Students' representations of the teacher's role in the language resource centre of the Faculty of Medicine of Strasbourg

Abstract

This article considers the representations students have of the teacher's role in a specific self-directed language learning environment: the Language Resource Centre of the Medical Faculty of the University of Strasbourg. The shift from language teaching to language learning in a Language Resource Centre (LRC) based on self-directed learning entails major changes in the roles of both teachers and learners. For students mostly used to teacher-led lessons, taking an active part and making decisions imparted to teachers in a more traditional system can be difficult to accept and adapt to. The research presented and focused on the evolution of the students’ representations of the teacher's role after a one-semester learning period in an LRC and led to the identification of three types of evolutions in representations: spontaneous evolution, gradual evolution and non-evolution. The type of evolution occurring appeared to be related to the existence and nature of teacher–student interactions that had taken place during the semester. The methodology and results will be exposed in the paper.