SLA RESEARCH ON SELF-DIRECTION: THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL ISSUES

b) the development of "individual attainment of absolute performance criteria"
(evaluation based on personal standards and objectives),

c) focus on definition of short-term objectives,

d) appropriate leaming-to-leam activities to help learners to modify
attributional processes in order to develop positive belief structures and,
e) learning atmosphere, tasks, materials whose role is to enhance the learner
predisposition to Ieam (to make her ready) and to facilitate learning (to make
her being focused)

It seems to me that all these external factors might be considered when developing
the rationale and content of a leaming-to-leam framework.

4.2.7 Attitudes and beliefs about self-direction

Some of the factors mentioned when I dealt with alertness were attitudes and beliefs.
These seem to play a very important role in making the learners ready to leam. In this
section I will define them and draw the connections with self-direction based on the results
on research on this area.

Although different authors use several terms to refer to this type of phenomenon
(representations, attributions, values, etc), for purposes of clarity I will only differentiate
between two concepts: attitudes and beliefs. Beliefs, as Ridley states, are assumed “ to
underlie attitudes, especially core, or salient beliefs” (1997,9). Adapting Freeman's
definition on attitude (who uses it to refer to teacher's attitudes, 1989,32) to this study,
attitude is simply understood as the stance the learners adopt towards self-directed learning.
With regard to beliefs, Riley defines them (based on Jodelet and Durkheim) as:

part of a group's commonsense world of social reality, its shared or
intersubjective meaning, established in and maintained through our
daily life and conversation (1996b, 2)

and adds that we use our representations "both to interpret and to organise and manage the
world around us" (ibid)

Categorising beliefs as part of one's own self-schemata and metacognition system
Hager et al (1982, quoted in Wenden; 1991,12), say that they

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