Transcription
A student of French as a foreign language with whom I thought I could speak English, but in fact I’d been wrong about this possibility, so we didn’t have a common language, we didn’t have enough of a lingua franca to understand each other. In that case, advice is impossible, so you have to try to do something, to gradually bring people into advice, but it’s impossible, so you come up against an impossibility. All I managed to get across to this learner was that I wasn’t there to correct her mistakes, so she should come to me having already spotted the places where she had problems, so that’s what she did, I’d had to give her a French method because what we generally do is pick up bits and pieces of what interests us left and right, but as there was no way of explaining the whys and wherefores to her, in fact she’d adopted a method and she did absolutely everything, which from a learning point of view is absolutely unnecessary as it wasn’t necessary for her to commit herself to all the exercises on offer. I tried to tell her, she politely said yes, yes, and then she left again, and every time she came back she’d done all the exercises and highlighted the things she still wanted explanations on. So it wasn’t self-directed learning, but it had to be like that for several times, well for a whole series of counselling sessions, that’s 8 or 9 counselling sessions, she signed up again, because she liked it, she thought it was very good, at the end of the second series she was starting to make enough progress and we were starting to be able to talk a bit about what she was doing, but she wouldn’t give up, she’d moved on to the next volume of the method and she wouldn’t let go, no matter how many times I suggested other things, she wouldn’t do them, so that was a very, very painful memory, but one that was actually linked to a poor initial assessment of the conditions in which this learning was going to take place. We thought we’d be able to communicate in English, but we couldn’t do it.
Transcription
One learner who told me at the second or third meeting that she didn’t think she was capable of doing what she was doing, she didn’t imagine she could learn on her own, and then she realised that she could do loads of things, in fact that she didn’t need a teacher for that. At the time, I said to myself, ah, we’re good for something and I was extremely happy and delighted to hear that.
Transcription
For example, one learner who, while I was helping her to learn English, started giving advice herself, transposing the advice I gave her and passing it on to her partner. She told me at every meeting that what she had done at the centre she was doing at home with her husband, who also wanted to learn English. So I think that’s a great thing because it’s a transfer of skills and then she herself became an adviser to her husband, so that’s a nice memory. At the end of the course I also had a learner who told me that now that he’d learnt English he was going to do the same thing himself with Arabic. So he already had some knowledge of Arabic, and he explained to me that he was going to look for materials himself and start applying what he’d done with English to Arabic, so I think that’s pretty cool.
Transcription
The means are already in the learner, i.e. he knows how to do a certain number of things, often he knows how to do a lot of things but he doesn’t know that he can decide to use them, because he’s never had the opportunity, because in the education system we rarely leave any initiative, let’s say developed, to the pupils. So after a fairly long history of learning, people arrive with no idea that they’re capable of learning on their own because they’ve already done a lot of learning activities. Generally speaking, we don’t think that we learn outside school. They don’t think that they’ve learnt ninety-five per cent of what they know outside school.
Transcription
I could see that the first interview wasn’t working, I couldn’t get him into the posture of self-direction, so I saw him a second time and he said, well, I’ve bought a grammar book and I’m starting to learn the declensions in German. So we come back to his objectives. What were your objectives? My goals are to get by in Germany when I go there for weekends. So what’s the connection between learning declensions and your goal? Well, it’s obviously a bit difficult. And he starts to say to me, but does that mean I can do something other than what they’ve always done for me to learn languages? Well, I say yes, we’re going to start asking the questions, I’ll skip the details, we start putting our objectives on the table, what we could possibly do and so on. He’d started recording himself from little films he’d found on the Internet, recording productions in German and he’d made contact with German speakers and he asked me what he could do with them, in short, he was committed to the process. So that’s a really great memory because he’s someone who didn’t trust himself, who thought that only other people could teach him languages, so he managed on his own.
Some examples of learners
Gremmo (1995, 55-60) reports various cases of learners and the reactions of advisers.