Utilizing Advising Strategies with Grounded Theory to Support an Advisee’s Learning Goals

Abstract

This reflection-in-practice details a 30-minute advising session online with a fourth-year male student at a self-access center at Saitama University, a national/public university in Japan. The advisor (the author) was not the advisee’s instructor and genuinely attempted to be an equal conversation partner to boost trust and credibility. This qualitative framework was primarily inductive, and 12 advising strategies checklist and the use of silence in Kato and Mynard (2016) were utilized. After analyzing between patterns and themes in an inductive process, three advising strategies emerged in the post-session analysis using grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2015; Creswell, 2014; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) that were summarizing, metaphor, and asking powerful questions (Kato & Mynard, 2016). The advisee pinpointed his English self-study constraints, then planned to select English videos with English and Japanese captions as support to reach his English proficiency goals. After analyzing the rich content, I learned more about how my advising shortcomings turned into a strength by reflecting on the emergent data over time. Moving forward, I am conducting more advisee sessions to inductively reveal how advisees intensify their learner autonomy for their own study purposes.