What is advice ?

It’s a contribution in different areas. It’s a contribution that sometimes resembles teaching because it provides information. There are other contributions that are methodological, i.e. how to do things, with what, when to do things, where to do things, what to do with what, so things that are more in the area of providing a form of expertise, but in the popularised sense of the term, technical expertise. Depending on the objectives we’ve established with the learner, we’ll start to give them suggestions. The word suggestion is important because in the advisor’s vocabulary there’s a word, a phrase that’s been banned: you have to. You never have to, you can, it’s more justified. So we try to provide them with a range, a choice of activities and working documents so that they can start learning.

Does the advisor make a diagnosis?

It’s not the advisor’s responsibility to diagnose, it’s the advisor’s responsibility to provide the learner with the tools that will enable him to make a diagnosis based on his own criteria, which he often doesn’t have in mind explicitly. The role of the advisor isn’t to tell the learner that you don’t know, it’s to tell the learner to see if you’re capable of seeing what you know and what you don’t know, to see if you think you’re missing something to be able to do what you want to do.

Advice is in fact help in determining learning objectives, organising learning materially, even in time and space, organising learning, choosing resources, choosing learning activities, learning to evaluate what has been done. When learners learn the language and engage in activities, they have something to say about what they’ve done and something to reflect on. So counselling involves asking learners to talk about what they have done, so that they can reflect on it. The advisor’s job is to take the learner through a more detailed analysis of what he or she has done, so as to be able to guide the rest of the learning process, to make the learner aware of what he or she has done and whether it is relevant to his or her project. It’s all about supporting the development of a project.

In any case, the aim is to make the learner increasingly autonomous, so that he or she needs less and less advice.

Advising means helping learners to express their needs and define their learning objectives. It means enabling them to prioritise their objectives and then to spread them out over time, it means offering them materials on which they can work and then not just offering them materials but enabling them to develop criteria for choosing from among these materials, offering them ways of doing things, strategies so that they can make the most of their documents. It means supporting them throughout their learning process.

It also means understanding the learner’s project, listening to their doubts and motivating them, because motivation fades over time on courses that last a few months.
During the meetings, the advice interviews, we also show the learner the different tools they can use to exploit a document, such as the Internet, how to use a bilingual dictionary, a unilingual dictionary, how to use a corpus, these are tools that also enable them to work and that will be useful during the course, so during the advice interviews we also do this kind of thing.

How is advising different from teaching?

If I want to be a counsellor, I have to adopt a different logic, i.e. I can give all the advice I want, but the one who is responsible is the learner, and he is the one who pays. So I have to stay within this logic and put him within this logic, which means that I’m often going to find myself, because I work with schoolchildren, in the position of someone who is seen as the one who knows, who knows what the learner wants to learn. But my job is to put them in a position of responsibility, and that’s why, in a way, I have to come down off my pedestal a little in terms of my representations of the role of the teacher.

A teenager stands in front of you and says, well, in the next fortnight I’m going to do this and then walks away, and then you see him again a fortnight later, and he hasn’t done what he said he was going to do. But the way he tells you, you realise whether you’re still a counsellor or whether you’ve become a teacher again. In other words, they may be feeling guilty, which in a way is a bit out of step with the idea of self-direction.

I’m going to give him advice, depending on his own objectives, in the sense that I’m going to make a number of possibilities available to him, but I’m never going to dictate a way of doing things, a way of being, a course of action. On the contrary, and this is something I’ve learnt from this work, it’s always about giving several possibilities so as to put the responsibility back on the learner. So that’s one of the main characteristics of counselling for me: it’s about opening up possibilities and then leaving the learner to take responsibility for those possibilities. And then, of course, providing the learner with information, because when it comes to making these choices, there’s information that I have that the learner doesn’t have, which is not knowledge to be reproduced but knowledge that informs action.

The information I’m going to give him will depend on the analysis I make with him of the situation he’s in. And this analysis will focus on the state of the journey, whether we’re at the beginning or still learning, and it’s this analysis that will actually enable me to identify possible paths with him.

And so it’s in the discussions with them, in the counselling work, that we’re going to question these reflexes which are in the genes of people who have already spent fifteen or twenty years in the school system.