Restructuring language learning attitudes at university

The present contribution shows that freshmen students come to university with unbalanced visions about who they want to be and why. They carry with them limiting factors (low self-esteem, disheartening attitudes, doubts, and many different types of fears, just to mention a few) that inhibit or block the realization of their educational project. Traditional tools to identify students’ visions about the learning pathways, such as language portfolios, tend to be more efficient tools for educators than for students who have a tendency to rationalize the activity as one among the other course tasks without understanding the deep meaning behind the possibility of becoming self-aware of one’s own learning process. On the contrary, the unobtrusive observations about their learning visions, enriched with a deep understanding of their emotional states carried out observing the EFL P.Æ.C.E. Corpus (Landolfi 2012), indicate that guided visualizations may allow students to inwardly reflect about their learning process, decide changes and modify attitudinal perspectives. Considering this restructuring power of visualizations, two modalities have been observed holding different forces: a destructive force to delete/readjust dysfunctional visions and an empowering force to sustain working visions. Both modalities allow students, in the privacy of their minds, to self-act in favor of an improved learning process.