What is a successful interview?

For me, the criteria are I ask myself questions but from the learner’s point of view. What questions did they ask? Did they get the answers they were looking for? Did they get answers? From my point of view as an advisor, did I succeed in getting him to understand and distance himself a little from what he had done? Were there times when he was actually able to reflect and move forward in his thinking about what he had done? Did they leave the interview with a fairly detailed analysis of what they had done initially? Does he also leave with a clear plan, does he know what he’s going to do until the next time? So it’s more a question of responding to the learner. Has the interview enabled him to leave knowing what he’s done, knowing what he’s going to do?

In my experience, the first criterion is purely superficial: satisfaction. When I come out of an interview and say to myself ‘oh, there’s something wrong’, that’s my first criterion. If we want to look more closely at the counselling, at a specific counselling session, it’s the fact that for each manifestation of a learning problem there was a reaction from the counsellor that was appropriate, in other words, that didn’t provide an answer but provided leads for answers. That’s the main idea, it’s not to have missed something, not to have missed for one reason or another a point that represents a problem for the learner and not to have identified it. That, for me, is a criterion of failure, of poor achievement.

For me, a successful interview is one in which the learner takes the lead. It’s the learner who speaks more than I do in my role as advisor, it’s the learner who guides the interview. For me, a successful interview is one where a relationship of trust is established and where the learner can freely express what they need and the difficulties they have encountered. Another sign of a successful interview is a learner who is able to say no. I have learners to whom I’ve been able to say no for a long time. I have learners to whom I suggest things that don’t suit them and the ability to say no, that’s one of the signs that trust has been established, and that no is very, very important because it allows us to start again on other things and to look together, to think together about proposals that would suit them better, about ways of doing things.

There’s one thing you have to watch out for, I think, and that’s the satisfaction or dissatisfaction you feel in a slightly confused way, but we all have this reaction at first. Oh, it went well, because the person left with a smile on their face or because you had the feeling that you had done what you had to do. So I think that’s something to be wary of, because experience shows that it’s not always as meaningful as that. On the other hand, when you have the feeling, or rather the certainty, because what’s just been said proves it, because what’s just been done proves it, that someone’s representations have changed. He comes to you and says, well, I’ve done some work over the last few weeks, and I’ve tried to see how the community whose language I’m trying to learn goes about using this or that word, and I’ve looked up several occurrences, compared them and so on, And I think that’s a good indicator for evaluation, when people start to show in their initiatives that they are making progress in their representations of what a language is and what it is to learn a language, for example.