Abstract: The paper focuses on today's foreign language learning (FLL) as seen by first-year language students at university. It investigates, through the analysis of students’ written self-representations, aspects of their FLL belief system and the impact that these aspects have on their pedagogical evolution. The data under observation come from the EFL P.AE.C.E. Corpus, which gives voice to more than 500 students of English who self-described their learning states at the beginning of their first-year course and after a visualization that was implemented using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) modalities. In itinere qualitative analyses have so far: 1) shown that many students come to university with a clear vision of who they want to be but with a number of blocking factors; 2) allowed unobtrusive observations about their emotional states, and 3) highlighted aspects of affective teaching needing implementation in foreign language (FL) teacher-training courses.