Tiffani Blatchford, Kanda University of International Studies
Abstract
This is a reflective paper outlining an experienced language teacher’s first steps toward becoming a learning advisor. I first reflect on what it means to be a learning advisor, drawing from contemporary research in the field, then analyze a recorded advising session with a learner to deepen my reflective practice. The analysis explores how effectively I was able to use the advising strategies of repeating, intuiting, and asking powerful questions during the session. I found that use of these techniques and engaging in reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action were critical to developing my understanding of the role of learning advisors in supporting learner autonomy.
Keywords: learner autonomy, learning advising, reflective practice
I began my career in language teaching as an Assistant Language Teacher working in elementary and junior high schools in Japan. I spent several years teaching English using traditional language-teaching pedagogies and strategies, many of which have been teacher-centered and always left me feeling limited with how much I could support my students. It was not until April of 2024 when I began working in a university setting as an English Lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies, that I was introduced to a whole new practice in English teaching: one which places a great deal more focus on autonomous learning than I had been used to previously.
I was first drawn in by the term “learning advisor.” I had never heard of this before, and wondered what it meant to be a learning advisor. As Horai and Wright (2016) explain, “a learning advisor aims to help students to identify specific needs and create action plans to meet their goals” (p. 197). This appealed to me greatly, as I am interested in developing my skills in learning advising so I can better support students’ long-term journeys toward becoming self-aware, autonomous language learners.
Kato & Mynard (2016) describe the stages in an advisor’s learning trajectory beginning with stage one, “Getting Started,” where one is introduced to advising and considers what it means to be an advisor. Stage two is called “Going Deeper,” where the advisor prepares to transition to stage three, “Becoming Aware.” At this stage, the advisor is encouraged to reflect and understand who they are in an advising role. Finally, advisors arrive at stage four, “Transformation,” which includes further development of advising strategies. According to this trajectory, I would place myself at stage one, “Getting Started.”
The Advising Session
I have begun incorporating learning advisor strategies into my interactions with students in the classroom and in academic support sessions, but I have not had many sessions in which to practice. In my current sessions, I am “experiencing the gap between the theory and the practice” (Kato & Mynard, p. 16). To help me bridge this gap, this paper aims to analyze an advising session in which I attempted to put theory into practice and reflect on my ability to do so and how I might apply what I have observed to future sessions. This in itself is an important step, as the ability to reflect is “central to research and practice in the field of advising” (Mynard et al., 2018, p. 56). Schön (1991) proposed a model of reflective practice in which practitioners could actively reflect and make decisions as events unfold (reflection-in-action) or reflect on an event after it had already happened and evaluate how they would react next time (reflection-on-action). I believe that this study constitutes of both reflection-in-action while the session is ongoing, and further reflection-on-action upon re-examination of the transcripts.
The session was held online over Google Meet and was about thirty minutes long. The advisee in this session is a friend of mine who agreed to let me practice my language advising skills on him, and is not typical of my usual students. Whereas my students are first and second-year university students studying English as an L2, this advisee is a native English speaker, is neurodivergent, and is an adult who has been learning Japanese for several years for the purposes of naturalization. As a learner, he is highly self-aware and is already accustomed to “self-advising” (Kato & Mynard, 2016, p. 14).
Aspects of Focus
From the many strategies and techniques taught in the language advising course, I chose repeating, empathizing, and asking powerful questions as my focus areas (Kato & Mynard, 2016). I felt these were appropriate to use with this particular advisee because we have a pre-existing rapport and I wanted to practice using strategies that I might find more challenging to use with an advisee I did not know well.
Repeating
It can be difficult to distinguish between some of the advising strategies, especially during an active session when the focus is placed mainly on listening to the advisee. However, after some thought, I have decided to attribute the strategy used in the following piece of dialogue to repeating rather than questioning although I did use a questioning tone, mainly based on the intention behind the strategy. While I feel comfortable repeating words and phrases with L2 advisees, as it helps with clarity and understanding, I had questioned how else the strategy might be useful with higher-level learners. I chose to use it with this native speaker to explore its effects and because it felt appropriate to help draw attention to certain things he was saying.
Transcript excerpt 1
Advisee (A): Here, if I do go out, then that interaction is necessary for the duration of that visit, whether it’s an hour or three hours or four, and I can’t simply just stop and leave because it would be very rude.
Learning advisor (LA): Interesting. So you think it would be rude to do that?
A: Yeah. Well, I mean, I imagine that’s the social rule. I don’t really know. My autism doesn’t really register it. I kind of have to remind myself that it’s not socially acceptable to say, yeah, I’m leaving now. I have to…
LA: It’s not?
A: [laughter] Well, um…
LA: Why not?
A: Well, exactly, right?
LA: They’re your friends, right? You can’t tell them, well, I get tired?
During the session, I used this strategy to repeat what the advisee had just told me, with the goal of having him consider why he held the belief he did. To me, it felt effective in achieving this goal, and also helped me understand his struggles on a deeper level as it encouraged him to elaborate. I believe it may also have caught him off-guard, causing laughter, which helped create a more relaxing atmosphere.
