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Lessons	  from	  the	  Advising	  for	  Language	  Learner	  Autonomy	  Conference	  	 アドバイジング・フォー・ランゲージ・ラーナー・オート
ノミー神田外語大学大会からの学び	 	  Ian	  Alexander	  Hurrell	  University	  of	  Birmingham	  	 Ian	  Alexander	  Hurrell,	  バ ー ミンガム大学	  A

s a head teacher
at a small private
language school,morecommonlyreferred to in Japan as
an ‘Eikaiwa’ school, I
probably came to theAdvising for Language
Learner
Autonomy
Conference at Kanda
University of International Studies (KUIS) froma different view-point than most of the otherparticipants who were coming from a university
teaching background.
I find that it is useful to think of an Eikaiwa
school as a kind of fitness gym for developing
English, where each student comes to theschool with different ability levels and also witha range of goals, such as becoming able tocommunicate in a professional environment or
simply for personal interest. In addition, as aservice industry, there is strong pressure toprovide
customersatisfaction
asthecustomer’s desire to stay at the school isdirectly linked to the satisfaction they feel fromtheservice
provided.
However,
accommodating all of these different ability
levels and goals can be very demanding onteachers who struggle to prepare materials tosatisfy their student’s needs and expectations.
This was the case for me in the early years of	  teaching at an Eikaiwa school. The sheer
volume of work in constructing personalizedmaterials for each of my 40+ students wasoften overwhelming and would frequently
result in classes that not only failed to satisfy
my student’s needs but also failed to provide a
motivating teaching experience for myself as ateacher. However, after starting a Master’s
degree in TEFL/TESL, I was introduced toideas such as learner-centered teaching,learner autonomy, discovery learning, advising,self-access learning, etc. This has allowed me
to develop and implement open-ended syllabi
which put me in the role of a learning advisor
and passed control of the student’s learning
progress into their own hands. In this way, I
was able to help my students to develop theirown teaching programs and create their ownmaterials, tailored to their personal needs. This
has not only helped to reduce the burden of
creating materials on my shoulders, but, more
importantly, it has allowed my students todevelop into more responsible, motivated andindependent learners, as well as creating amuch more positive learning environment at
my school (Hurrell, 2010).
It was with this background that I came to thisconference, with a view to finding out how
others have been applying the ideas ofadvising and learner autonomy in their own
teaching situations and how I might be able toapply them to my situation in the Eikaiwa
industry.
The day before the conference, I was lucky
enough to go on a tour of Kanda’s Self Access
Learning Center (SALC). It was illuminating tosee how KUIS had implemented the concept oflearner autonomy and advising into their center
throughfull-timelearning
advisors,
independent learning programs, private multipurpose language learning rooms, and alounge area where students could come andchat in English in a relaxed and comfortableenvironment. We also had a chance toobserve an advanced writing class where thestudents worked collaboratively to investigate
topics of their choosing using the internet anda variety of other sources and write their own
research papers. It was clear that the idea oflearner autonomy runs deep in the corephilosophy of KUIS, which made it the perfectsetting for this conference.

LEARNING	  LEARNING	  19(1)	   9	  JALT学習者ティヘロフメントSIGの会報	 	  The next day, I was impressed to see thenumber of people who had come from all overJapan and also internationally to attend theconference. After taking part in theenlightening seminars and chatting with theparticipants between sessions, it seemed clearthat conference presenters and participants
shared a number of common issues with
developing the ideas of advising, learnerautonomy and self access learning in ELT.
The first and biggest issue was naturally thequestion of how should we introduce the ideasof advising and learner autonomy to students.
These ideas are still in their relative infancy
and, while the literature provides a lot ofevidence to show how autonomous learners
are more successful, there is still little
information on how teachers can actively help
students make the transition from being
passive learners to independent learners whoare in control of their own progress.
Many of the seminars focused on how wemight address this issue. Howard Doyle from
Kochi University and Michael Parrish from
Kwansei Gakuin University presented theirstudy on the methods that their learners use toimprove their English outside of class. This issomething that my students often ask me
about so I was interested to hear their findings.
I was amused by some of the more ingenious
methods their students had come up with,such as switching the language of theiriPhones from Japanese to English. At thispoint, their study seemed to be mainly
concerned with identifying the various methods
that their students preferred to use, but I think
it would also be very useful for language
advisors to have more information about which
methods are more successful in improving thelearner’s communicative ability. This could be
the subject of a follow-up study.
John Adamson and Naoki Fujimoto-Adamsonfrom the University of Niigata Prefecture
presented their work on the role of translanguaging (alternating between the learners
L1 and L2) during mentoring sessions. This isa subject that is of great interest to me as I
have often experienced resistance to native
speaker instructors using Japanese in theirlessons at Eikaiwa schools. I believe that thisis primarily because of the perception that an
English-only policy will create an immersion
environment and will aid learning by pushing
the students to speak more English. While thisidea may have some merit, I feel this policy
greatly limits the types of ideas that can beintroduced, especially with lower level students,

