SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

"advice about how to go about learning English" (1991,120) in order for the teacher to know
the student's beliefs about the best way to Ieam a language. However, I see that the student's
answer may be of two different sorts: It may involve "how I have learned" statements, that is
to say, what she has been able identify as good strategies that work for her, or it may deal
with the "how I should learn" answers, which reveal the ideal situation in which this student
believes but has not been able to carry out. As Ridley states,

a belief system relates not only to the way things are but also to the way
we think things might or should be (1997, 9)

In short, Wenden’s task does not differentiate beliefs about “the way things are”
(what the learner believes she does) from beliefs about “the way things should be” (what the
learner believes she should do), which is crucial for a learner-centred approach such as this.

With this idea of simplicity in mind, the reader may get very frustrated when she
discovers that the development of autonomy is not so easy, that, in her real situation the
students, instead of giving transparent verbal reports, tend to talk about other things, that
some of them react against the training, that they do not care about metacognitive
knowledge, that they do not understand what in the book seemed so straightforward, and so
many other responses I myself have experienced. I think that it is not fair to depict the
developing of autonomy as an easy goal when in fact it is "a long, difficult and often painful
process for the learner and not least for the teacher" (Dam; 1995,6).

To sum up, I think that there is a need for consistency when dealing with autonomy;
a kind of loop input (Woodward; 1988 and 1991) where the writer writes a reader-centred
book about Ieamer-Centredness, where the writer believes in autonomy for the learner but
also in autonomy for the reader, and where the writer's right attitude evolves in the teachers'
best attitude. I believe that this, in turn, will bear fruits in relation to learners' attitudes
towards autonomy.

Having dealt with some problematical issues when putting autonomy into practice,
let me now focus on a more theoretical aspect: the cognitive element in learner autonomy.

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