SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

setting up self-instructional systems and resources than in the way of direct contact with the
learner. Other authors coincide that counselling consists of telling the reader that apart from
"helping learners to..." (Sturtridge; 1992,11), the teacher has to be prepared to carry out many
of new roles such as librarian, manager, administrator, technician, etc. From Holec (1980), I
learned that the content of a counselling session (CS) has to make

reference to the learning process...(and) give the learner an
opportunity to think about his learning... in order to develop the
abilities he needs in order to be able to take over responsibility
for his learning. (1980,31)

In addition to this, most of the writers seem to agree on the fact that the counsellor
has to "resist becoming a language teacher" (Dickinson; 1987, 45). Little by little, I was
building up and adding to my new schema of counselling session, nevertheless I found
nothing about the way a counsellor counsels. In 1997, Riley is still saying that "we have no
discourse in which to discuss or 'do' counselling" (115) and recommends that

we need to frame a new discourse in which it is possible to
'counsel' learners without constant reference to other
interactional genres, and other informational economies, in
particular, teaching (ibid).

In 1995, I carried out a piece of research (Clemente 1995a) in which I analysed the
discourse of the CS within the context of the SAC in Oaxaca. The data of this study was
obtained through a questionnaire for SAC counsellors and learners, video-recorded CSs and
the corresponding protocol analyses of those. From the questionnaire I learned that
counsellors and learners have different concepts of counselling, mainly in terms of goals,
content and roles (see Fig.3.1 for the most common answers). In general, it can be said that
the counsellor's concept of counselling was more in agreement with the literature of self-
directed learning than the learner's.

The analysis of the discourse of the CSs gave a description of the semantic
characteristics constant in some of the CSs held in Oaxaca. From it I learned that the
semantic attributes ( Paltridge; 1994,292) of the CS we were carrying out were: learners'
experiences and goals, counsellor's information about the SAC system and suasion in the
form of suggestion or advice. Interestingly, it was found that in very few of the counselling

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