10	   LEARNING	  LEARNING	  19(1)	  	  as language has to be kept within the learner’sL2 ability range. In my classes, I have beenable to get positive results by mentoring mystudents using Japanese where necessary andstudents have reported greater satisfaction
with their classes. Over time, the managementof my school has gradually become more
comfortable with the judicious use of Japanesein my classes. Nonetheless, this is still anissue that I grapple with on a daily basis in myteaching. Just how much of the student’s L1should be used during teaching sessions? Itwas interesting to hear the stories of how otherinstructors dealt with this issue in their classes.
One teacher commented that he only used
Japanese when he got the “blank stare”, anexperience that I think many of us have had atleast one time in our teaching careers.
However, from the range of opinions that wereexpressed, I think it is fair to say that the use oftrans-languaging is very much left to personal
intuition at this time. It would be very useful forthe development of language advising to see
more work done in this area to create a set of
guidelines so that instructors can be better
informed about appropriate use of translanguaging when advising.
It goes without saying that creating
autonomous learners was a major issue of theconference, but another issue of equal
importance was encouraging institutions
themselves to promote the ideas of learnerautonomy and advising. It was clear to see that
KUIS had made a considerable investment increating their SALC, and many of theparticipants who I talked with had come withthe aim of starting similar facilities at their own
universities. However, in these tougheconomic times, competition for resources isfierce between various departments, andconvincing university decision-making bodiesto commit these scarce resources to creating acenter and employing full-time advisors is a
tough prospect. This is especially the casewhen there is currently little concrete evidence
to prove that such centers would besignificantly more effective in improving a
student’s
communicativeability
thanconventional teaching.
This point was clearly illustrated by thepresentation made by Marjo Mitsutomi andMariko Sakurada from Akita University, which
has also recently opened a self-access center.
They talked about their difficulties in fighting forresources and trying to get students throughthe doors. As I listened to their presentation, alot of the problems they were talking about
reminded me of discussions from my days as aNewsletter	  of	  the	  JALT	  Learner	  Development	  SIG	  	  business major, such as the need to create a
coherent business model for the center and tomarket the center effectively within the student
body. Therefore, it seems that if we promote
the widespread development of such centers,
especially in a commercial industry such as
Eikaiwa, then a sound theoretical underpinningalone will not be sufficient. We also need astrong business rationale.
This brings me to the final issue raised in theconference, that of using ideas from otherfields to aid our research in developing theconcept of learner autonomy. We saw how therepresentatives
fromAkita
University
highlighted the need for a clear businessrationale. However, there were otherpresenters who had also taken concepts fromother fields. A presentation which greatly
impressed me was given by Satoko Kato ofKanda Institute of Foreign Languages. Ms.
Kato had conducted research into the various
problems that advisors at her institution had in
their professional development, for example:
understanding their role as a facilitator oflanguage learning rather than a teacher;dealing with the uncertainty of advising wherepotentially any issue could arise versus therelative certainty provided by teaching with alesson plan; and adjusting the expectations ofboth advisor and advisee as to what is to beexpected in advising sessions. Ms. Kato used
a wheel diagram (Kato & Sugawara, 2008) toplot how advisors and advisees felt about theiradvising sessions and used the results todiscuss with advisors about how they could
improve their advising. Neither I nor the people
around me had ever seen this kind oftechnique before. When I approached Ms.
Kato to ask her about how she had developed
the idea, she informed me that she had
adapted the wheel diagram from a techniquecommonly used in life counseling to help
people improve their life. After hearing this, I
thought that this technique could also beapplied with my students to help them develop
as autonomous learners, and I plan to do thisin the future.
It became apparent that advising in ELT could
greatly benefit from work already done in
related fields, and this issue was encapsulatedby the final presentation given by the key-note
speaker of the conference, Chris Candlin. He
presented his research on the techniques usedby the professional medical industry to advise
patients about health issues and highlighted
how health advisors could not explicitly tellpatients what they should do, but rather had toemploy a number of techniques in order to	  guide patients to make the right choices bythemselves. Candlin then went on todemonstrate how this basic principle may be
applied when advising students to become
more autonomous learners. This further
reinforced the idea that a lot could be learned
from other related fields to develop the idea ofadvising for language learner autonomy
So, after all this, what lessons could be taken
away from this conference? It is clear that
there is still a lot of work to do if we are going
to convince both students and institutions tocommit to the ideals of learner autonomy,
advising and self-access learning. This isespecially true of the Eikaiwa industry, which iscommercially driven and wary of abandoningtried and tested methods. However, if research
into the problems raised in the conference canbe continued with the help of work alreadydone in related fields, such as business andcounseling, I believe that it will be possible toovercome these issues. Conferences such as
this one play a great part in exciting people’simaginations to explore ways that we mightdevelop and adapt our own teaching contexts
so that we can help learners take greater
control of their own learning, and I look forward
to making my own contributions in the future.
Ian started his teaching career on the JET
program teaching at two senior high schools in
Saitama Prefecture, Japan. After three
productive years on the JET program, hebecame head teacher of a private language
school in Sapporo, Hokkaido, where hecontinues to help his students to develop into
successful learners of English. Currently, he isabout to complete his Masters in TEFL/TESL.
His main interests lie in learner autonomy,task-based language teaching and the use of
discourse analysis to help learners understandpragmatic meaning in authentic materials.
ReferencesHurrell, I.A. (2011). A plan for a negotiatedtask-based syllabus. JABAET Journal,14(15), 93-110.
Kato, S., & Sugawara, H. (2008). Actionoriented Language Learning Advising: A
new approach to promote independent
learning. The Journal of Kanda Universityof International Studies, 21, 455-475.

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