Transcription
The first piece of advice I’d give is to do it yourself, i.e. to put yourself in the situation of learning a language on your own seems to me to be a good way forward, because of course, provided that afterwards you take a step back and ask yourself how it happened and why it happened the way it did, but doing it yourself is already, I think, a good way forward. That’s the first thing. The second suggestion I’d make for training is to listen to yourself. It’s true that when I’ve listened to myself giving advice to teenagers or young adults, you realise that sometimes there are inconsistencies or that you’re unable to seize the right moment. That’s when you should have intervened, that’s when there was a representation that could have been worked on and then you let it go. So listen to it yourself, and then listen to it with others, with other advisers.
Transcription
It’s always interesting to listen to recordings of other experienced advisers to learn more about advising. It means talking to other advisers when you can. It means recording yourself, listening to yourself, analysing what you do and what happens in an interview. It also means listening to what the learner says, what learners say, because they’re often full of good ideas, full of strategies, and I know that I’ve enriched my practice through contact with learners because they think of things that I hadn’t thought of. So that’s extremely rich, and you can learn about the job of advisor, the role of advisor, by learning from what the learner has to say.
Transcription
We can learn by observing others, so by observing advisers giving advice, either live or in the form of films, with an analysis grid here too, what we observe in the work of an adviser that we see working. So we can actually observe the way he manages the interaction, the way he explains things, does he explain a lot of methodology, does he explain a lot of things about the language in question, does he listen to the learner, does he answer the learner’s questions, did he get carried away, how did he manage the whole thing, does he take notes to help himself? So you can observe a discussion in terms of its content, see what happened, what the advice was actually about, you can also look at it from the angle of the interpersonal relationship that was established, because that’s another thing you have to learn to do. You can also do simulations, i.e. put yourself in a fictitious situation but on a real basis. Your learner asks you tatata, what do you answer ? Alors on peut le faire sous forme d’études de cas, simplement on cherche à mobiliser les connaissance dont on a besoin : je lui répondrais telle chose, telle chose, et puis on peut le faire avec quelqu’un d’autre, en simulation cette fois-ci et donc avec un apprenant fictif mais qui joue le jeu “je suis apprenant, j’ai tel problème, je pose des questions, je suis un peu retord ou je sympa etcetera” donc on peut se préparer en jouant des situations les plus réalistes possibles et puis après il faut se lancer et se filmer et s’observer. Then you can do it with someone else, in simulation this time, so with a fictitious learner who plays the game ‘I’m a learner, I have such and such a problem, I ask questions, I’m a bit tricky or I’m nice and so on’, so you can prepare by playing out situations that are as realistic as possible and then you have to get out there and film yourself and observe yourself.
Transcription
To learn how to do something, you need to practise, so you can practise in real life, or you can practise in virtual life, by observing real-life counselling situations, i.e. attending interviews conducted by another counsellor, or even audio or video recordings of counselling sessions. There are other ways, there’s all the contact with peers or ex-peers, former peers like me and the fact of talking to people who practise counselling, as they’re different individuals they share a common basic reference but they each have their own responsibilities, so confronting the different points of view and the different experiences is something quite formative, so this observation part, this discussion part. Another way of training is to consider feedback from the interviews with the learners themselves, who are probably often willing to send information back to the advisor that may be useful for his or her practice.
A few more tips
Carette and Castillo (2004 : 95-96) give advice to teachers who wish to train to become counsellors. According to them, the actions to be taken are as follows: