working experience in a self-access centre, my change of roles and empirical research made
me aware of the necessity of elaborating my own scheme of self-direction. The description
of this process starts in Chapter 3, “From a different point of view”.
The reader will also notice that the literature review for the present research is
included in these two chapters. There are two main reasons for proceeding in this manner.
First, the survey of the literature of the present research was not a single event I carried out
when I started my PhD studies. It was an on-going process that began four years earlier. It
took place along with the development of the innovation itself. Second, the review of the
literature was a developmental process for me. I grew with it. I changed with it. Sometimes
it influenced me and sometimes it made me react and go in the opposite direction. The most
obvious example of this is the concept of autonomy. The reader will notice that there are
three sections subtitled "Autonomy" (with a different number to differentiate each one).
Dividing the discussion in such a manner, I am trying to depict the way I got into the
research on autonomy and how the concept of autonomy got into me, that is to say, the way
I developed my own definition of autonomy which responded to my own reality and why, at
the end, I opted to use self-direction instead.
The second block of this thesis is Chapter 4. It is entitled “An Attempt to make
sense” because it is exactly that, an endeavour to achieve coherence of all my knowledge
and experience concerning the issue of self-direction of language learning. My most urgent
need for coherence was triggered by the feeling that there was a huge gap in my schema of
self-directed learning that stopped me from making connections with schemata I had already
acquired as a language teacher. I basically wanted to establish a link between my knowledge
of the process of language learning from SLA research and my concept of self-direction.
The result of this reflection was a proposal for a cognitive model of self-direction in
language learning (section 4.2). There were other needs related to this preoccupation with
making sense. One of these was to read with a more critical approach the literature related to
autonomy and self-direction (in section 4.1 I give an example of this). The other was to
delve more into the concept of autonomy in order to have a coherent definition of autonomy,
which also made me opt, as I have already said, for the term self-direction as a the key term
in this study (section 4.3).
The third block of this thesis is made up by Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8. Having dealt with