Riding the Waves of Autonomy: Language Counsellors’ Reflections at Masaryk University Language Centre
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | This paper, inspired by the questions in David Little’s introduction, was written by a team of six teachers who work as language advisors, or “counsellors,” in the English Autonomously course at the Language Centre at Masaryk University (MU), Brno, Czech Republic. The text emerged from informal conversations among the team members about our counselling work: how we do it; what it means to our students and us; and how we might do it better. Over the course of several months, we turned these discussions into a more formal conversation. We agreed on six questions as an axis for the discussion. Each section of the conversation below begins with one of these questions. After each question, there is a short reflective task for you, the reader, which is modelled on the exercises we suggest to students before and after their counselling sessions (here we’ve adapted the language of these tasks so that they are aimed more at teachers and advisors). Then, we offer our responses to the initial question, and our responses to each other’s answers. At the end of each section, there is a summary of the most important points raised. Finally, at the end of the article, there is another list of questions, this time looking forward to where we might take the conversation next – not only among ourselves, but with our readers too. |