Neale Cunningham and Chantal Hemmi
At Tokyo Woman’s Christian University (TWCU), we are on our journey to implementing a student-led autonomous learning activity. In 2024, a new programme for English centred around vocabulary building and extensive reading was launched, followed by the introduction of a second-year programme focusing on the learning of content and language in the humanities and social sciences. Our endeavour at the LARECE Learning Commons (LLC) at TWCU is to implement and sustain a programme called Consultation and Advising (C&A), an extracurricular activity whereby the students bring in their own questions and challenges in their learning of content and language. The system we established is that students make their own bookings for a 30-minute consultation session with one of our full-time academic members of staff. In this article, we describe an online forum which was offered to help teachers make the transition to becoming reflective advisors. The forum was attended by LARECE instructors as well as those from other private universities in Japan and one university in Scotland.
To guide us on our journey of applying theory to practice in the LLC in our C&A sessions, we invited two experts in the field of student advising to speak. The presentations comprised the fourth and fifth events of our Bridging CLIL and Liberal Arts Forum: Jo Mynard (21 May, 2025), Director of the Self-Access Learning Center (SALC), and Satoko Kato (25 June, 2025), Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Learner Autonomy, both of whom are from Kanda University of International Studies (KUIS). Jo and Satoko co-authored Reflective Dialogue (2016), which advocates an advising approach which they term “transformational advising”. Their approach focuses on the goals of generating “awareness of language learning processes” among advisees and aims ultimately to assist learners develop “a system for successful, continuous, lifelong learning” (p. 69).
Jo Mynard’s talk provided us with a largely theoretical but also practical accompaniment to our new endeavour. Jo described how students can be supported outside the classroom, particularly through resources and spaces that allow self-access language learning (SALL). While Jo explained the relevant theoretical perspectives, including the current focus on self-determination theory and the universal psychological needs of students and their inner motivational resources (Mynard & Shelton-Strong, 2022; Curry et al., 2023), she also demonstrated useful practical examples of dialogic strategies and structured awareness techniques to achieve transformational changes in students and their perspectives on learning in “the learning trajectory” (Kato & Mynard, 2016, p. 179). Jo also talked about practices which have grown organically, such as the idea of study buddies and the various multiverses that students have created across languages autonomously at the SALC at KUIS. These examples demonstrated to us the way students can grasp and mould the opportunities available to them independently in a well-appointed SALC.
The second session was with Satoko Kato who followed on from the talk given by Jo Mynard in May. Whereas Jo’s talk gave us much theoretical background on our new work in the LLC consultation and advising sessions, Satoko Kato’s interactive workshop introduced the idea of the professional practice of advising in language learning (ALL). She stressed to us that an advisor can be a mental coach on the student’s path to transformational learning; transformational in the sense that advisors promote the challenging of existing beliefs by the student. Satoko unfolded for us a six-step method of advising effectively. The steps are:
(i) repeating (listening to the learner),
(ii) summarising (consolidating the main points),
(iii) complimenting (making the student feel valued and appreciated),
(iv) asking powerful questions (wh/how questions; e.g. What does learning English mean to you?),
(v) using metaphors (e.g. If you are climbing a mountain, where do you think you are now?),
(vi) what-if visionary questions to expand perspectives (e.g. What if you could live your life as you wished?).
These steps can be followed by declarative statements in which advisees visualize the action steps to be taken to achieve their envisaged goals. We were able to try out these steps first-hand as participants and we could experience just how transformational these techniques can be and the surprising possibilities that can be conceived by a person participating in the process.
Both authors of this article thought that what we learnt in both the theoretical as well as the practical session was an excellent resource for the team of six members of LARECE, three of whom are involved in the implementation of the C&A programme. In terms of the practical aspect of what we learnt, (i) to (vi) were applicable to our practice, and we actually tried them out in the same week of Satoko Kato’s talk. Our reflection was that it transformed our advising sessions into an opportunity for the students to feel heard, and the procedure helped to establish a dialogic inquiry eliciting deep learning (Meyor, 2015) and originality in student thinking.
An example of the above is that one particular student was able to construct her thinking about how to proceed with her studies on community building to support children with a learning disability. This was a good example of how the student autonomously created her own strategy for her extracurricular learning, integrating the application of her academic studies in community development and “language through learning” (Coyle et al, 2010, p. 36), the language needed for making presentations and explaining about the field work that she does in her part-time job concerning young learners with cognitive and emotional challenges. Interestingly, the content and language integration emerged through the student’s own agency in the C&A sessions. In CLIL, language through learning is founded on the idea “that effective learning cannot take place without active involvement of language and thinking” (Coyle et al., 2010, p. 37). It is difficult to scaffold in large classes, as the language that is needed to fulfil the task cannot be fully predicted. Rather the need becomes evident when conducting the tasks. Thus, in this particular instance, the C&A sessions provided a safe platform whereby the student could negotiate the meaning of what she wanted to say in a fostering environment with the guidance of a full-time teacher who is trained to support the student using English as a medium of instruction.
On the whole, this is just the first step to our implementation of C&A sessions where we worked on a student-centred approach to supporting students. The next step in terms of programme and teacher development would be to share our reflection on our practice of consulting and advising and co-construct a community of practice in our workplace. Although this is just the start of our learning journey for teachers, in future, we wish to document our progress through data-based practices.
References:
Coyle, D., Hood, P., & Marsh, D. (2010). CLIL: Content and language integrated learning. Cambridge University Press.
Curry, N., Lyon, P., & Mynard, J. (Eds.). (2023). Promoting reflection on language learning: Lessons from a university setting. Second Language Acquisition.
Kato, S., & Mynard, J. (2016). Reflective dialogue: Advising in language learning. Routledge.
Meyer, O. (2015). Pluriliteracies approach to teaching for learning. Council of Europe.
Mynard, J. & Shelton-Strong, S. J. (Eds.). (2022). Autonomy support beyond the language learning classroom: A self-determination theory perspective. Multilingual Matters.
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