Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 3; May 03

Learner Autonomy

Ágota Scharle, Anita Szabo, Cambridge , 2000

[ Editorial note: this review is written by one of the authors, Agota, since HLT distrusts peer review and feels that authors know their books better than anyone else.]

Some ten years ago I taught English as a foreign language in a secondary school as a trainee teacher – and I found it a very difficult experience. I had been taught by British and American trainers who came to Hungary after 1989 to bring up-to-date teaching methods. I had learnt how to use communicative and humanistic methods, and I found myself facing a class used to rote learning and frontal teaching. My pupils expected me to tell them what to do and to use my authority to make them do as they were told. They expected the lesson to be about memorising irregular verbs and pairs of Hungarian and English words. So, when I asked them to turn to their neighbours and tell each other about their favourite TV programme, they just could not believe their ears! Typical communicative activities did not take off easily because the pupils would not know what to say or they would sit still waiting for proper instructions as the task seemed too vague to them, and often the task broke down completely as the pupils switched to Hungarian. I also felt that, even when something finally went smoothly, the amount of learning was much less than I hoped for, because the pupils used few strategies to process the language input that came to them in unstructured ways.

My friend and colleague Anita Szabó had similar experiences and it was in a commiserating discussion with her that we first thought of writing a resource book. The source of our misery, we thought, was that our innovative methods did not match with our pupils' expectations and attitudes, which were shaped by their past language learning experience and continually reinforced by their experience in learning other subjects. So, we started searching for ways to change these attitudes in ways that took into account for the relatively rigid educational environment and the existing attitudes of our pupils. Our book entitled Learner Autonomy (CUP 2000) presents the fruits of this search.

The book is a collection of activities designed to help teachers develop a sense of responsibility in their learners so that they would understand why and how they learn and take an active role in their learning. We see this as a slow process of changing learner attitudes and divide it into the following three phases:

Raising awareness is the starting point. Here we present new viewpoints and new experiences to the learner and encourage him to bring the inner processes of his learning to the conscious level of his thinking.

The activities are all aimed at opening the learners' eyes to examine their experience of learning. Some activities invite them to consider old routines or habits at the conscious level of their thinking, e. g. how they usually memorise words. Other activities help them to discover new aspects of learning, e.g. trying out new techniques for memorising words. All this is to make them realise that their involvement and contribution is crucial.

Most of the activities at this stage are rather tightly structured, and controlled by the teacher. This is because we assume that learners are not yet very responsible: they need to be told what to do.

The next step is practising the skills introduced at the previous stage in order to begin changing attitudes. This is a slow process requiring a lot of practice and patience, since it takes time to go from understanding to practising new roles and habits, especially when this involves breaking away from stubborn old patterns of behaviour. Learners who have little sense of responsibility in general require particular attention and patience.

Activities at this stage already allow more room for learner initiative: they are less tightly structured than those in the first stage.

Finally, we get to transferring roles to the learner. This requires a considerable change in classroom management and so it may be the most demanding phase for the teacher. There are two main reasons why we think this useful and necessary. For one, learners can only assume responsibility for their learning if they have some control over the learning process. For another, increasing independence may evoke and reinforce responsible and autonomous attitudes. This of course only happens if students are ready to accept the challenge of independence, and this is exactly why we devised a step-by-step process of responsibility development.

At this stage, the activities are loosely structured, giving a considerable amount of freedom to the students in accomplishing tasks, or even, in deciding about tasks. We move gradually towards tasks that require a high degree of independence, starting from handling devices in the classroom, and ending with negotiating rules of behaviour in the classroom in the framework of a class contract.

The activities tackle a wide variety of skills and attitudes arranged under the main headings of motivation, learning strategies, community building (co-operation) and self-monitoring. We tried to make sure that activities serve a clear linguistic purpose as well, so that teachers can easily find a slot for them in their lesson plans.

We offer the book especially to our fellow-teachers in Eastern Europe, as a companion and help in their efforts to introduce communicative and humanistic methods in an environment where frontal teaching dominates.