Nurturing Self-Direction: Reflections on Guiding a Student on University Leave

This paper is a reflection on a language advising session the author carried out with a 4th-year Japanese liberal arts major on academic leave from university. The session was conducted as a follow-up to an initial session where the author and the student collaborated on creating an action plan for language study. The aim of the session was to refine the action plan after the author learned that the student had faced challenges in following the original plan. Key moments in the session included the student’s strong commitment to 4 hours of language study at the beginning of the session and the student sharing how mental health struggles had hampered his commitment to follow the original action plan. The author concludes by describing how the session challenged her assumption about the relationship between learner autonomy and language proficiency, how the core advising principle of focusing on the learner helped her cope with discomfort in the session, and how a missed opportunity to utilize metaphors underscores the potential for their use in future sessions.