Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 3; May 02

Autonomy in adult education

Monica Cardholm, Sweden

( editorial note: this piece was written two and a half years ago )

After quite some time spent in discussions the three of us agreed we had to give it a fair try ,this autonomy thing, not just talk about it.
So we worked out a plan which we presented to our headmaster who immediately exclaimed: "Sounds interesting! Go ahead!"
Our colleagues, on the other hand, weren't too enthusiastic about the idea. Referring to their long experience, they insisted languages can NOT be taught the way we wanted to do it.

In August 1998 our autonomy experiment began, encouraged by our headmaster and suspiciously sneered at by other teachers of English.

Our idea is that adults coming to evening class to learn English have a wide range of differences concerning pre-knowledge and what they want to achieve with their studies. We think this makes it impossible to fit them into certain levels all doing more or less the same thing, like in ordinary teaching.

What we offer our students is a variety of possibilities to choose from each evening. They can practise grammar or improve their speaking the language within a small group. They can also choose a self study room with a teacher guiding them to a lot of different exercises.

Before our first evaluation, which was done in October, we were slightly nervous. What if we had been wrong? But we didn't have to worry at all. Apart from a couple of students who still preferred the old way, the response from the group was overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of the comments: