Maintaining Control: Autonomy and Language Control

Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further information, see p. iv.

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Edited by Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

Hong Kong University Press 14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Praya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong

© Hong Kong University Press 2009 Hardback ISBN 978-962-209-923-4 Paperback ISBN 978-962-209-954-8

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Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose art explores the complex themes of language across cultures, has written the Press’s name in his Square Word Calligraphy. This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and the distinctive nature of our English-language books published in China. “At first glance, Square Word Calligraphy appears to be nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read Square Word Calligraphy but cannot. Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.” — Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing

Contents Contributors

vii

Introduction

1

1.

3

Maintaining Control: An introduction Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

Theories and discourses of autonomy and language learning 11 2.

Making sense of autonomy in language learning

13

Phil Benson 3.

Crash or clash? Autonomy 10 years on

27

Edith Esch 4.

Discursive dissonance in approaches to autonomy

45

Philip Riley

Practices of learner autonomy

65

5.

67

Controlling learning: Learners’ voices and relationships between motivation and learner autonomy Terry Lamb

6.

Learner autonomy in a mainstream writing course: Articulating learning gains Sara Cotterall

87

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Contents

7.

Reflective lesson planning: Promoting learner autonomy in the classroom

109

Lindsay Miller 8.

The use of logbooks — a tool for developing learner autonomy

125

Leni Dam

Practices of teacher autonomy

145

9.

147

Learner autonomy, the European Language Portfolio and teacher development David Little

10. The teacher as learner: Developing autonomy in an interactive learning environment

175

Barbara Sinclair 11. Defending stories and sharing one: Towards a narrative understanding of teacher autonomy

199

Naoko Aoki, with Hiroaki Kobayashi 12. Autonomy and control in curriculum development: ‘Are you teaching what we all agreed?’

217

Mike Nix and Andy Barfield

Commentary

239

13. Autonomy: Under whose control?

241

Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda

Notes

255

References

259

Index

283

Contributors Naoko Aoki is Professor in the Graduate School of Letters at Osaka University, Japan, and works with pre-service and in-service teachers of Japanese as a Second Language (JSL). She is a co-founder of JALT’s Learner Development SIG and has published on the topics of learner autonomy and teacher autonomy in the context of JSL. Her current pedagogical and research interests are narrative-based teacher education, particularly applications of narrative inquiry, and second language user (rather than learner) stories. Her latest pet projects are the Japanese Language Portfolio and bringing a plurilingual Japan into reality. Andy Barfield is Professor in the Faculty of Law, Chuo University, Japan. His publications include Autonomy You Ask! (2003, co-edited with Mike Nix), Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education (2007, coedited with Steve Brown), Lexical Processing in Second Language Learners (2009, working title; co-edited with Tess Fitzpatrick), and Researching Collocations in Another Language: Multiple interpretations (2009, co-edited with Henrik Gyllstad). Andy has taught in the UK, France, Spain and Yugoslavia, and he is co-editor of the IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG newsletter, Independence. Phil Benson is Professor in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He has worked in Hong Kong since 1991, and formerly taught English and Applied Linguistics in the English Centre at the University of Hong Kong. His main research interests are in autonomy in learning and narrative-based research. He is the author of Teaching and Researching Autonomy in Language Learning (2001), and co-editor of Learners’ Stories: Difference and diversity in language learning (2005, with David Nunan). Sara Cotterall taught in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, from 1986

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to 2005, and from 2005 to 2008 was Associate Professor at Akita International University in Japan, where she taught courses in Independent Language Learning and Communication. Between 1996 and 2002 Sara was co-convenor of the AILA Scientific Commission on Learner Autonomy in Language Learning and in 2007 she was coconvenor of the Independent Learning Association Japan Conference. Sara is currently a PhD student at the University of Macquarie, Australia. Her publications include Learner Autonomy in Language Learning: Defining the field and effecting change (1999, co-edited with David Crabbe). Leni Dam took her first steps towards developing learner autonomy in language teaching and learning in 1973 at Karlslunde school near Copenhagen, Denmark, where she taught for 40 years. From 1979 she also worked as an in-service teacher trainer and pedagogical adviser at University College, Copenhagen, a post which provided excellent opportunities for implementing the principles of learner autonomy in teacher education. Her publications include Learner Autonomy 3: From theory to classroom practice (1995). From 1993–1999, Leni was co-convenor of the AILA Learner Autonomy in Language Learning Scientific Commission. In 2004 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Karlstad University, Sweden. In 2007 Leni retired and is now working freelance, applying her experiences with school children to the language education of adult refugees. Edith Esch is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK, and a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College. Her interest in autonomy dates to the beginning of her career when she worked with the CRAPEL (Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues) in Nancy, France. She developed this interest further in Cambridge as Director of the University Language Centre. Her main current interest is in second language education, especially the British and French pedagogical cultures in post-colonial contexts. These sociolinguistic and sociocultural themes are the extension of her life-long interest in bilingualism and cross-linguistic communication and language change. Her publications include The Bilingual Family: A handbook for parents (1985 & 2003, with Philip Riley) and Self-Access and the Adult Language Learner (1994). Terry Lamb taught languages in secondary schools for 16 years, and now works at the University of Sheffield, UK, where he is Director of

Contributors

ix

Initial Teacher Education and of the MA in Applied Professional Studies in Education, as well as supervising doctoral students in his research fields of learner autonomy, teacher education, linguistic diversity and language policy. Terry has published widely in these fields, and is also convenor of the AILA Research Network on Learner Autonomy in Language Learning and founder editor of the journal Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching. Terry’s work with a number of key national and international bodies involves him in policy development in the UK and beyond. Since January 2007, he has been President of the Fédération Internationale des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes. David Little retired in 2008 as Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences and Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin. His principal research interest is the theory and practice of learner autonomy in second language education. From 2001 to 2008 he was Director of Integrate Ireland Language and Training, a government-funded unit that provided English language courses for adult newcomers with refugee status and supported the learning of English as a second language in Irish schools. He is currently chair of the Council of Europe’s European Language Portfolio Validation Committee. His numerous publications on learner autonomy include Learner Autonomy 1: Definitions, issues and problems (1991). Lindsay Miller is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the City University of Hong Kong where he teaches courses in selfaccess learning, materials development and critical pedagogy on BA and MA TESOL programmes. He also trains secondary school teachers. He researches and publishes in the areas of self-access learning and listening. He has published Second Language Listening (2005, with John Flowerdew) and Establishing Self-Access: From theory to practice (1999, with David Gardner). He has worked in primary, secondary and tertiary level educational establishments in the UK, the Middle East, Thailand and Hong Kong. Mike Nix is Professor in the Law Faculty at Chuo University, Japan. His research and teaching focus on helping students to use English to engage critically through research, discussion and writing with legal, political and global issues of concern to them. He is also interested in questions of identity in language learning and use, especially in relation

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Contributors

to the glocalisation of English, as well as in exploring possibilities for collaborative curriculum and teacher development with full-time and part-time colleagues. His publications include Autonomy You Ask! (2003, co-edited with Andy Barfield). Richard Pemberton is Associate Professor in TESOL in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he teaches and supervises MA and PhD students. He taught for nearly 15 years at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he co-ordinated the Self-Access Centre team, and before that taught ESL at secondary and tertiary level in the UK, Zimbabwe and Papua New Guinea. He coedited Taking Control: Autonomy in language learning (1996, with Edward Li, Winnie Or and Herbert Pierson) and his interests include learner autonomy, L2 listening and vocabulary acquisition, and technologyenhanced language learning. Philip Riley is Emeritus Professor of Ethnolinguistics at the University of Nancy, France, and a former Director of the CRAPEL (Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues). He has taught English, Linguistics and Language Didactics in Finland, Malta and France and has made extended visits to Italy, Hong Kong and New Zealand. His main areas of interest include autonomous language learning, identity studies and intercultural communication. His latest publications include Domain-specific English: Textual practices across communities and classrooms (2002, edited with Giuseppina Cortese) and Language, Culture and Identity: An ethnolinguistic perspective (2007). Barbara Sinclair is Associate Professor of Education (TESOL) in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK, where she has worked since 1992. She is currently Director of the MA TESOL and supervises research students. For over 25 years, her research has focused on issues relating to the development of autonomy in language learners, including metacognition, ‘learner training’, the assessment of learner autonomy and, more recently, autonomy in on-line learning. Her publications include Learning to Learn English (1989, with Gail Ellis) and Learner Autonomy, Teacher Autonomy: Future directions (2000, co-edited with Ian McGrath and Terry Lamb). She has worked in Spain, Germany and Singapore, and has provided consultancies and courses on learner autonomy in Mexico, Turkey, UAE, Austria, Malaysia, Brunei and Cyprus.

Contributors

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Richard Smith is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK. His research interests and professional activities are mainly in the areas of learner autonomy, teacher development, cultural issues in ELT and the history of language teaching. He co-edited Learner Autonomy across Cultures: Language education perspectives (2003, with David Palfreyman) and has a particular interest in innovative approaches to language teaching ‘in difficult circumstances’. He runs the DAHLA project (‘Developing an Archive and Histories of Learner Autonomy’) as a means of recording practice in the field of pedagogy for autonomy, oversees the online journal English Language Teacher Education and Development and is co-editor of Independence, published by the IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG. Sarah Toogood is an Instructor and Self-Access Language Learning Adviser at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She was President of the Hong Kong Association for Self-Access Learning and Development from 2001 to 2005 and continues to be an active member. Her main interests are concerned with devising ways of integrating self-access language learning into the curriculum and looking in particular at how to advise and assess for self-access language learning projects. She has published widely in these areas and has conducted teacher-training workshops on self-access language learning and advising for tertiary and secondary level contexts. Her current research is developing a Virtual English Language Adviser (VELA): http://vela.ust.hk/. Ema Ushioda is Associate Professor in the Centre for Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, UK, where she teaches MA courses and coordinates the Education Doctorate programme. Her main research interests include language learning motivation and its theoretical interface with learner autonomy, and relevant implications for classroom practice and teacher education (Learner Autonomy 5: The role of motivation, 1996). In recent years, she has been exploring language motivation from the perspective of Vygotskian sociocultural theory as well as theories of social and cultural identity, and is currently developing an approach to examining how language motivation is socially constructed in discourse.

Maintaining Control

Introduction

1

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Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

Maintaining Control

3

1 Maintaining Control: An introduction Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

The origins of this book lie in a major conference entitled ‘Autonomy and Language Learning: Maintaining control’ held in Hong Kong and Hangzhou (mainland China) in June 2004. That conference was the younger sibling of another important conference held 10 years earlier, also in Hong Kong and mainland China, which formed the basis of the book Taking Control: Autonomy in language learning (Pemberton et al. 1996). Back in June 1994, at the time of the first of these two conferences, the concept of autonomy in language learning — together with related practices of self-directed and self-access language learning (SALL) — had been around for some 20 years, starting out from the Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues (CRAPEL) at the University of Nancy in France in the early 1970s (cf. Harding-Esch 1977a; Holec 1979, 1981; Riley 1985) and spreading to the UK, Denmark, Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. At the wider international level, the concept of autonomy in language learning was starting to become more popular: a Learner Autonomy Scientific Commission had been formed as part of the Assocation Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA) and had just held its first symposium. However, autonomy had not yet become part of mainstream theory and practice in second language education. East Asia, the region that the three of us are most familiar with, is a case in point. In Japan, interest was just beginning to develop, as evidenced and aided by the formation of the Japan Association of Language Teachers (JALT)1 Learner Development Special Interest Group in 1993, and the publication of its first newsletter Learning

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Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

Learning in Spring 1994 (see Andy’s ‘story’ below and Richard Smith’s ‘autobiography’ in Chapter 13). In Hong Kong, the concept of learner autonomy was familiar to a relatively small group of teachers involved in supporting SALL at university level (and in some companies) (e.g. Gardner & Miller 1994), but was not familiar to local language teachers in general. In mainland China, where self-access had yet to ‘take off’, the concept was even less well known, and to our knowledge there had been no publications or presentations on the subject. Ten years later, however, presentations at the 2004 conference in Hangzhou by both local and overseas participants were filled to overflowing, and to date more than 35 papers written by participants from mainland China have resulted from this landmark event (see Sarah’s ‘story’ below). This growth of interest in China is part of a global trend, which, as Phil Benson (this volume) details, has seen autonomy take up a central position in second language education literature since the turn of the millennium, becoming, in Benson’s words, “an idea that researchers and teachers ignore at their peril”. Similarly, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda argue in their concluding chapter that the expansion in the ‘autonomy movement’ from small university-based circles scattered here and there to a much larger and more diverse grouping means that new voices need to be listened to and conflicting interpretations engaged with. But just as it is vital to keep opening out to different narratives and understandings, it is also important to understand how we got to where we are today. It is in this spirit, then, that we would like to share with you our stories of how the two conferences and this book came to be.

Taking control in 1994: Richard’s story In the early 1990s, when I arrived in Hong Kong, the University Grants Committee had decided to provide each of the seven UGC universities/ polytechnics with a language enhancement grant, in order to improve the language proficiency of Hong Kong undergraduate students (which was perceived to be in decline) and to maintain Hong Kong’s position as a regional international financial centre in the face of competition from Singapore and Shanghai. These funds, involving very large sums of money, allowed universities to employ more language teachers, so that the number of language classes could be increased and class sizes reduced. They were also a vital ingredient in the mushrooming of

Maintaining Control

5

university self-access centres (SACs) across Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Within a few years, each institution had set up its own SAC so that learners could develop their language skills outside regular class time; there was an active Association for Self-Access Learning and Development (HASALD) drawn largely from university teachers; and Hong Kong quickly developed a ‘cutting edge’ reputation for the design of SACs and support of SALL at university level. In the early days, as we planned and started running our SACs, we were very much focused on practical issues such as lay-out, shelving, cataloguing and copyright. However, extended consultancy visits to Hong Kong in 1992 and 1993 by Philip Riley helped me make the connection between the ‘what’ of self-access and the ‘why’ of autonomy — to see why we were supporting self-access in the first place. To borrow Phil Benson’s (2002b: 4) description of his own growing awareness under Philip Riley’s guidance: “Ever so gently, Philip made me aware that there was not much point to self-access without autonomy”. However, in 1993, as an SAC coordinator, with our own centre about to open, SACs and SALL were still very much to the forefront of my mind. So when, in the same year, the director of our Language Centre at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) asked for volunteers to convene the next in our series of annual joint-venue conferences, my first suggestion for a theme was not ‘autonomy’ but ‘self-access’. Luckily, our director suggested a broader theme, and so ‘autonomy’ it was. (Interestingly, Phil Benson [2002b] reports a similar intervention by his director, David Nunan, which resulted in the Benson and Voller [1997] book having an ‘autonomy’ rather than a ‘self-access’ theme.) With an appropriate conference focus in mind, I then asked Herbert Pierson if the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) would be our institutional partner for the conference. At the time, CUHK had just created a very impressive open-plan Independent Learning Centre, and Herb, as ILC director at the university, had been responsible for bringing Philip Riley to Hong Kong to advise SAC teams at all the tertiary institutions about both the theory and practice of SALL. Herb agreed, and my colleague Austin Conway joined as co-organiser from HKUST. Together we set about planning the conference. Our first decisions concerned who to invite as keynote speakers. With two sponsoring institutions and support from the British Council, we were able to fund the attendance of the following five pioneering figures in the fields of learner autonomy, self-access and learning to

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Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

learn: Edith Esch (University of Cambridge, UK), David Little (Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland), Philip Riley (University of Nancy, France), Barbara Sinclair (University of Nottingham, UK) and Ken Willing (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia). We were also lucky that David Nunan had recently joined the University of Hong Kong as director of its English Centre, and had accepted our invitation to give a plenary presentation — and so there were six keynote speakers. The schedule we decided on for the conference was to have two days at HKUST, followed by a morning at CUHK, and then an afternoon trip across the border into mainland China to visit Shenzhen University, where the final keynote presentation, by David Little, was to be given. Cramming three locations and two countries into three days seemed like a good idea at the time, but the final afternoon trip across the border with no air conditioning in a packed coach (Austin Conway had to perch on David Little’s knee) was — in hindsight — overdoing it, memorable though the trip was. Overall, the conference was very successful, attracting some 150 enthusiastic participants from Asia, Oceania and Europe. It was one of those occasions where something occurs in the right place at the right time. Hong Kong University Press had just published Directions in SelfAccess Language Learning (Gardner and Miller 1994), which had been well received, and offered to publish selected papers from the conference as soon as they heard about it. My SAC team colleagues Edward Li and Winnie Or agreed to join Herbert Pierson and myself as editors, and the four of us set about editing the volume that came to be called Taking Control. Little did I think that 10 years later I — along with many of the participants at the 1994 conference — would be helping to bring Taking Control’s younger sister into the world.

Maintaining control in 2004: Sarah’s story The idea behind holding the 2004 conference was not, as some may have initially thought, ‘a good excuse for a reunion party’, although that may have been one of its positive outcomes. The opportunity to hold a 10-years-on conference was, in fact, quite serendipitous. One afternoon in early 2003, I was called into our director’s office. He wanted me to convene the next Language Centre conference and had some ideas as to the theme and potential collaborative partners. As I listened,

Maintaining Control

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I decided that I would be happy to convene a conference but would prefer the focus to be on autonomy and language learning. My proposal was met with approval and I was given full control to organise the conference as I wished. As soon as I left the director’s office, I sought out Richard and told him the news. He thought it was a wonderful idea and, being good at maths, saw an immediate marketing angle if we connected the 2004 conference with the 1994 conference that he had convened. I saw an immediate opportunity for a bit of word play. As Taking Control was the name of the book that resulted from Richard’s 1994 conference, Maintaining Control was the name I proposed for our 2004 conference — with the prospect that in another 10 years, we might have fully lost control and would have a hat-trick to mark the end of our careers. Richard, weary of my puns, wasn’t too keen on the idea. There was more to it, however. Having spent almost 10 years at HKUST researching ways in which to improve the support of SALL for our learners through the SAC and through course integration, my feeling was that the issues we faced as frontline promoters of language learner autonomy were now more to do with progress and maintenance rather than beginnings and taking. As Richard mentioned above, many tertiary institutions in Hong Kong had been given rich resources to set up SACs, providing learners with the opportunities required to ‘take’ control. Yet there were instances where some of these institutions had lost their space, people had moved on and materials were merged with the main library collections. At HKUST we had experienced a situation where teachers had begun to refer to our SAC as a white elephant. This galvanised a small group of us to propose changes to our provisions which aimed to maintain understanding, interest and collaboration among colleagues and learners. It seemed to me that the idea of maintaining control as a progression from taking control could be an inspiring concept for practitioners and researchers dealing with the need to ensure progress and continuation not only of ‘set-ups’ in the form of SACs but also in provisions that scaffold autonomous language learning inside and outside a SAC. Richard and I then agreed on Maintaining Control as a working title. Our next step was to set up a team of committee members and, in keeping with the idea of ‘one conference, more than one venue’, we proposed a collaboration with Pang Jixian, vice-dean of the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Pang readily agreed to a joint venture whereby participants would be at HKUST for

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Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

the first two days and then move on to Zhejiang University for the following two days, with a day for travelling in between. The committee then sat down and discussed who to invite. We ended up with a very long list of people, not just to maintain a connection with the 1994 conference but also to represent progress in research and practice 10 years on. Luckily our Language Centre was extremely supportive and allocated enough funding to invite 12 key speakers (six plenary and six invited). This, however, gave us quite a challenge in working out our programme, given that we only had a total of four days for plenary and parallel sessions. (Andy explains how we got round that conundrum in his ‘story’ below.) The conference proved a great success. Phil Benson (2007c: 1) calls it “the largest to be held on the subject of autonomy and language learning to date … attracting participants from all over the world”. It’s also possibly the only conference to generate five publications (so far), including this one. On the first day of the conference it struck me that it might be a good idea if we could publish a variety of volumes instead of one proceedings. David Little (editor of the Authentik Learner Autonomy series) was one of our plenary speakers and the way in which we (with Phil Benson’s great help) had organised the abstracts into clear ‘themes’ headed by invited speakers seemed to cry out for separate Authentik Learner Autonomy volumes with invited speakers as the editors. On our way back from Hangzhou, David agreed to the idea. Learner Autonomy volumes 8, 9 and 10 (Benson 2007b; Gardner 2007; Miller 2007) are currently on the shelves in the form of one set of proceedings from the conference. Another volume of Chinese papers produced by the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University, entitled Selected Papers from the International Conference on Autonomy and Language Learning: Maintaining control (Fan & Pang 2005), came out in 2005. It’s taken a little longer for us to produce this special volume, also called Maintaining Control, containing the work of our plenary and invited speakers.

Maintaining momentum 2004–07: Andy’s story I joined the JALT Learner Development SIG in late 1994 and started reading in the SIG’s newsletter, Learning Learning, fascinating accounts of a conference in Hong Kong that had recently taken place. Although I had missed the conference itself, I soon met Richard Smith in Japan;

Maintaining Control

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and through a shared interest in teacher education and learner development, we became involved in bringing David Little and Leni Dam as main speakers to the international JALT Conference in Tokyo in November 1998. Their joint plenary lecture, delivered to a packed conference hall with people standing in the aisles and everyone listening with rapt attention, was perhaps one of those moments when the waves of interest in autonomy in language education from Hong Kong in 1994 started to gather speed, at least in Japan, and scattered groups began to surf together. A few years later at the AILA Conference in Singapore in 2002, I met up with Richard (Pemberton) and Sarah and many others, swapping stories and different ideas for conferences and collaborative participation by speakers. I mentioned the 1998 joint plenary in Tokyo, and we brainstormed ideas for creating a different kind of format for plenary partners for the upcoming autonomy conference in Hong Kong. From these different conversations came the idea of twinning David Little and Leni Dam, Philip Riley and Edith Esch, and Phil Benson and Naoko Aoki for the plenaries. Later, together with Sara Cotterall, Terry Lamb, Lindsay Miller and Barbara Sinclair, Mike Nix and myself ended up as invited speakers. The conference was a huge success, but what about the proceedings? Having submitted our original paper two years earlier, Mike and I felt, when I rang Richard in late 2006, that a decent enough interval had now passed to ask anew about the intended publication date. “Is it…?”, “Well, not quite …” — and then I said the fateful words: “I have some free time coming up in the next few months …”. Within a short while, Richard, Sarah and myself had worked out a tentative schedule and draft plan of action. Now, several drafts — and many draft action plans later — with free time itself fading in memory more quickly than an editorial deadline ever did, we have almost completed our editorial work. It is good to get here, and it just remains for us to say a word or two about the organisation of this volume.

Reading on We have organised the chapters in this book into three main sections. As you read on, you will find that the next three chapters (Chapters 2 to 4, by Benson, Esch, Riley) provide the theoretical foundation for the rest of the book, looking at current conceptualisations of autonomy from a critical and sociocultural perspective. Benson and Esch highlight

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Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield

problems that occur in a globalised world in which ‘autonomy’ has come to be seen either as a ‘must-have’ skill for members of a flexible workforce or as the ‘freedom’ to make ill-informed and self-constraining ‘choices’; while Riley focuses on problems that occur when autonomy means different things to different people and the discourses of autonomy diverge. As you will see, we have grouped the remaining chapters into two main sections: one that is concerned largely with developing learner autonomy (Chapters 5 to 8, by Lamb, Cotterall, Miller, Dam) and the other dealing mainly with developing teacher autonomy (Chapters 9 to 12, by Little, Sinclair, Aoki, and Nix and Barfield). As is often the case, these divisions are somewhat rough and ready — for example, the chapters by Miller and Dam could also have come under the ‘Teacher autonomy’ section, while those by Little and Aoki could also have been grouped together under the ‘Learner autonomy’ section — but they serve as useful starting points. Another way of navigating through the book is to read the concluding chapter by Smith and Ushioda (Chapter 13) — either first or last. If you read it before you read the other chapters, it will help you identify the major themes of the book, and serve as a useful introduction to the field of learner autonomy as it has changed in the last 10 years. On the other hand, if you read it last, it will offer you a delicately critical view of particular chapters and overall trends. As learner and teacher autonomy become more mainstream in second language education, and as the waters we chart become at the same time more diverse and more congested, we hope that this 10years-on collection will, like its predecessor Taking Control, inspire you to maintain control and momentum on your own voyages into autonomy over the next 10 years and beyond. December 2007 Richard Pemberton, University of Nottingham, England Sarah Toogood, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Andy Barfield, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan

Note: For further details of the 2004 conference, see the conference website: http://lc.ust.hk/~centre/conf2004/

Making sense of autonomy in language learning

11

Theories and discourses of autonomy and language learning

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Phil Benson

Making sense of autonomy in language learning

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2 Making sense of autonomy in language learning Phil Benson

Introduction In December 1976, a group of language educators gathered at the University of Cambridge to discuss an idea that was, at the time, largely unheard of in the field of language teaching and learning. The idea was ‘autonomy’ and the discussion that took place was preserved for posterity in a mimeographed collection of papers that has recently been made available once again on the Web (Harding-Esch 1977a). Reading the collection for the first time, almost 30 years later, I was struck by the fact that the issues addressed by the contributors were very similar to those that we continue to discuss today. In particular, the editor noted in her preface that “there were heated arguments about the definition of autonomy on the one hand and its intrinsic value on the other” (Harding-Esch 1977b: iii). Although the context for discussion of autonomy in language learning has changed considerably, the questions of what exactly we mean by autonomy and how we see its value to the individual and society remain with us and are likely to do so for some time to come. It also occurred to me, however, that the contributors to the Cambridge collection could hardly have anticipated the explosion of interest in the idea of autonomy in language teaching and learning that we are now experiencing. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to revisit the issue of what we understand by autonomy from the perspective of the difficulty that we seem to experience in agreeing upon a single definition of the term. What strategies do we have to ‘make sense of’ the concept of autonomy in the light of this difficulty,

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and how are they related to the broader context of growing worldwide interest in autonomy in language learning?

The problem of definition Since the mid-1970s, and in particular since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a remarkable growth of interest in autonomy in language teaching and learning across the globe. In Benson (2007a), for example, I noted that the number of studies on autonomy published since the turn of the century far exceeds the number published over the previous 25 years. This literature includes more than 20 book-length publications. Chapters on autonomy have also begun to appear regularly in books in overviews on language teaching methodology (Hedge 2000; Harmer 2001; Kumaravadivelu 2003) and in more specialised work, such as Nation (2001) on vocabulary, Thornbury (2005) on speaking, Dörnyei (2001a) on motivation, White (2003) on distance learning, Littlemore & Low (2006) on figurative thinking and Cameron (2001) on young learners. Chapters on autonomy have also begun to appear with increasing frequency in edited collections on a variety of topics (Aoki 1999; Blin 1999; Healy 1999; Hoven 1999; Wachman 1999; Lamb 2000; Little 2001a; Littlemore 2001; Lynch 2001; Schalkwijk et al. 2002; Holliday 2005; Lamb & Reinders 2005). And at the AILA 2005 Congress in Madison, Wisconsin, there were no less than 36 presentations from 18 countries listed under the heading of autonomy in language learning. Put simply, autonomy seems to have become part of the current orthodoxy of language teaching and learning research and practice: an idea that researchers and teachers ignore at their peril. In addition to taking those who have advocated autonomy for many years somewhat by surprise, the current popularity of the idea also presents us with two major problems. The first of these concerns the definition of autonomy, or perhaps more accurately the meanings that are currently being attached to it. As interest in autonomy has spread, so has the need to provide, and at times defend, an adequate definition of the concept. A degree of consensus has evolved around the idea that autonomy best refers to a capacity to take charge of (Holec 1981) or control (Benson 2001) one’s own learning, but it has proved very difficult to specify exactly what this capacity consists of. In an appendix to his compendious work on adult self-directed learning, Candy (1991) lists more than 100 competencies associated with autonomy in the

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educational literature. Little (1991: 4) argues that autonomy in learners can “take numerous different forms, depending on their age, how far they have progressed with their learning, what they perceive their immediate learning needs to be, and so on”, and I have taken a similar position, suggesting that it may be neither necessary nor desirable to define autonomy too precisely, because it is “a multidimensional capacity that will take different forms for different individuals, and even for the same individual in different contexts or at different times” (Benson 2001: 47). In the face of statements of this kind, a newcomer to the field could be forgiven for having the impression that autonomy can be almost anything that we want it to be! The second problem is that those of us who have been working with the idea of autonomy for a number of years are yet to factor the reasons behind the current worldwide interest in autonomy into our understanding of the concept. While this interest is clearly welcome, there is an underlying feeling that it is not entirely, or even primarily, a consequence of our arguments and examples. Language teachers and researchers are not, it seems, the only ones who have an interest in autonomy and it is the interest of these mysterious others that often concerns us most. There is also a concern that as the idea of autonomy is ‘popularised’, it may also be ‘misunderstood’, ‘watered down’, or even put to purposes for which it was not originally intended (Little 1991; Kenny 1993; Benson 1997; Pennycook 1997; Holliday 2003; Schmenk 2005). As Pennycook (1997: 41) has put it: The idea of autonomy has therefore moved rapidly from a more marginal and politically engaged concept to one in which questions are less and less commonly asked about the larger social or educational aims of autonomy. Broader political concerns about autonomy are increasingly replaced by concerns about how to develop strategies for learner autonomy. The political has become the psychological.

In the light of our reluctance to be pinned down on the definition of autonomy, however, we find ourselves in something of a dilemma. While we worry that the concept of autonomy might be ‘watered down’, we also appear to be unwilling to say exactly what it means. In this chapter, I want to explore this dilemma further in three ways: first, by looking at how the idea of autonomy entered and has gained ground within language teaching and learning; second, by exploring some of the strategies we have used to make sense of this idea; and,

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third, by looking more closely at the wider context of current interest in autonomy in education and social life.

Where did autonomy come from? The history of autonomy in language learning has been outlined elsewhere (Gremmo & Riley 1995; Benson 2001) and here I want to limit myself to two points that are particularly related to the argument of this chapter. The first point is that the idea of autonomy is not indigenous to language teaching and learning. Rather, it is an imported, essentially non-linguistic, concept that has been brought into language teaching, via psychology and educational theory, from the field of moral and political philosophy. One reason for beginning this chapter with a reference to the Cambridge collection on autonomy (HardingEsch 1977a) is that it allows us to place an approximate date on its arrival. Contributors to the collection make a few references to earlier papers on autonomy in Mélanges Pédagogiques (the journal of the CRAPEL at the University of Nancy, France, which began publication in the early 1970s — see Riley 2000), but beyond this point the sources appear to dry up. Up to the late 1970s, therefore, we can assume that, if language educators were familiar with the idea of autonomy in other contexts, they did not necessarily see its relevance to language education. One reason for this is the fact that the idea of autonomy implies a focus on learners and learning. For much of the 20th century, however, language teaching theories and methodologies were largely grounded in theoretical and applied linguistics. It was only in the 1960s that theories concerned with learners and learning came into the field and, in this sense, we can see autonomy as one of a number of non-linguistic concepts that have been borrowed from psychology and social theory in order to make sense of the learner’s role in the language learning process. Other examples include the idea of ‘motivation’, which first came into the field at the end of the 1950s (Spolsky 2000) and, most recently, ‘agency’ and ‘identity’ (Norton 2000; Lantolf & Pavlenko 2001). The second point is that interest in the idea of autonomy has grown largely through its association with various forms of practice, including individualised learning, self-instruction, self-access, computer-assisted language learning, distance learning, the use of authentic materials, language advising, learner training and strategy training, collaborative

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learning, project work and the process or negotiated syllabus. Autonomy has often been posited as a goal that lends meaning and direction to practices of these kinds. In turn, these practices have been viewed as being supportive of the goal of autonomy to various degrees. In this sense, the ‘rise’ of autonomy is closely connected to the deconstruction of the traditional language classroom in the 1970s and 1980s and to the emergence of innovative forms of learner-focused practice. More recently, however, autonomy has been presented as a more general goal equally applicable to more conventional classroom situations (see, for example, Dam 1995; Gardner & Miller 1996; Nunan 1997; Scharle & Szabó 2000; Harmer 2001; Nation 2001; Benson 2003). It is largely in the form of ‘autonomy in the classroom’ that the idea of autonomy has become part of the fabric of present-day thinking on language education. These two aspects of the history of autonomy in language learning mean that autonomy is necessarily a complex multifaceted concept. Because our ideas about autonomy have drawn on a range of sources beyond the field of education and evolved in association with a wide range of practices, they are necessarily diverse. In an earlier paper, I attempted to make sense of this diversity using the idea of ‘versions’ of autonomy (Benson 1997). Although we may all have our own opinions about the relative merits of the different versions of autonomy available to us, we also have to acknowledge that it is not easy to set these opinions on firm theoretical grounds. The alternative, however, seems to be a relativist view that accepts the validity of almost any definition of autonomy. The remainder of this chapter is, therefore, devoted to an exploration of the possibility of going beyond the idea that autonomy can be whatever we want it to be, either through definitional and argumentative strategies, or through connections between the idea of autonomy in language learning and conceptions of autonomy in wider educational and social contexts.

Strategies for making sense of autonomy The first definition of autonomy in language learning to gain widespread acceptance was formulated by Holec (1981: 3), who described it as “the ability to take charge of one’s own learning”. Elaborating on this definition, Holec stated that:

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To take charge of one’s own learning is to have, and to hold, the responsibility for all the decisions concerning all aspects of this learning, i.e. • • • •

determining the objectives; defining the contents and progressions; selecting methods and techniques to be used; monitoring the procedure of acquisition properly speaking (rhythm, time, place, etc.); • evaluating what has been acquired. The autonomous learner is himself capable of making all these decisions concerning the learning with which he is or wishes to be involved.

This definition is so widely quoted that it is perhaps superfluous to repeat it here. The point that I want to highlight, however, is that although there is a good deal of consensus on the first part of this definition, there is far less consensus on Holec’s more detailed description of what “taking charge of” one’s learning involves. I have suggested, for example, that autonomy involves control over three major levels of the teaching and learning process: learning management, cognitive processing and the content of learning (Benson 2001: 50). Holec’s definition clearly focuses more on learning management than it does on cognitive processes or learning content and, as we will see below, alternatives to his definition have emerged over the years. At the same time, it has become clear that, if autonomy can be defined at all, it must be defined as a composite of abilities, attitudes or dispositions. Within this basic framework, I want to describe what I see as three major sense-making strategies in the literature on autonomy in language learning, which I will call the kaleidoscopic, exegetical and quintessential strategies. These are, of course, no more than metaphors representing a certain way of making sense of a complex body of work, and although I find them useful, I also feel that they do not stand up to too close a scrutiny. Anyone who cares to look more deeply into the theoretical work on autonomy will no doubt discover other strategies and other metaphors to describe them.

The kaleidoscopic strategy This metaphor involves the idea of shaking up a number of objects, in this case components of a capacity for autonomy, until they fall into

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some meaningfully ordered pattern. This was essentially the approach I used in identifying technical, psychological and political versions of autonomy (Benson 1997), a model that was critiqued by Oxford (2003), who pointed out that it “privileged” the more political versions. While it is certainly true that I favour a more political approach, and this was explicit in the paper, my intention was actually to suggest that each of the three versions was valid in its own way. Oxford (2003) also used the kaleidoscopic strategy to considerable effect in order to construct a matrix model, in which technical, psychological, sociocultural and political-critical perspectives were placed along one axis and themes of context, agency, motivation and learning strategies were placed along the other. The essential feature of the kaleidoscopic strategy is that it accepts all definitions of autonomy as equally legitimate and attempts to amalgamate them into a kind of ‘macro-definition’. As Oxford (2003: 90) puts it, in her model, “no single perspective should be considered antithetical to any other perspective”.

The exegetical strategy This metaphor is drawn from theology, in which an exegesis is a critical interpretation of an ancient sacred text. In the context of autonomy, this strategy involves going back to an earlier source, interpreting it and arguing that this interpretation represents the core meaning of autonomy. In spite of the fact that many variations upon his definition of autonomy have emerged, Holec (1981) remains the most authoritative source of this kind. His definition is the most frequently cited in the literature and, in defining autonomy as “the capacity to control one’s own learning” (Benson 2001: 47), I made reference to Holec’s definition as one around which consensus could be built. The significance of the exegetical strategy is, of course, that it privileges work within the tradition of the authoritative source and defines the boundaries of the field in its terms. The implication of my own definition was, for example, that whatever autonomy might mean, it has by and large come to be associated with the idea of control over learning within the body of work that has emerged around the idea of autonomy in language learning.

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The quintessential strategy The third metaphor comes from medieval philosophy and its belief that the universe was composed of five elements: earth, air, fire, water and a fifth unknown element, the quintessence. Although philosophers did not know what this fifth element was, they believed that it could be extracted from matter, if only they knew how. In the context of writing on autonomy, the quintessential strategy involves an attempt to try to discover, or isolate, what is most essential to autonomy. In contrast to the kaleidoscopic strategy, the quintessential strategy privileges one perspective over others, usually the psychological or political perspective. Little (2004: 69), for example, defines autonomy as follows: Autonomy in language learning depends on the development and exercise of a capacity for detachment, critical reflection, decision making and independent action (see Little, 1991: 4); autonomous learners assume responsibility for determining the purpose, content, rhythm and method of their learning, monitoring its progress and evaluating its outcomes (see Holec, 1981: 3).

Little suggests here that an ability to control learning at the level of learning management does not in itself constitute autonomy. Rather, this ability depends upon the presence of certain psychological capacities, which define autonomy. Wenden (1995) makes a similar argument concerning the fundamental importance of metacognitive knowledge to autonomy. I have argued, on the other hand, that “there is good reason to believe that control over content is fundamental to autonomy” and that “if learners are self-managing methodological aspects of the learning process, but not learning what they want to learn, their learning may not be authentically self-directed” (Benson 2001: 99). In this case, I was suggesting that the ‘quintessence’ of autonomy lay not so much in learner psychology as it did in their capacity and freedom to control learning content (see also Kenny 1993; Pennycook 1997; Holliday 2003). As a means of going beyond the idea that autonomy can mean whatever we want it to mean, however, all three of these strategies are relatively weak. The kaleidoscopic strategy explicitly accepts the legitimacy of any definition. The exegetical strategy succeeds in narrowing down the scope of autonomy; it has been successfully used, for example, to dissociate the idea of autonomy from the practice of

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individualised ‘programmed’ learning (Riley 1986). Its broad emphasis on the idea of learner control nevertheless allows for a wide variety of different definitions of autonomy based on different ideas of what the most important features of ‘control’ are. The quintessential strategy is clearly the strongest of the three, but it depends on an ability to show either that the non-preferred dimensions of autonomy are trivial or that they are dependent upon the preferred dimension. So far, this strategy has shown how definitions of autonomy based on learning management skills alone are problematic, but the priority of the psychological or political perspectives remains unresolved.

Why autonomy? Why now? It seems, therefore, that it is difficult to establish or defend any particular definition of autonomy against any other definition through logical or reasoned argument alone. I now want to explore what a consideration of the broader contexts of our current interest in autonomy can add to the picture. In particular, I want to make reference to the fact that the last several decades have been marked both by the worldwide expansion of education systems and institutionalised second language learning and by a worldwide tendency to harness educational practices to broader economic and social goals connected to the idea of globalisation. One consequence of this process is the expectation that ever-growing educational sectors will produce individuals who fit the ‘needs’ of the new global economy. In the following discussion, then, I want to touch upon three aspects of the process of globalisation that may help to answer the questions: ‘Why autonomy?’ and ‘Why now?’ These are the global expansion of second language learning, the emergence of the self as a reflexive project and the technologisation of the self. I also want to explore the implications of these aspects of globalisation for the ways in which language education researchers represent the idea of autonomy.

The global expansion of second language learning Since the early 1960s, there have been several developments in language teaching and learning that can be traced back to the fact that the number of people learning and teaching languages around the world has

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increased exponentially. These include: a greater biographical diversity and diversity of purposes among teachers and learners; the growth of migration for purposes of language learning or teaching; learner diversity within classrooms; and growing diversity in the settings and modes of practice involved in language teaching and learning. All of this is widely recognised, but I would argue that we have tended to underestimate the impact of the current scale and diversity of language teaching and learning on the ways in which we think about theory and practice. The rise of the principle of learner-centredness in the late 20th century, for example, and the entry of non-linguistic concepts such as motivation, autonomy and identity into the field can be seen as part of an attempt to make sense of this scale and diversity. And from this perspective, we may view current interest in autonomy as a sensemaking strategy that works in either of two ways: first as a means of encouraging sensitivity to diversity and promoting the recognition that learners are individuals with unique histories and purposes for second language learning; or, second, as a practical solution to the problems posed by mass second language education, in which the responsibility for learning is pushed onto the student.

The self as a reflexive project The idea that the self has become a reflexive project comes from Giddens (1991) and is based on a contrast between individual-culture relationships in traditional and late modern societies. In traditional societies, Giddens argues, individual identities were largely determined by strong cultural frameworks held together by the expectation that children would for the most part follow in their parents’ footsteps. In late modern society, these frameworks are breaking down and individuals are increasingly obliged to construct their own identities. It is in this sense that the self has become a reflexive project, or something that individuals have to work on for much of their lives. Again, the fact that the cultural frameworks in which our parents and grandparents lived are breaking down and that we are increasingly obliged to find our own way in the world is well known, but I would argue that its implications for language teaching and learning have been underestimated. It is, perhaps, the identities of second language learners that are most at risk in the processes of globalisation, because language learning so often involves a struggle to achieve a balance between first

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and second language identities. From this perspective we may, perhaps, find a deeper significance to the idea of autonomy in the context of second language learning — one that is connected to the emergence of new and relatively stable multilingual ‘selves’ out of potentially disorienting processes of second language acquisition.

