Reflections on Learner Autonomy
Context for reflection
I aim to critically reflect on an advanced level English elective for final year Japanese high school students which I taught for two years. I had complete creative control over the curriculum and still have copies of the course materials for the purpose of reflection. Although I wasn’t aware of the concept of learner autonomy (LA) at the time, I will analyze where I inadvertently designed tasks with high LA and areas where LA could have been applied. Much of the sources I draw from in this reflection are studies done with 3rd level students. I justified this decision based on the age, degree of freedom of curriculum I had with this class, and their universal desire to study at the 3rd level.
What is LA?
Learner autonomy is a concept which has as many interpretations as there are researchers. Starting from Holec (1981), we see that early conceptions of LA involve developing the capacity of learners to control their own learning. It is interesting to note that the concept of LA was first theorized in the context of adult education, who as members of the democratic societies in which Holec worked, were already assumed to be in possession of a certain degree of rationality that was not afforded to minors at the time. Although more modern scholarship seems to have moved away from this idea and accepts that minors do benefit from LA (Little 2004), this seems to stand in stark contrast to Holec’s earlier work on LA, specifically when he claims that LA moves us from the idea of man as a “product of his society” to the idea of man as a “producer of his society”.
Ahearn (2001, P. 112) ties LA to agency, or “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act.” This definition implies that LA is not solely contingent on learners themselves. Taking an extreme example, a strong headed student with high intrinsic motivation to learn cannot be said to be truly autonomous if they are still shackled by the constraints of an authoritarian curriculum. The implications of this are that creating an environment with a high degree of LA is a two way street, teacher authority and power in the classroom must exist in a negative correlation with student classroom power and authority. This is a concept which is explored by Tan (2004) in the context of assessment. Tan argues that power and control over learning in the classroom is something that can’t be co-possessed by students and teachers, either one’s will is sovereign or it is not. While this sounds rather drastic, Tan makes an excellent point that if teachers aren’t willing to give up the complete authority that has traditionally been granted to them, autonomous curriculums “will be a token act of autonomy ultimately requiring their acquiescence to teacher control”. Porto (2007) claims that the decentralization of power in the classroom led to a greater sense of community in the classroom. This emotional connection which the students developed both towards the physical space and conceptual idea of a classroom is a great asset to be fostered in an autonomous classroom due to the positive effects it can have on student development according to socio-cultural theories of learning. Little (2007) further states that LA has the effect of increasing learner fulfillment, which exists in a positive correlation with motivation of the learner.
McMahon (1999) also argues for a similar understanding of LA, again in the context of assessment, by arguing that without true devolution of power in the classroom, students will still be conditioned by their lack of control over the grading process to seek to please the teacher at the expense of an authentic demonstration of their own learning. While I tend to be skeptical of behaviorists' understanding of human conduct, it is not hard to imagine times where learners prioritize high marks and the benefits they bring on the course of their lives over an authentic learning experience. In order to develop a form of assessment in line LA, teacher-student negotiation can serve as an effective method. In my own experience with this class, we often carried out a similar procedure when creating a list of need to know words for assessments. I would start by asking the class to discuss which vocabulary words we learned were most relevant, useful, or important for them to be able to communicate. When both parties act in good faith, I believe this method resulted in an increased sense of personal investment into the content of the class with no loss of assessment validity or reliability.
What then is the role of a teacher in a class that prioritizes LA? Yamashita (2015) explored this problem through the framework of “teacher as advisor”. In a case study involving 3rd level EFL students in Japan, Yamashita found that by adopting an advisory role, teachers can help develop learners' meta-cognitive awareness about the language learning process in order to efficiently foster LA. Yamashita used a scaffolding process to achieve this, whereby she helped the students become aware of solutions to their issues not through a prescriptive authoritative model of teaching, but by means of an “authentic socially-mediated environment” (Yamashita, 2015 P.63). To me, what she seemed to do was attempt to raise awareness via a Socratic dialogue, where the teacher attempts to prompt the correct course of action by the use of reflective questions.
Implications of foreign language anxiety (FLA) and LA in the classroom
Anyone who has studied another language or has taught in a language class is likely to have experienced FLA before. Unsurprisingly, researchers have concluded that FLA has a negative effect on aspects of SLA, including LA (Horwitz, 2017). We can conclude from this that if FLA negatively affects LA, then FLA must also negatively affect overall learning, as the benefits of fostering LA in classrooms are well established in the literature (Nunan, 2003). A learner with high FLA might be unable to engage with the language to the degree that they wish, or in the most severe of cases, at all. Yukselir (2022) reported that a large percentage of Turkish EFL learners reported moderate to high FLA in the context of EFL classes. Most worryingly, students who reported feeling FLA also reported that they didn’t know of any strategies to overcome these negative feelings. Fortunately, the issue of raising meta-cognitive awareness in regards to FLA in students has been studied already..
