SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

i.e. knowledge and activities, what Wenden has identified as "integrated instruction"
(1987c,161).

3.3.4 Teacher education

Another area that I wanted to revise is that of teacher education for, at that time, one
of my main concerns was that I did not feel competent to carry out my job. Being a language
teacher was very different from being a counsellor and it implied different things, many of
which I seemed not to be aware of. To study this specific area I gathered data through a
long open-ended questionnaire to the teachers, and through meetings and personal
conversations with most of them. I also took into consideration Freeman's scheme for
teacher education (1989,30). According to him, teacher education should integrate four
elements: knowledge, skills, attitudes and awareness.

Although the national project included training schemes that provided us with
information about different aspects of self-learning issues (see Fig. 2.4), it was not enough to
be prepared to assist independent learners. As I see it, a SAC counsellor needs, among other
things, to know the rationale of needs analysis, to have a deep knowledge of learning
processes, styles and strategies and to be able to uncover and analyse them from two
different perspectives: the learners and the materials. A counsellor also needs to develop
metaskills that enable her to transmit some of her own teaching skills for the learners to turn
themselves into their own teachers. I believe that, to a certain extent, the counsellor has to be
able to educate the learner in the same way an educator educates the teacher in order to
manage her own teaching. As the reader can see it is not enough to have a language teaching
background and some information about the change of roles.

Apart from the knowledge and skills, there are the teachers' attitudes, which can be
included into those

more complex aspects of teaching categories in which it is
much more difficult to train teachers but which are essential to
the theory of teaching (Richards; 1990,8)

The data I collected allowed me to describe the SAC counsellor's attitudes towards
themselves as counsellors, towards the SAC learners and towards the SAC project. In

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