The technologisation of the self Late modernity also involves, however, what Cameron (2002: 75) calls a “self-improvement culture” comprising “a range of practices and texttypes focusing on the individual and her or his relationships with others, and particularly on the problems of modern personal life”. According to Cameron, the most accessible expressions of this culture include selfhelp and popular psychology books, and TV shows of the ‘confessional’ type where people talk out their experiences, problems and feelings in public. In this context, we might also refer to discourses on individual responsibility for one’s own health and safety and gendered discourses on physical fitness, beauty and bodily improvement. Once again, these are familiar facts of our lives, but I would argue that their implications for language teaching and learning have not been fully taken into account. Cameron’s examples focus on the importance of ‘communication skills’ within this self-improvement culture — an emphasis which reflects the importance of such skills as a recognised qualification for entry into the new globalised world of work and their current importance as a focus of much second language teaching. Collectively, however, these discourses of self-improvement may add up to what we might call a ‘technologisation of the self’, based on the problematic assumption that our bodies, minds and personalities should be worked upon as if they were components of a complex machine that is in constant need of maintenance and upgrading. This technologisation of the self is, I would argue, the other side of the coin to Gidden’s (1991) self as a reflexive project. It also points to a potentially disturbing role for the idea of autonomy in language learning — one that emphasises the learner’s responsibility to create and maintain a self that is adequate for the ever-changing demands of the new global economy.

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The ambiguity of autonomy Once the idea of autonomy is placed within a wider context of globalisation, the reasons behind our current interest in this concept in language education become somewhat clearer. It also becomes clear that autonomy is a highly ambiguous concept. We have tended to represent it as an idea that serves the interests of learners, but we can also see how the idea of autonomy can serve the interests of a global economy in which individuals are increasingly being held responsible for the processes involved in their own development. It has become clear in recent years, for example, that employers increasingly expect their workers to be able to train and re-train themselves and that there is a corresponding expectation that education will produce individuals who are capable of doing just that. Becoming ‘autonomous’, in this sense, is no doubt in the interests of learners, but only inasmuch as it helps them accommodate to the needs of the new economy (Schmenk 2005; Auerbach 2007; Toohey 2007). Placing the idea of autonomy in this wider context, however, also gives us a different way of looking at the problem of defining autonomy, which is less concerned with the issue of what it means and more with the issue of what it should mean. To illustrate this point, I want to look at two recent publications that have defined autonomy without direct reference to earlier definitions. First, Nation (2001: 394) includes a long section on autonomy in his recent book on vocabulary teaching and learning. He defines autonomy by stating that “autonomous learners take control and responsibility for their own learning”. Here “control” and “responsibility” are treated as two sides of the coin of autonomy. We see something similar in the definition offered by Scharle and Szabó (2000: 4) in their teacher’s handbook on learner autonomy: In theory we may define autonomy as the freedom and ability to manage one’s own affairs, which entails the right to make decisions as well. Responsibility may also be understood as being in charge of something but with the implication that one has to deal with the consequences of one’s own actions. Autonomy and responsibility both require active involvement, and they are apparently very much interrelated … We may conclude that, in order to foster learner autonomy, we clearly need to develop a sense of responsibility and also encourage learners to take an active part in making decisions about their learning.

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The word that concerns me here is, of course, ‘responsibility’ — a word that appears in the earlier literature, but has not been emphasised in definitions of autonomy. My concern arises from the possible implication that autonomy is a matter of instilling into learners a sense of responsibility for their own actions, which they would otherwise lack, and without which they are likely to be left behind. Indeed, Scharle and Szabó (2000: 1) make this implication explicit, when they rationalise autonomy as follows: Most language teachers have experienced the frustration of investing endless amounts of energy in their students and getting very little response. We have all had groups who never did their homework, who were reluctant to use the target language in pair or group work, who did not listen to each other, who did not use opportunities to learn outside the classroom, and so on. Such behaviour very often stems from one common cause: the learners’ over-reliance on the teacher. Even otherwise motivated learners may assume a passive role if they feel the teacher should be in charge of everything in the classroom.

In terms of the discussion earlier in this chapter, this will perhaps be recognised as a line of argument based on the idea that autonomy is a matter of control over learning management. But what is missing from this argument? And what support can we marshal for an argument that this may not, in fact, be an argument for autonomy. What is missing, I would argue, is a sense that many learners are already autonomous in certain respects and that it is not primarily their ‘lack of autonomy’ but the suppression of their autonomy by educational systems that is the problem (Smith 2003). And in such a context, an argument for autonomy as ‘responsibility’ seems to imply that we are aiming for a particular kind of autonomy — one that will be displayed in a set of desirable behaviours matching the demands of the school and the society that the learner is about to enter. It is, moreover, a line of argument that tends to view the learner as a ‘technology’ capable of improvement and self-improvement. The line of argument that I would prefer to pursue would be one based more on Lantolf and Pavlenko’s (2001: 145) idea that researchers should treat language learners as ‘people’: We believe that learners have to be seen as more than processing devices that convert linguistic input into well-formed (or not so well-formed) outputs. They need to be understood as people, which in turn means we need to appreciate their human agency. As agents, learners actively engage in constructing the terms and conditions of their learning.

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Although Lantolf and Pavlenko do not use the term ‘autonomy’, their use of the term ‘agency’ is, I think, very close to the sense of autonomy for which I would like to argue. This sense is based on the idea that second language learners are already autonomous in important ways and that it is part of our role as teachers to support their autonomy as far as we are able by creating the conditions in which it can flourish. The argument is based, not so much on logical analysis of what the concept of autonomy actually means, but more on a strong belief that it is our responsibility as teachers to help students learn to lead the kinds of lives that they wish to lead, rather than to fit them out with the skills and attributes that society demands of them.

Conclusion To sum up, this chapter has been concerned with two problems: the problem of defining autonomy in language learning and the problem of accounting for the current interest in this concept within our field. I have tried to argue that these two problems are closely related. From a purely theoretical or intellectual perspective, it is difficult to establish grounds for the legitimacy of any definition of autonomy over any other. Autonomy has many sources and contexts of application and we may be inclined, along with Oxford (2003), to regard them all as equally legitimate. But when we place our own interest in autonomy within a wider context of a world in which powerful economic and social forces increasingly require education systems to provide them with ‘autonomous learners’, the question of what kind of autonomy we want to aim at becomes an important ground of legitimacy in its own right. To dichotomise, and perhaps oversimplify, the issue, we might put it this way. Do we view autonomy as a matter of the production of responsible, active, flexible and adaptable worker-learners who are capable of fitting into and matching the demands of the new economic order? Or do we view autonomy as a matter of learner agency — the production of critically aware learners who are capable of controlling their own learning and lives and of participating in the authoring of the worlds in which they live? The more interest in the idea of autonomy within the field of language learning grows, the more important our answers to these questions will become.

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3 Crash or clash? Autonomy 10 years on Edith Esch

Introduction In the first part of this chapter, I show how the notion of autonomy has spread into language pedagogy in the past 10 years and how this mainstreaming has been accompanied by conceptual distortions and discursive dissonances. Such dissonances can be located in the contradictions between the discourses of individual personal autonomy and of critical socially situated autonomy. I argue that we are at a crossroads and that if we take the notion of social learning seriously, opting for the road of individual personal autonomy is not sufficient. We need to take a whole-community approach to autonomy and reassert the critical dimension originally associated with autonomy and foreign language learning. This redirection will help us engage in a new research agenda in the years to come.

The notion of autonomy over the last 10 years A period of dissemination Over the past 10 years, interest in the concept of autonomy in relation to language learning and language teaching has developed in many directions and at many levels. At the conceptual level, one could argue that the publication of the Council of Europe’s Framework in 2001 reflects the impact of Henri Holec’s Autonomy and Foreign Language

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Learning published by the Council in 1979 (Holec 1979, 1981). As David Little rightly reminds us, Holec explicitly linked the concept of autonomy to the Council’s work on adult education (Janne 1977) which “emphasised the importance of equipping adult learners with the knowledge and confidence to participate in the democratic process” (Little 2004: 70). It is difficult to assess whether the educational aims of the Council have been achieved, but when it comes to language learning, the size of the impact can be observed at the level of practice. The last decade can be characterised as a period of dissemination of the idea that autonomy is more than a commodity and that it needs fostering and developing as advocated by Trim (1977). While the pedagogical principle per se can be pursued in many language learning and teaching environments, efforts to implement it have been particularly notable in university Language Centres, not only throughout Europe and in former Commonwealth countries but also in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and South America — in short, wherever the need to harness new technologies has imposed a complete reassessment of language learning and teaching practices. Innovations associated with particular individuals or institutions 20 years ago — such as the Language Learning Advisory Service of the Cambridge Language Centre (Harding-Esch & Tealby 1981; Harding-Esch 1982; Esch 1994) — have now become mainstream throughout the educational sector. Moreover, in Europe, dissemination has frequently been based on government-funded evidence-based research or action research so that, in parallel, a process of validation has taken place at the policy level. Let me illustrate briefly the way in which the process of mainstreaming has interacted with trends in research and influenced the way we conceptualise the pedagogical relation. In using the term ‘pedagogical relation’, I refer to Yves Chalon’s (1970) characterisation of the relationship between teacher and learner (‘enseignant’ and ‘apprenant’ in French), where both words denote active participants, in opposition to ‘teacher’ and ‘taught’ (‘enseignant’ and ‘enseigné’), where the word enseigné refers to a passive recipient. Let us start with ‘the learner’. This construct from the late 1960s became popular when developments in second language acquisition made applied linguists switch focus from the process of language teaching to that of language learning. The 1973 collection of edited papers Focus on the Learner: Pragmatic perspectives for the language teacher by John Oller and Jack Richards is a typical example of that turning point (Oller & Richards

