SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

appears to be very fluent and sometimes she appears to be struggling to form a complete
sentence. However, these variations do not occur haphazardly. All of them respond to
specific causes, although these can be different according to the learner and the interactional
context. Again, metacognitive knowledge and the awareness of it seem to play an important
role in this stage of the learning process. In Clemente (1996b), I studied the way self-
directed learners can take advantage of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive
strategies to analyse their production and make decisions in relation to the most appropriate
psycholinguistic context for practising and monitoring their speech.

Linguistic input

Orientation

∩ta

knowledge

Noticing
Structuring
Renoticing
Restructuring

Practising
Renoticing
Restructuring
Practising
etc.

Linguistic goal

Fig. 4.3. The awareness box in self-directed language learning

As the reader can see, I am using the term awareness in its broadest sense, which
implies the three different meanings in which it has been used in SLA research (Schmidt,
1993). Thus, awareness in self-directed learning refers to: learning with intention (opposed

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