not that we were running out of students. On the contrary, every semester
we had to run user's courses for more than one hundred of students. The problem was that
they left after one or two months of being working in a self-directed way, or better, two
months of “being working without a teacher”, as most of them put it. Apparently, we had not
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