Transcription
The most difficult aspect is perhaps also a relational one, i.e. we’re in a relationship between two individuals, and there are cases where the current just doesn’t flow. The person in front is not receptive, we ourselves have a bit of trouble with this or that aspect of this person, so that’s the difficult part for me, it’s reversing a preconception that I might have about the first few minutes or the first quarter of an hour, where I say to myself ‘it’s not going to be easy with this person’, So what’s difficult after that is to reverse the tendency, to open your ears wide and get to know the person in question so that you can succeed, that’s what you have to do, to anchor yourself in what they say and who they are and not have any hang-ups about a person.
Transcription
The difficulty lies in answering, always bearing in mind the idea of how I’m going to provide information in a way that will be a tool for the learner’s future learning. How am I going to strategically or tactically formulate what I’m saying so that it’s a tool for the learner and not just information? It’s easy to have the answers, but the difficult part is to have them and not say them, and you have to keep a constant eye on yourself – well, that’s my problem – I have to keep a constant eye on what I’m saying so that what I say can be used as a tool for further learning and not just as a tool for answering the question at the time.
Transcription
That is to say, when you’ve been a teacher yourself and you’ve used and sometimes abused the argument of authority, because it’s easy in the classroom to say that’s the way it is, there’s no guarantee of learning behind it, but you do it, so when you’ve had this relationship with things, So when you’ve had this relationship with things, this relationship with people and this relationship with learning, what’s difficult is precisely to be part of the movement, to help someone to learn simply by telling them what they are, by helping them to understand what they can do, but without ever saying to them, this is how I would do it. That’s not the aim of the operation, it’s to help them find their potential. It’s difficult, but it’s fascinating, and the knowledge and know-how you have to mobilise to try and help people without being as effective as possible, i.e. to understand as well as possible the way they understand things and then to embrace the movement without directing it, is difficult.
Transcription
The whole issue will be to detect the learner’s representations. And you need to have the necessary references to do this. When a young person suggests that for them language is a bunch of words, because that’s often how they think of language, for example, that it’s a bunch of words and that a word in French corresponds to a word in the foreign language we’re learning, well, there’s work to be done. But if you yourself don’t have a clear idea of what a language is and what language means in terms of inter-individual relations, etc., you won’t be able to help them build on that. So obviously, whether we’re talking about socio-linguistics or psycho-linguistics, this is essential information to help the child identify the areas in which he or she needs to work, and then to point him or her in the right direction. Because there’s also all the knowledge you need in terms of didactics to help you make the right choices. Of course, we’re always faced with learners who aren’t aware of what it means, for example, to understand what it means to understand, or how I’m going to learn to understand. It’s something they never ask themselves in their heads. For teenagers, understanding is something magical. And often when they start, when they come to see us for the first time, they say I want to know how to speak. When we think of learning a language as a teenager, we think of speaking the language, not understanding it. But here’s an essential fact: once they’ve understood that comprehension is an enveloping skill in relation to production, we’ve already come a long way. So obviously you need to have a clear idea of the didactic approaches you need to take to build this up.
Transcription
You need to know what a language is from the point of view of a teacher, from the point of view of someone who wants to learn a language. A language is not just a linguistic code, it’s also a social practice, you don’t just say anything to anyone at any time. It’s also a vector of culture: words in one language don’t necessarily mean exactly the same thing in another, they carry cultural elements. So there you have all these skills, let’s say linguistic, but also socio-linguistic, psycho-linguistic too, the fact that a language is not the same thing as understanding it or expressing yourself in it, working with it orally, in writing and so on, so there you have it, all these skills that could be summed up roughly as linguistic skills. From a theoretical point of view, it’s all this specialised knowledge that I’ve already talked about, so knowledge about what a language is, what it means to learn a language, what it means to acquire a language, we make a distinction between acquiring and learning, So acquiring refers more to what we know about what goes on in a person’s head when they go from a stage where they don’t know something to a stage where they do, but this process is totally unconscious and involuntary, and that’s what we call acquisition. Du point de vue de l’apprentissage c’est plus justement du domaine de la méthodologie, quelles sont les activités dans lesquelles on peut s’engager pour apprendre, consciemment, volontairement, quelque chose dans le but de l’acquérir. Il faut donc des connaissances linguistiques, des connaissances sur l’acquisition, des connaissances sur l’apprentissage. Quand j’ai dit linguistique j’intègre tout ce qui est fonctionnement non seulement linguistique à proprement parler mais social, de la langue, pragmatique. From the point of view of learning, it’s more a question of methodology: what activities can we engage in in order to learn, consciously, voluntarily, something with the aim of acquiring it? So you need linguistic knowledge, knowledge about acquisition and knowledge about learning. When I say linguistics, I’m including everything that has to do not only with linguistic functioning in the strict sense of the word, but also with social, language and pragmatic functioning.
Transcription
Part of what we try to provide learners with is knowledge about how to learn a language, knowledge about how to learn a language, knowledge about what a language is, how it works, how it works both in terms of construction and linguistic mechanics, or in terms of how it works in the mind, i.e. what we actually do when we use a language, particularly a foreign language.
Sometimes the advisor works with a learner who is learning a language that the advisor does not know, or knows only to a very limited extent. You don’t need to be an expert in the language the learner wants to master to be an advisor. But you do need to know about the resources available for learning the language.
The theoretical parts take place on two levels, the psycho-linguistic level, i.e. what it is to speak a foreign language, what it is to learn a foreign language, what it is to use a language in a global way, how it is made. And outside psycho-linguistics, at the level of the language itself, how does a language work, how do we use it? Apart from the traditional images of grammar and vocabulary, what does it mean to use a language, what activities does it involve and what does it imply in terms of knowledge? Another area in which an advisor needs knowledge is learning. What does it mean to learn, what happens when you learn, and perhaps what are the problem areas in learning. So, generally speaking, you need to have a more or less in-depth theoretical knowledge of how language works, how learning works and how communication works in a foreign language as a whole.
Knowledge of how learning takes place, what factors come into play in learning. Knowledge of how a language works, how it works in the mechanical sense, what a language is, how it is constituted, how it is arranged. And there’s a second dimension to how a language works, which is practically how we use it. There are things that aren’t always very obvious to learners, things as basic as you don’t speak the way you write, you don’t write the way you speak. When you say it, it sounds obvious, but in terms of practice and implementation, it’s not as obvious as that. So it’s part of a theoretical background that needs to be mastered, on the way a language works, so we have learning, the language itself and the way the language works.
The skills and knowledge of advisers
Many authors claim that one of the essential skills of advisers is listening :