Two strategies proposed by Horwitz (2017) to reduce FLA are worth examining in detail. The first strategy involves the creation of realistic leaner goals. Students were asked to reflect on, through the use of journals, where they thought they were weakest in their language development. Learners were asked to be as specific and concrete as possible, in order to avoid learning goals with high degrees of ambiguity. With the help of their peers and teacher, a series of tangible learning goals were created. This was shown to have the effect of reducing the daunting nature of studying something as complex as learning another language. As shown by Cheng (2020), the process of studying music is not unlike learning a language. Like a musician breaking up a complicated passage into measures, a learner can focus on strengthening a weaker aspect of their linguistic repertoire before applying this to the larger context as a whole. As Yamashita (2015) notes, the experience of FLA consumes the same cognitive resource (working memory) which is required for the completion of tasks when working in the TL. If a prospective student has a high degree of FLA in the context of speaking in another language, perhaps a teacher can recommend trying to set a goal of a limited number of interactions in the TL per day. Like a therapist practicing exposure therapy with a patient suffering from a severe phobia, a teacher can help a student through gradual, limited engagement, until the student develops the confidence and capability to increase the difficulty of their own learner goals. As Dias (2000) found, an increased sense of LA may lead students to use the TL more, so creating a situation where learners with high FLA are able to be in control of when they enter uncomfortable situations is paramount. A classroom has as many proficiency levels as it has students, and although the pressures of standardized universal curricula can’t be discounted, the benefits of personalized learning goals for students are likely to be profound.
Another method for reducing FLA suggested by Horwitz is to design reflective activities where the students are placed at cognitive and emotional distance between themselves and hypothetical language learners who are suffering from some common forms of FLA. Typical situations include learners with low self-esteem, performance anxiety, and fear of negative peer evaluation. Learners have to reflect on the hypothetical situations in a group and in order to advise them on methods to overcome their issue, thereby raising awareness in ways which might lower their own FLA. The role of the teacher in this context is to facilitate the connection between the hypothetical task and the lives of their students.
An issue which I came across while reading through the literature is the role and predominance of group work in developing LA. Group projects are most often theoretically justified by Vygotskian socio-cultural theories of learning (Little, 2007). I have yet to come across any papers dealing with the potential for a reliance on group work to benefit certain student personality types to the disadvantage of others. My concern is that group projects, like any social interaction, can become dominated by the presence of strong, extroverted personalities, which might actually serve to lower LA in more reserved students. In addition, there seems to be a contradiction in the idea of increasing LA via group work, as the teacher is restricting the autonomy of students who would rather work alone. This has some serious implications in cases where students are socially isolated from their peers, suffer from high degrees of social anxiety, or simply have interests that are divergent from what their groups want to study. From this, I conclude that any attempt to foster LA in a classroom must be multifaceted in order to cater to the needs of the individual personalities in the classroom.
Journaling as a language learning tool
To start, an area where I could’ve increased the LA of my class was in the area of learner journals. Due to how small this class was, it is hard to understate what a missed opportunity this task was. I will report some intriguing findings from the literature, before elaborating on what I could’ve done differently.
A journal is at its core, a vehicle for learner reflection. O’Bryne (2003) claims that learner journals act as a nexus between the institution of formal education and the wider socio-economic situation in which students inhabit. This is due to the journal acting as a canvas where what is learned in a class can mix with the individual life experiences that students bring to the institution of education. Without this element of reflection, learning is in danger of merely being knowledge without any means of application (Porto, 2007). To anyone who believes that what we learn in formal education is for more than just an exam, this is a concerning finding.
As noted by Cotterall (1995), a journal is not inherently a tool for increased autonomy. The journal should exist somewhere between a blank canvas and a series of highly structured exercises, so that learners are not set completely adrift but are also not constrained by a too structured journal which leaves little room for student creativity. Porto (2007) used journals as a way of gauging the meta-awareness, reaction, and perceived purpose of lessons for Argentinian EFL students, which allowed the development of informed dialogue between teacher and students. The content of these journals were instrumental in the development and evolution of the curriculum, which served to foster learner autonomy. This type of journal in particular would’ve been an excellent template for the classes that I taught. Knowing what classes, activities, and themes that my students enjoyed, disliked, found inspiring or uncomfortable, or wanted to know more about would’ve affected the way I designed my course. In particular, I would’ve benefited from their opinions about my handouts and course materials. As my class had no textbook to use, I was responsible for creating the syllabus from the ground up. While I tried my best to design the materials to be as user friendly as possible, getting their opinions about what aspects of the course materials they found useful, neutral, or detrimental would’ve been invaluable for the progression of the class.