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1973). The disembodied character of the learner became the object of much research activity in the innatist and/or cognitivist tradition, and as the term became increasingly popular, use of the terms ‘pupils’ and ‘students’, which both reflect a socially dependent and responsible role in the pedagogical relation, declined. In the past 10 years, ‘the learner’ has undergone a process of resocialisation as sociocultural theories have regained currency (Lantolf 1994, 2000). During this time, the abstract and idealised construct has been literally fleshed out as researchers have increasingly acknowledged the role of the social and cultural context in the learning process. The motivations (Ushioda 1996; Ridley & Ushioda 1997), decision-making processes (Simmons & Wheeler 1995), beliefs (Benson & Lor 1998), learning styles (Duda & Riley 1990; Griffiths & Sheen 1992), discourses (Crabbe, Hoffmann & Cotterall 2001) and learning cultures (Pierson 1996) of actual learners in particular learning environments have all been analysed. During the same period, the spread of pedagogical practices involving the development of learners’ self-awareness and their ability to engage in self- and peer-assessment throughout the educational sector from primary (Dam 1995) to adult education (Esch 1994) has made apparent how slow the process of changing individual learners’ conceptions of learning is. Such innovations have at the same time made it clear how much progress is dependent on a social-interactive view of development (Little, Ridley & Ushioda 2002; Little 2003). In effect, the process of dissemination of the idea that pursuing autonomy is a valuable educational aim has coincided with a shift in focus from abstract theoretical models of the learner to constructs embracing the importance of language learning as an artefact that is locally and collectively realised in situations subject to specific political, social and cultural constraints (Little, Dam & Timmer 1998). Similarly, if we look at the teacher pole of the pedagogical relation, the past decade in Europe has witnessed a repositioning of teachers as ‘advisers’ (Mozzon-McPherson & Vismans 2001; Pemberton et al. 2001) or ‘conseillers à l’apprentissage’ (Gremmo & Abé 1985; Gremmo 1995) in pedagogical discourse. What is notable here is the passage from experiments by influential groups such as the CRAPEL in Nancy, or individuals (Leslie Dickinson in Edinburgh, David Little in Dublin) to government-funded networks dedicated to collaborative training in best practices for a whole sector. To take one example from higher education, the SMILE (Strategies for Managing an Independent Learning Environment) project coordinated by the University of Hull (1997–2000)

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has led to the creation of online courses for the professional development of advisers leading to European qualifications. So here, the process of mainstreaming has been associated with a shift from experiments conducted by a small network of similarly minded educationalists to the professionalisation of new pedagogical roles and their integration into local structures and institutions (Mozzon-McPherson & Dantec 2006; Mozzon-McPherson 2007). As to resources, challenging developments have taken place as new technologies have demanded a reassessment of the relationship between teacher, learner and tools for learning (Trim 1977). This has prompted new thinking about the role of technology in supporting autonomy (Little 1996). However, technological advances giving direct access to language learning materials have come much faster than imaginative uses of the technology for the development of learners’ independence and self-awareness. In the UK, the government funded a nationwide initiative to “make teaching and learning more productive and efficient by harnessing new technology” in the higher education sector. This programme took place from 1992 to 2000 and had three phases, with over 76 projects being funded overall, many by consortia. While the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP) (1992 to date) concerned all disciplines, its impact on the teaching and learning of languages at university level was considerable. The production of computer-assisted language-learning materials was made possible and new technical and pedagogical expertise had to be brought in for the development work required to make content-support materials as well as a whole range of learning-process-support materials accessible online. However, the balance between content support and learning support varies widely depending on the pedagogical context, the funding (Reinders & Lázaro 2007) and user-friendliness. Tools for learning which require that learners organise their own learning programme such as concordancers for data-driven learning have now become increasingly easy to use — although their actual efficiency is being currently questioned (Boulton 2007). Crucially, networking and broadband technology have made possible the distribution and exchange of multimedia materials (Esch & Cleary 1999; Esch & Zähner 2000; Zähner, Wong & Fauverge 2000). Increasingly, the integration of e-mail, chatrooms, MOOs etc. into language-learning programmes (Möllering 2000; Shield, Davies & Weininger 2000) has led to the formation of virtual language learning communities (MozzonMcPherson 1996) and the widespread use of virtual learning

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environments to improve learning in schools (National College for School Leadership 2005). In recent years, however, the possibilities opened to language learners for the creation of their own materials and for communication with people around the globe have also made it apparent that the integration of technologies in education is in fact problematic. The educational world reproduces other social divisions so that many of these opportunities can be accessed only by a privileged minority (Education for All 2004) and, as pointed out by Hawisher and Selfe (2000: 9), “the global-village myth is far from culturally neutral”.

The increasingly ambiguous discourse of autonomy The very brief characterisation I have offered is sufficient to make the point that the process of mainstreaming of pedagogical practices to support autonomy in language learning appears to have been successful, but leads us to ask whether the radical aspects of the concept of autonomy as proposed by Holec (1981: 3) have been distorted in the process. Bearing in mind the nature of autonomy as “the ability to take charge of one’s own learning”, has the aim become to sell wall-to-wall autonomy, to have autonomy validated, assessed and made available in easy self-assembly packs at university supermarkets? A number of issues associated with the process of mainstreaming need to be addressed as the ‘discourse of autonomy’ becomes increasingly ambiguous and leads to discursive dissonances. Inevitably, expansion and recognition go along with issues of integration into existing structures and changes: when diversity appears, interpretations differ. Many of the misconceptions identified by Little (1991: 3) are being recycled in the course of these mainstreaming processes. The main ones remain that ‘autonomy is synonymous with self-instruction’ and that ‘any intervention on the part of the teacher’ is detrimental to autonomy. Indeed, at a recent conference in Spain, many young researchers seemed to assume that designing computer programs to allow students to learn on their own would lead to learner autonomy. There is also much variation in the way particular cultures and educational systems conceptualise learner autonomy as evidenced by their discursive practices (Alexander 2000: 522). Moreover, priorities vary depending on which educational sector and age range one is dealing with. While adults need to analyse the learning routines they have been using automatically for years, children have yet to discover

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self-regulation. Similarly, even though the pedagogical principles might be the same, integrating learning-to-learn practices into the primary and secondary curriculum raises different implementation problems. Crucially, educational institutions are not islands and there can be considerable outside resistance towards pedagogies which can be perceived as jettisoning the notion of authority and in so doing may constitute a danger to society (Turner 1999: 92). For example, many parents are concerned by the lack of control exercised by teachers on the out-of-school context of language learning, particularly if the children are expected to work online. Finally, there are frequent pressures relating to cost-effectiveness in an educational culture — at least within the UK — that are increasingly based on accounting and national targets. Elements of distortion in the very notion of autonomy as an educational goal seem to be the common outcome of conflicting interpretations reflected in language use. Indeed, the more the word autonomy (sometimes replaced by independence) is used, the more it seems to refer to contexts where the word means the opposite of what it used to refer to, even in colloquial usage. Another such word is choice. Ten years ago, I proposed the provision of choice or genuine alternatives as one of the evaluation criteria for assessing systems supporting autonomy (Esch 1996). In current usage, though, ‘choice’ often relates to the provision of a range of options that people do not want or cannot afford. The following quote from the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2003 is a clear example of the way discourse “constitutes the social” (Fairclough 1992) and illustrates the double talk in relation to the students’ so-called ‘choice’ while having to pay increased tuition fees in UK higher education. War on Mickey Mouse degrees will kill autonomy However unpopular tuition fees might be, at least they put control into the hands of customers rather than bureaucrats. Universities will soon drop Mickey Mouse courses if they do not attract students. What higher education really needs is a way of mitigating the effects of top-up fees on those from poor backgrounds. Labour is indeed vulnerable to the charge of allowing such students to be priced out of the most prestigious universities. But destroying university autonomy and taking choice out of the hands of students is not the answer. (Editorial, Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 June 2003: 14, my emphasis)

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Not surprisingly, distortions are reproduced in pupils’ discourse. The second example comes from a TV documentary on current obesity in children. In the US, apart from improving the diet offered in the canteens in schools, some governors are trying to find ways of making the schools abandon the habit of providing vending machines in schools. In the programme, the reporter mentioned the problem of “the ‘dollar factor’ [which] prevents schools from pursuing their educational agenda”. Immediately afterwards, a schoolgirl (12 years old at most) was interviewed and declared: “There’s no way they [i.e. the school authorities] are going to control us. We’ll still eat junk food at home … .” (BBC TV, Thursday 15 April 2004). This example shows that the conflict between children and authority is “no longer between what the child would like to do and what should not be done but between what the child wants to do and what he cannot do” (Marcelli 2003, quoted in Truong 2003, my translation). Here the autonomy of the child means the authority of the infantile since she does not understand that the ‘dollar factor’ is a much more pernicious constraint than the school governors’ aims. Confronted with these discursive dissonances (Riley, this volume), language teachers and researchers need to make a choice between two roads to guide their future practice and research: the road giving prominence to individual personal autonomy or the road giving prominence to autonomy as the capacity to exercise critical thinking about learning as a participant in a social milieu. This critical dimension highlights the socially transformative potential of learning when it arises from the constructive questioning of knowledge. The process whereby we identify conflicts in discourse between, on one hand, ‘school knowledge’ or “the knowledge which someone else presents to us” and, on the other hand, ‘action knowledge’ or “that view of the world on which our actions are based” (Barnes 1976: 81, quoted in Little, Ridley & Ushioda 2002: 11) is central to this kind of learning. It engages our responsibility as social participants in the production and interpretation of discourse and requires collective action. Such a view is far from original, but needs to be reasserted at a moment when the social control orientation of educational systems tends to marginalise more and more learners into adopting individualistic attitudes to autonomy.

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The first road: individual personal autonomy Priority to individual personal autonomy refers to the individual learner’s autonomy as well as that of the teachers or advisers. The latter participate in the day-to-day activities of the classroom or resource centre and in the changes involved in the use of new tools such as the Internet. While the importance of the community and the distributed nature of cognition are acknowledged, priority is given to the moral dimension of autonomy. This moral dimension consists of encouraging the pursuit of self-discipline and self-mastery in individuals. As noted by Little, Ridley and Ushioda (2002: 15), the Rogerian tradition tells us that being in control of one’s own actions and being responsible for their outcomes are a prerequisite for self-fulfilment. Such goals are admirable and might be sufficient for a small minority of individual learners and teachers. However, giving priority to individual personal autonomy is not sufficient for maintaining the dissemination of the idea of autonomy in education if we accept the view that our ability to learn is dependent upon our participation in social life and our membership of communities of learning. The first reason why this aspect of autonomy is insufficient is that if we fail to go further than the active social mediation of individual learning, we will probably promote an individualistic culture rather than a culture of autonomy. The second, more substantive, reason is that the basis for the conceptualisation of autonomy is a form of dualism that is difficult to overcome. I would like to continue by looking at these issues and contradictions more closely.