Intuiting
I felt that intuiting would be an appropriate strategy to use with this advisee because there was a pre-existing foundation of trust between us. I used it near the end of the session to help bring focus to the discussion.
Transcript excerpt 2
LA: Well, so it seems like the… I’m just gonna say something intuitive here. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like maybe the main issue is that you just don’t have any, like, Japanese friends where you are now.
A: Um, there are some that I spend a bit of time with so I do get the opportunity to use Japanese.
LA: Okay.
A: When there is free time.
LA: Ah it’s free time that’s the problem.
A: Yeah but aligning that free time and having the energy to kind of go out and be social are two very different things.
LA: That’s true.
I believe that through intuiting I was able to narrow down and better understand the problem the advisee was having.
Asking powerful questions
The reasoning behind asking powerful questions is that they can promote deeper thinking by the learner, and they can also be used to challenge the learner’s existing values (Kato & Maynard, 2016), which I thought would benefit this particular learner.
Transcript excerpt 3
LA: That’s good. So can I ask why you keep using the Kumon pages, the ones that you find uninteresting and difficult?
A: Um, a couple reasons. One, I’m extraordinarily stubborn.
LA: Okay.
A: I started it and I want to finish it because Kumon gives you a wooden plaque with a brass plate.
LA: Okay.
A: And you finish the whole thing and it’s like I must have this.
LA: Okay. Win the prize.
I do not think my question had the intended effect (challenging the learner’s beliefs), but it did, in fact, challenge mine. It helped me understand the advisee’s goals and motivations more clearly and that was useful for informing which strategies I could use for the rest of the session.
Key Moment
The key moment of the session for me came when I questioned why the advisee continued to study using methods he found uninteresting and difficult, and he answered that it was because he was stubborn. I realized that, unlike in a session with a younger, less autonomous learner where I would feel comfortable guiding them toward selecting more interesting learning materials, this learner was already self-aware and had his own motivations for choosing this particular method to study. I had no guidance or advice to offer that he had not already considered on his own, and I switched gears towards being an empathetic listener. Upon reflection, I can see that this is the moment where I began to understand taking an autonomous approach- wherein learning is student-led and aligns with the needs, interests, and desires of each individual (Morrison & Benson, 2014).
Reflection
This process has made me far more aware of the power dynamic when advising a younger, less experienced learner who is maybe just starting out on the trajectory. While it feels as though it is “easier” to advise students when you can offer a clear piece of advice to help them improve, it may be that they are not aware enough of their own needs or feel too uncomfortable or simply do not have enough vocabulary to explain why those options may not work for them. Working with a highly self-aware advisee who could express himself well has made me realize that though we may feel as though we can see a clear path the learner can take to improve their learning, and may offer advice based on our feelings, we may not always be right. I felt this particularly strongly when my “powerful question” did not have the intended effect. This gap between the advisor’s mental map of how a session should play out and what happens in reality has been touched upon by many advisors in the past, including Brown (2021) and Jerrems (2023). Sometimes it is important to listen, empathize, and try to understand where learners are coming from without jumping in to try to fill a perceived need. It is not the role of the learning advisor to provide solutions to language learning problems, but rather to support and guide learners towards developing learner autonomy and the ability to identify and meet their own learning needs (Carson & Mynard, 2012).
Conclusion
After reflecting on this session and noticing the huge gap between theory and practice I have yet to fill, I do think I was able “to place more attention on the learner and becoming able to listen actively,” which indicates I am moving forward on the trajectory towards the “Going Deeper” category in my language advising (Kato & Mynard, 2016, p. 16). I realize that my skill as an advisor is still at the beginning stages, and I will need to continue learning and reflecting on my practice in order to provide the level of support to my students that they need in order to thrive as autonomous learners.
Notes on the contributor
Tiffani Blatchford is a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies. She has an MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL from the University of Leicester. She is interested in learner and teacher autonomy, CLIL, and materials writing.
References
Brown, T. (2021). Stressing out about being genuine: Reflections on a first advising session. Relay Journal, 4(2), 99−106. https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/040205
Carson, L., & Mynard, J. (2012). Introduction. In J. Mynard & L. Carson (Eds.), Advising in language learning: Dialogue, tools and context (pp. 3−25). Longman.
Horai, K., & Wright, E. (2016). Raising awareness: Learning advising as an in-class activity. Studies in Self-Access Learning Journal, 7(2), 197−208. https://doi.org/10.37237/070208
Jerrems, M. (2023). Getting started—Advising session reflections. Relay Journal, 6(2), 150−159. https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/060204
Kato, S. & Mynard, J. (2016). Reflective dialogue: Advising in language learning. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315739649
Morrison, B. & Navarro, D. (2014). The autonomy approach: Language learning in the classroom and beyond. Delta Publishing.
Mynard, J., Kato, S., & Yamamoto, K. (2018). Reflective practice in advising: Introduction to the column. Relay Journal, 1(1), 55−64. https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/010105
Schön, D. A. (1991). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Ashgate Publishing Ltd.