While most experiments with learner journals involve a one journal per student approach, Pellet (2012) explored the use of class wikis through the lens of a socio-constructivist theory of developing LA, an approach to LA also taken by Little (2013). These wikis are essentially a “one big journal” approach. The primary objective of students in this project was to create original, personalized content in the TL, which was not superseded by a need for TL accuracy. The wiki project resulted in the creation of authentic learner materials, which were situated in a communal environment where peer and teacher feedback were available. The role of the teacher as a scaffolder, helping the students by creating an environment where authentic self directed learning can take place.
The idea of a class wiki is another which could’ve been applied to the unit on politics that my class took part in. At the time, my class consisted of 5 students who had all recently turned 18 (the age of voting) prior to an upcoming election for the Japanese diet. During the course of this theme, we worked on argumentative writing skills by responding to what NHK (the national broadcaster of Japan) defined as the key electoral issues. A collaborative wiki could’ve been a great source for collaborative learning, not only of the TL, but also of the larger issues facing society as a whole through the sharing and discourse in regards to newspaper articles, interviews, and other relevant media. As noted by Little (2004) and Gach (2020), fostering LA in the classroom is inseparable from fostering a sense of critical thinking about the class and society at large. A process that he links to the survival and progression of democracy as a political process. Such skills are of critical importance if we are to follow Holec in believing that LA is a vehicle for moving citizens from products to producers of their societies.
Project based learning
The most autonomous series of lessons I implemented was a project where my students collaborated in groups to produce powerpoint presentations in order to share an aspect of their cultures with secondary school students from Australia who were studying Japanese. Learners created these projects in their L2, which had the effect of allowing students to “receive comprehensible input and produce comprehensible output.” (Beckett & Miller, 2006, p. 4). Students were allowed to form groups, whereupon they were allowed to create and justify themes for a project. One group chose to do a presentation on Japanese dialects. This ties in well with Ramírez (2014) and their standard of project based learning in that students are “invited to live a meaningful experience that goes beyond the syllabus and classroom walls”. Wertsch (2007) showed that accent is heavily tied into one’s self-identity, creating a situation where students were able to share and take pride in a non-standard dialect fostered a sense of self-motivation, and therefore autonomy, in the students. Allowing them to undertake this research project aligns well with Dam (2018) and the concept of a teacher being a co-researcher in the construction of new knowledge. Akhand (2015) noted the benefits of the perceived authenticity of PBL in developing a positive attitude towards learning, self-reliance, and willingness to take responsibility for their own learning. My students primarily spoke the Tsugaru dialect, a dialect distinct in vocabulary and phonology from standard Japanese due to the influence of the Ainu language (Tanaka, 2000).
Developing learner autonomy and motivation through drama
Another activity we did as a class involved the study of the imperative mood and the collaborative writing of a silent film script. As a highly social and collaborative learning experience, this kind of activity aligns nicely with socio-cultural theories of learning (Vygotsky, 1978, Sağlamel, 2013). After studying the construction of the imperative mood through a more traditional focus on form method, we transitioned to an exercise where groups of 2-3 students were asked to watch a silent film on the internet over the weekend in order to familiarize themselves with the genre, with the intention of using the imperative mood to write an original script for another group in the class to perform. As shown by Afshar (2014), a high degree of LA is strongly correlated with high degrees of motivation, which I believe was the case in this activity. Learners spent about an hour and a half over the course of a school week writing their plays in the target language before the scripts were given to another group to perform. What usually happened was that there was a significant gap in the information the students thought they conveyed and what was actually conveyed on paper, leading to unintended interpretations of the scenes by the performing group. Students were then allowed to rewrite their plays in an attempt to encourage more precise use of the TL. What I realize now is that this could’ve been a great opportunity to encourage learner reflection, specifically in regards to their pragmatic competencies (Council of Europe, P.141). Encouraging the students to reflect on where the logical flow of precise and coherent information broke down would’ve served to increase their communicative abilities not only in the TL, but also their L1.
References
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