Theme: learner-centred approaches to teaching and learner autonomy contents: introduction

Autonomy and Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics views language as inseparable from its sociocultural context. It considers language as a tool for communication that is used in a social context. Individuals with personal needs and intentions learn to express themselves in relation to the groups they are part of. They use the language to share, maintain, and influence a certain social reality. In this view it is not enough to learn a language as the sum of its linguistic features, but one also needs to know how to use the language appropriately. For teaching practice this means allowing social reality to be a part of the learning experience. Because social reality changes constantly and because learners influence it as well as are influenced by it, teachers cannot teach everything about a language. Learners influence the social context and therefore the language and its use. Learners therefore become more important members of a classroom community. The greater understanding of the social aspects of language and language learning has led to an increased understanding of the role of the individual in the learning process and the importance of valuing and supporting that role. In this way, developments in sociolinguistics have contributed indirectly to the development of the concept of learner autonomy.

Autonomy and Psychology

In the 1950s and 60s, there was a broad development in the field of psychology away from behaviourism, with its view of learning as a change in behavior, towards an increased focus on the individual. Constructivism played an important role at this time. It sees knowledge as a reorganisation and restructuring of experience; something that cannot be directly taught, because it is a unique process for every individual (see also Candy, 1991). The same applies to language learning where learners thus actively construct their own target language through unique experiences. In psychology, humanism as “the study of personality focussing on the individual’s subjective experience–his or her personal view of the world” (Atkinson, 1993, p. 544) became increasingly influential. It gave a central place to the unique individual. Experiences and insights were considered more important than behavior alone: “It is not the events and texts themselves that are ingrained in his memory but the object of his attentions. How he has apprehended the matter and what he has done with it” (Kelly, 1955, p.35).
Psychologists like Kelly (1955), Bruner (1966), and Maslow (1968) all emphasized the role of the individual and his or her specific needs and these ideas had a strong influence also on education. For the development of learner autonomy especially the work of Carl Rogers has been influential. He too regarded the tendency of human beings to fulfil or actualise all of their capacities as the main motivation for personal growth. It is the learner who learns and not the teacher who teaches. The teacher facilitates learning in learners, and the quality of this interaction is largely based on the relationship between them, where trust and empathy make learning experiences more pervasive and therefore make a difference to the behaviour of the learner. For the same reason, it is ultimately the learner who is the only person able to evaluate progress (Rogers, 1969).
The work of Stevick (1980) relates to this in that it sees as a critical task for the teacher the enhancement of this process of self-fulfillment and therefore the facilitation of learning. A genuine interest in the student, his or her work and personal experience are a prerequisite for success. Stevick further writes about the need to strike a balance between control and initiative. The teacher acts as an expert on the subject matter, for example making comparisons with the learner’s linguistic production and that of a native speaker, or that of a learner and his previous production. The amount of control or initiative is flexible.
Self-fulfillment and personal growth are strongly influenced by affective factors such as motivation and courage. Research in this field has influenced language teaching methodologies and several teaching methods have arisen from it, such as Suggestopedia (Lozanov, 1978) and the Silent Way (Gattegno, 1963). More importantly perhaps, these insights have had a considerable influence on all teaching methodologies by emphasizing the needs of the individual and the focus on personal development rather than the transmission of some abstract body of knowledge.
The connection with a learner’s personal development determines the meaningfulness of new knowledge. If learning is not perceived by a learner to be meaningful, it is less likely to be incorporated into his or her internal schemes. It might be learned and remembered, but not become part of a learner's internal representation of the world. In this context, Marton, Hounsell and Entwistle (1984) and Rivers (1983) talk about the distinction between school knowledge and action knowledge, where the latter becomes more internalised and can therefore also be applied outside the school (or any other environment). This type of learning is related to autonomous learning, since no teacher can make the link to these internal schemes directly. Ultimately, this is perhaps where real autonomy lies. Learners have to work actively with these internal schemes themselves. They need to compare new information with existing knowledge, look for similarities, organise new knowledge logically etc. We touch here upon a distinction made between active and proactive learners (Knowles, 1975). In short, active learners take responsibility for this process whereas proactive learners wait for external stimuli and help. In relation to learner autonomy, Dickinson (1995) says that:
There is convincing evidence that people who take the initiative in learning (proactive learners) learn more things and learn better than do people who sit at the feet of teachers, passively waiting to be taught (reactive learners) .... They enter into learning more purposefully and with greater motivation. (p. 14)
These findings have influenced several methodologies. The projectsyllabus (Legutke & Thomas, 1991) tries to involve learners more actively in the learning process. This is also the underlying idea of the process syllabus (Breen, 1987). The learner-centred approach, (more influenced by humanistic psychology than cognitive psychology) gives learners a central place in education. Nunan (1995) defines the learner-centred curriculum as one where “key decisions about what will be taught, how it will be taught, when it will be taught, and how it will be assessed will be made with reference to the learner” (p. 134, see also Nunan, 1988).
This focus on the learners and their unique ways of learning was also influenced by research into learning styles (Willing, 1988) and learning strategies (Oxford, 1990). It was found that different learners approached learning tasks in different ways. This meant that classroom instruction had to take into account these differences (and that therefore they had to be understood properly in the first place), in order to make the learning experience maximally useful to the largest number of students possible. This thinking directly influenced the (further) development of learnercentred approaches in language education. A different implication was that it might be possible to identify ways in which successful learners differ from less successful learners. Identifying the ch aracteristics of the ‘good language learner’ (Naiman, et al, 1978; Rubin 1975) became an important impetus for research. One suggestion of this research was that good learners are more involved in the learning process; they participate actively (Wesche, 1979), they are self-motivators (Ushioda, 1996), they are good self-assessors (Hagen, Barclay & Newman, 1982), good monitors (Weinstein & Rogers, 1985) and they generally know more about themselves and about their learning than less successful learners (Wenden, 1991). These ideas directly influenced the development of the concept of learner autonomy. They are closely related to the area of metacognition, which is the focus of the next section.