Perpetuating an individualistic culture A student on the road to individual personal autonomy is not only capable of self-discipline and self-mastery (Gibbs 1979) but believes that “by exercising autonomy (i.e. his/her learning of English) s/he shapes his/her own life and that this is an engagement valuable in itself” (Young 1986: 81, as quoted in Benson 2001: 44). The main reason why this may not be a sufficient aim to operationalise our vision of the future for autonomy in language education is that there is a danger that individualism becomes the driving force behind what is referred to as ‘autonomous learning’. First, the active social mediation of individual learning is often associated with the notion of noninterference in ring-fenced types of activity — for example, training for

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chess or computer games. Secondly, individualism leads to misunderstandings about the notion of individualisation. In practice, learners or teachers often interpret learner-centredness as self-centredness and mastery as absolute (sometimes manic) control of whatever it is they can control, whether it be their learning programmes, their computers, their favourite seats, their research projects or even their families, irrespective of the others around them. Self-centredness can in fact result in apparently conflicting behaviours. For example, whenever I prepare a postgraduate seminar, I usually spend a lot of time planning it to give students ample opportunities to ask questions and to participate in discussions with peers. When foreign students remain silent, I tend to assume that they may be too shy to express their views in front of the others — and this is typically what they say when asked. But the same students may think nothing of telephoning me at home on Sunday mornings without regard for my time or availability. Some may describe such behaviour as reflecting ‘independence’, but in reality, far from reflecting autonomous learning, it shows avoidance of social learning mediation within the shared public space of the classroom. This form of individualistic selfcentredness denies that engagement into active participation is an essential part of learning autonomously. Individuals who are not active participants in the community — and active listening is a mode of participation — not only do not benefit the learning of the community but miss out on valuable opportunities for learning themselves. Individualistic cultures may also inculcate particular characteristics in teachers. According to Hargreaves (1994), the “combination of selfreliance and immunity to intervention” is closely associated with the much valued practice of professional autonomy which has characterised the teaching profession in the UK for many years. Hargreaves argues that the notion of professional autonomy serves as a shield behind which many teachers hide when they want to resist change; he further claims that “individualism is the most efficacious defender of conservatism” (Hargreaves 1994: 425) and a major brake on the development of a “knowledge-creating society” (Hargreaves 1999). He describes how, in staffrooms, teachers would typically avoid intellectual debates on education and would generally prefer to maintain harmonious relations with their colleagues rather than get involved in working closely with them. Hargreaves’s paper is particularly relevant to our argument here because he proposes a whole-school approach as the best way to support

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a culture in which collaborative professionalism can thrive. In this approach, the struggle is to create and establish new social relations between teachers and administrators so that they form a sense of community in which teamwork and developmental approaches replace hierarchies and a top-down managerial approach. In other words, his solution for the creation of a climate in which autonomous learning can be developed for teachers relies on the adoption of a social theory of learning. In the specific domain of language teaching, one can see how such a vision could transform teacher education. Two examples from totally different contexts come to mind. The first one is the integration of trainees who are ‘native speakers’ (typically French, German or Spanish students) into initial teacher training programmes in the UK (Block 2001). These ‘foreign nationals’ come across the issue of “forging an identity for themselves as British modern language teachers”. Block reports (2001: 309) that during their first year of teaching in the UK, “the most salient issue to arise in interviews carried out during this period was the tension between compromise and resistance” to the values and culture of the system, “a tension directly related to each individual‘s long-term plans to either stay in Britain as a modern language teacher or to return ‘home’”. Clearly, if European citizenship is ever going to be elaborated, the socially meaningful spaces constituted by cross-national language teachers’ qualifying courses could become rich environments for collective professional learning based on the negotiation of such tensions (see Riley, this volume). The second example is that of the professional integration of NET teachers (Native-speaking English Teachers) in Hong Kong schools. This has sometimes been problematic, largely because they are perceived as ‘foreigners’ by local teachers and pupils (Lai 1999; Lok 2002) while they have to cope with a process of professional ‘othering’, perhaps increased by the switch from English as a Second Language to English as a Foreign Language in the Hong Kong post-colonial situation. Again here, one can see how a collaborative developmental approach could be beneficial and give rise to new professional identities. This is also a domain where new technologies can help bring about the move from exclusive reliance on vertical hierarchical relations to cooperative networks within and between schools. For example, in the UK, most trainee teachers in Modern Languages have an e-mail conference integrated into the initial stages of their one-year postgraduate course for mutual support and exchange of materials so that when their group is split at the moment

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when they are all sent to different schools for professional training, they continue to cooperate and to help each other. They can also involve their local mentors in the school in the discussions as well as their lecturers in the faculty if they so wish. Similar schemes are now widespread, and the significance of communities in virtual learning environments is being systematically researched (Shumar & Renninger 2002; Beetham & Sharpe 2007).

The issue of scope The danger of perpetuating an individualistic culture is not the only risk in following the road of individual personal autonomy, however. The other issue associated with the development of personal individual autonomy is that — as shown in the previous examples — it is based on a conceptualisation of the individual which is separate from that of the community. Let us assume one possible ideal scenario whereby a student is a truly self-directed language learner in a self-access centre. A constructivist approach makes us assume that she or he shares with all learners the capacity for self-regulation and autonomy. Through linguistic interactions, collaboration with other students and learning conversations with expert advisers, she or he will learn through a process of internalisation mediated through discourse and will become more autonomous in the process of learning to learn languages. Educationally, the problem with this view remains that of the scope or domain to which the theory of learning applies. Just as the girl in our earlier example could only see the control of the teachers and could not appreciate the nature of the control of the dollar factor, pupils and their equally self-directed and self-regulated teachers may be controlled by social constraints which may undermine or be in conflict with the autonomous learning experience. To put it crudely, the pursuit of personal autonomy may be admirable as long as individuals are sufficiently influential, powerful or rich to control much more than themselves. But this is difficult to reconcile with a social theory of learning which balances individual cognition with distributed cognition in the community (Salomon 1993). As discussed by Benson (2001: 45), the problem with a liberal-humanist view is that it involves a “dualism in which individuals are counterposed to the communities of which they are members”. Autonomy remains an individual’s concern and is consequently open to manipulations of all sorts — I characterised this

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as a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ culture 10 years ago (Esch 1996: 47) in that, ultimately, we are led to celebrate the resilience of the autodidact or self-made learner — alias Robinson — and forget that his aim is to gain by himself and for himself the knowledge which will give him power over Friday. Such a culture originates in the fact that the community which constrains autonomy and limits freedom is conceptualised separately from the individuals who form the community.

The second road: a critical thinking view of autonomy The second road gives priority to critical thinking and the social aspect of learning, so that individual cognition is not conceptualised independently of social and cultural constraints. Thus, the notion of autonomy is assumed to be constantly negotiated and we can be “edging our way together to tentative understanding” as Brumfit (2001) wrote in the conclusion to his book Individual Freedom in Language Teaching. This critical dimension of the pedagogy of autonomy is also emphasised by Little, Ridley & Ushioda (2002: 17) in what they call ‘the principle of learner empowerment’: “Making learners responsible for their own learning is not a single act on the part of the teacher but a never-ending process”. This approach gives priority to engagement in action rather than readiness for a particular type of action. It also places a high value on shared agency and socially situated critical thinking (Habermas 1972). Through the identification of contradictions between discourse and practice, both learners and teachers can engage in the social process of knowledge construction. In turn, this means the development of practices conceptualised here as socioculturally embedded processes of knowledge creation and a transformational view of learning. It also takes into account whole communities as learning entities. Here, I would like to report at some length on the results of the ‘Learning How to Learn in Classrooms, Schools and Networks’ project (Learning how to Learn 2001–06) from the second phase of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) (2000–07) in the UK. While it may be limited to the UK context and concentrates primarily on the secondary sector, it is relevant to our concerns here because the research goes beyond the classroom practices through which teachers promote learning autonomy and the beliefs and values that underpin their practices (James et al. 2006). Not only does it look at the organisational conditions and

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leadership strategies developed in different schools that help to embed and sustain such practices across all school subjects, but it highlights implications for support systems as well as for policy frameworks that facilitate or constrain autonomous learning (James et al. 2007: 306–28). In the part of the project that I report on below, James and Pedder (2006) examined relationships between assessment practices and the values teachers placed on those practices. Part of the research involved analysing the questionnaire responses of 558 teachers with little or no managerial responsibility who were drawn from 32 UK schools (in both the primary and secondary sectors). Factor analysis revealed three reliable factors which seemed to underpin classroom assessment practice: explicitness, autonomy and performance. 1.

Explicitness refers to teachers making learning explicit, i.e. eliciting, clarifying and responding to evidence of learning: working with students to develop a positive learning orientation. For explicitness, the teachers who were surveyed had to respond to statements such as: Assessment provides teachers with useful evidence of students’ understandings which they use to plan subsequent lessons. Teachers use questions mainly to elicit reasons and explanations from their students.

2.

Autonomy in this context refers to actions promoting learning autonomy mainly through self- and peer-assessment. Statements included: Teachers provide guidance to help students assess their own learning. Students are given opportunities to assess one another’s work.

3.

Performance refers to actions emphasising a performance orientation in planning and assessment. Statements included: Teachers use questions mainly to elicit factual knowledge from their students. Assessment of students’ work consists primarily of marks and grades.

These three dimensions of assessment (explicitness and autonomy versus performance) are a representation of the potential clash which exists in the assessment culture of UK schools between those dimensions

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which support learning (i.e. explicitness and autonomy), and those which are related to the control of attainment (i.e. performance). On the one hand, the dimensions of explicitness and autonomy are powerful tools for learning. ‘Making learning explicit’ is effective in informing decisions and formative assessment, whereas the second dimension of ‘promoting autonomy through self- and peer-assessment’ is also a central means of encouraging and sustaining independence and selfregulation — important conditions for deep learning. On the other hand, the third dimension of performance orientation is a powerful tool for controlling attainment and shaping the enacted curriculum. This large-scale survey did not involve only closed questions; the teachers were also asked to comment on their practices and how they valued what they did. Specifically, they were invited to voice: 1.

how much of each assessment practice they were doing for each dimension;

2.

the extent to which they valued their practice.

