Awareness of Strategies is Not Enough: How Learners Can Give Each Other the Confidence to Use Them

Abstract

This paper reports on a study that started out as an investigation into learner training, but evolved into a more holistic study on consciousness raising. The context is a university-level English reading course which incorporates learner training sessions and plenty of group work. This report focuses, on the one hand, on the change in perceptions of a mature language learner and, on the other hand, on the possible powers of group interaction. The findings indicate that the case study student perceived a change in her approaches to reading and vocabulary. This perceived change is likely to be connected to the personal relevance the student was able to create on the course. The findings also suggest that group interactions as a follow-up to teacher-initiated sessions may serve at least two reflective functions. First, they may offer alternatives to the perceptions a student has and, second, they may reinforce those perceptions. The implications of the findings for both the practice of teaching and for further research are considerable.