Listening and Learning: Advising Session Reflection

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.