Week 7: Learner/Teacher Autonomy

Week 7: 

Dear webmates!

Another week has come and is almost gone, but once again, we have added to our range of potential solutions to enhance our daily teaching.

For this week, I have been interested in Learner Autonomy, defined by Holec (1983:3) as the “ability to take charge of one’s learning”.

The main thing I retained from the two papers I read (Learner Autonomy by Samuel P-H Sheu, and What is Learner Autonomy and How Can it Be Fostered by Dimitrios Thamasoulas) is that Learner Autonomy cannot be dissociated from Teacher Autonomy, or even Administration Autonomy, because Teachers sometimes have to concentrate on official curricula, with set goals.

To promote Learner Autonomy, Samuel P-H Sheu suggests activities such as vocabulary, jigsaw, extensive reading, and listening/watching English programs on radio or TV while Dimitrios Thamasoulas proposes self-reports diaries, evaluation sheets, and persuasive communication.

Both authors also insist on the Time factor, claiming that it takes time to build Learner Autonomy, in addition to key elements like motivation, desire to learn, and self-esteem (Dimitrios Thamasoulas).

For a long time I have thought that Learner Autonomy could be achieved by just directing learners to libraries or giving them lists of useful websites. The two papers have shown that I (as a teacher) need to be more involved in the process.

The one-computer-class task has not been very easy for me to start until I read the works of my webmates. However, the main difference between my work and the works of most of webmates is that in my activity, the computer is “Teacher-used” rather than “Student-used”. The main reason for that is certainly the size of my classes (around 30), which does not allow individual uses of the laptop.

In the lesson plan I proposed, learners work on answer sheets to write their answers by watching/listening to a short video on Water.

I hope you’ll have read it and that you ill like it!

Best regards.