The analysis of these two sets of open-ended responses led to the creation of two separate scales, a practice index and a values index. The practice index gave a picture of what the teachers thought they were actually doing in their assessment practices, and the values index provided insights into what the teachers thought they valued in their assessment practices. The findings show there are important gaps between the way teachers practise assessment and the way they think about it, especially concerning the promotion of learning autonomy. In particular, the key finding is that teachers, on any of the dimensions of assessment practice, teach in ways which contradict their views. This remains true irrespective of the subject, type of school, or teacher’s gender or years of experience. For promoting learning autonomy, it is clear that while the teachers value practices that promote learning autonomy, they do not act accordingly, with their declared values being significantly ahead of their practice, whereas for performance orientation, their practice is ahead of their values. If the gaps between values and practice for the three factors are considered together, the extent to which the teachers themselves are non-autonomous and the extent to which their professional lives are in conflict becomes open to critical scrutiny. One possible explanation —

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although not one the project team has considered — is that the less room for professional autonomy teachers have themselves, the more they retreat to a make-believe professional world. In the UK, this would mean that performance charts, forms, inspections and so on are too alien to their teaching practices for them to cope professionally. As a result, they exaggerate their commitment to values associated with what they have been taught during their training, but have not been able to appropriate them sufficiently to transform their teaching practice. The size of the gap might also be related to the amount of pressure coming from the top onto teachers who are unprepared for a number of reasons. It is noticeable, for example, that it is in the core subjects of the curriculum (such as English and Mathematics) that the gap between professed practice and espoused values is wider. One wonders how it is possible for the pupils to become autonomous if their teachers are themselves torn between what they value and what they do. Yet again, we have here an argument in favour of supporting a coherent social approach to learning such that both teachers and their pupils find themselves in a space where they can seek new forms of relations between knowledge and shared experience. Otherwise, as this research shows, the school will remain a place where, again to quote Yves Chalon, participants learn “à se conformer plus qu’ à se former” (1970: 3) — literally, “to conform more than form themselves”. In deconstructing the personal road to autonomy and arguing for a more critical, socially situated view of the concept, I have tried to show that if we take the critical aspects of autonomy seriously, the task of identifying clashes and analysing the points where there are gaps between values and practice which constrain autonomous learning in the educational system — at whatever level it might be — becomes crucial. The onus is on us as teacher-researchers to make apparent these problems and to attract attention to them by engaging in appropriate educational research. This leads me, in the final section of this chapter, to consider the interaction of the concept of autonomy with a number of other constructs as appropriate research themes and to argue for the pursuit of international comparative research as a key methodological approach.

Concluding remarks: proposals for a new research agenda In this chapter, I have tried to show that the language education field is a discursive arena in which two conceptualisations of autonomy are in

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continual tension. This tension is a necessary condition for a genuine dialogue to go on and the last thing I would like to do would be to advocate the return to some ‘pure’ notion of autonomy reified in the 1960s. But antagonistic conceptualisations of autonomy need to be renegotiated constantly in view of the changing contexts within which language learning and teaching take place. I have shown that whenever individuals were conceptualised as being separate from their community, the notion of autonomy was diverted into individualistic views which were not compatible with the view that autonomous individuals were the creative products of their social context. I have argued that the task of researchers is to identify and explore critically those areas of discourse where there are tensions and clashes so that the contradictions between the underlying views can be made apparent and acted upon. Such a critical road needs to be associated with a new research agenda for studies concerning autonomy, as proposed below: 1.

The maintenance of a whole-community approach and a sociocultural theory of learning are necessary to develop the idea of autonomy further. This assumes that, although the importance of individual cognition is in no way to be denied, we recognise that knowledge is distributed amongst members of the community. In the context of Europe and in the domain of language learning, the notion of plurilingual competence foregrounded by the Council of Europe (2001: 4) is useful because it may help us formulate new questions or reformulate old issues concerning autonomy. Work on trilingualism and multilingualism has so far seemed to concentrate on linguistic and acquisition issues primarily (Cenoz & Jessner 2000; Carton & Riley 2003), but we know very little about the way autonomy is conceptualised by young learners who have two — or increasingly three — languages and complex cultural backgrounds. We know very little indeed about the interplay between the use of several languages and the development of self-regulation in children engaged in language-learning activities.

2.

Critical educational research requires that we take into account the ideological and political context within which the research is being carried out, as in the UK research I discussed earlier in this chapter. What can be described or perceived as autonomous learning is culturally dependent and thus difficult to grasp in communities with which we are not familiar. To avoid oversimplifications, careful

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and detailed collaborative work needs to be done. As the research of Michael Breen and his Australian colleagues (2001) reminds us, teachers (and presumably learners) can be observed to have the same practice based upon very diverse principles, just as a single principle can lead to a very wide range of practices. A pedagogy supporting autonomy is one such principle, but so far very little systematic work has been done to trace the way teachers and learners believe they operationalise learning autonomy principles across communities and what their practices are. 3.

International comparative work is also needed if we want to gain a deeper understanding of the way autonomy as a capacity is perceived and constructed in different cultures and what part it has in the process of overall socialisation. Too often, work on autonomy does not take on board seriously that notions of selfhood are culture-dependent. The recent work of Raveaud (2002, 2006) on socialisation in French and English primary schools is a good example of the kind of ethnographic work and ‘thick description’ which needs to be carried out to make such differences apparent.

4.

A social approach to the role of communication in education and a sociocultural theory of learning is needed to make it possible to avoid at least some of the ideological and simplifying discourse of globalisation and to address the complexities of sharing perspectives about autonomy. To name but a few of the issues, we need to take into account: the language cultures mediate in particular societies (Schiffman 1996); the way individuals approach the task of teaching and of learning, the representation of which might be captured by activity systems theory as proposed by Engeström (1990); the way the socialisation process in different societies brings individuals to approach the very notion of being autonomous or independent differently (DeLoache & Gottlieb 2000); the way these representations affect the kind of targets individuals give themselves; and how successful they are in achieving them, as well as the historical context within which particular pedagogies are mediated. The quality of future research will depend on our own ability to work jointly with teacher-researchers who approach the concept from different perspectives. If we fail to engage in such dialogues, we will not be in a position to capture how ‘autonomy’ is both shared and distributed among communities.

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These proposals leave more unanswered questions than responses for our community as, to use Brumfit’s words again, we are “edging our way together to tentative understanding” (Brumfit 2001: 187) — but they will, I hope, provide some departure points for those who seek to examine with a critical mind the significance of discursive dissonances that pervade current practices and theorisations of autonomy.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank a number of colleagues who have discussed aspects of the above paper with me and, in particular, Philip Riley and David Pedder. Special thanks are due to Mary James and David Pedder for their help in making it possible to quote the work of the ‘Learning how to Learn Project’ and to the editors for their insightful comments.

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4 Discursive dissonance in approaches to autonomy Philip Riley

Introduction This was a very timely conference, not just because it marked a 10th anniversary, but more importantly because that period has been one of intense research, practice and reflection in our field, a period of growing competence and confidence during which myriads of ideas have been generated and tested. One of those many ideas, just one but an important one, is the belief that we can only really understand what autonomy is about if we examine it in the widest possible context, theoretically, educationally, and, above all, socially. I say “above all, socially” because the overall thrust of the work conducted over the last decade or so has been to show that becoming autonomous is an essentially social business. This seeming paradox is due to our human nature: we are both separately incorporated individuals, selves with bodies, and members of society, social beings. As Mead (1934) and Vygotsky (1986) have demonstrated, the reflection which is essential to learning consists of an internal dialogue between the self and the ‘me’, between the individual and the member of society. The skills for creating that intrapersonal dialogue, for thinking and reflecting, are acquired in and through interpersonal dialogue, social interaction. Whether it is approached as a social activity or as a mental process, learning in fact involves both dimensions of personal identity. Participative interaction with the environment provides the experiences, resources and skills necessary for the functioning of an interiorised

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discourse, and the construction and maintenance of a personal identity. To put it in a nutshell, we learn by talking to ourselves. Our selves: the primary mechanism for the construction of identities is discourse. Others — our family and friends, teachers, neighbours, colleagues and institutions — constantly ‘membership’ us, that is, tell us who they think we are, while we ourselves send out a stream of identity claims (Riley 2002, 2007). The effect of this double series of pressures is generally to manoeuvre the individual concerned into a specific discursive position or role. However, in certain conditions, there may be a lack of congruency between the two, or individuals may be subject to conflicting messages or ideologies. In this chapter, I will argue that such conditions of discursive dissonance arise in educational contexts when there is a conflict between (unacknowledged, out-of-consciousness) pedagogical traditions and ‘official’ or ‘academic’ approaches to learning and teaching. Learners and teachers alike are caught in a tug-of-war between one relatively explicit set of beliefs and instructions and values backed up by institutional authority, and another inexplicit set which is based on folklinguistic beliefs and models and backed up by the authority of tradition and common sense.1

The theoretical background In order even to begin to set autonomy in its overall intellectual, practical and social context, and to set our discussion of discursive dissonance in the context of autonomy, at least three requirements need to be met: • Firstly, we need some kind of general framework for discussing the relationships between discourse, society and the individual. I shall attempt to do so under the heading of ‘The social knowledge system’. I would justify this part of the discussion as relevant to autonomy on the grounds that autonomy is first and foremost an approach to learning about the way in which the individual is integrated into society. To understand autonomy, we need to see it as one possible form of knowledge transfer or management, a particular kind of epistemic economy. • Secondly, if we are to discuss different pedagogical traditions, we obviously need some ideas and information about just how approaches to teaching and learning vary from one culture to

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another. For this, I will call on the anthropology and ethnography of education. Thirdly, if we want to understand how popular beliefs about language and language learning influence or even interfere with official, institutional methods and practices, we need to take a look at those beliefs. In other words, instead of relying on academic, scientific linguistics, we will be attending to folklinguistics and, ideally, examining the role played by folklinguistics in the social knowledge system and in determining different pedagogical traditions. I would justify this part of the discussion as being relevant to autonomy on the grounds that different pedagogical traditions are more or less receptive or favourable to autonomous approaches.

This is, to put it mildly, an ambitious agenda. But I believe — and I believe that research over the past decade has shown — that there are important aspects of autonomy which can only be noticed, which only come to light, if they are situated within the overarching cultural context of which they form a part.

The social knowledge system (cf. Riley 1996, 2002, 2007) Any society, in order to be a society, to exist as such, has to develop a set of structures and functions for knowledge management. These include: • Creation and production of knowledge • Organisation of knowledge • Storage of knowledge • Distribution of knowledge • Legitimation of knowledge • Use of knowledge Conversely, individuals, in order to exist as members of society, have to acquire competence in these areas. To learn and act competently and appropriately, individual members of society need to think in ways which are congruent with the operations of the social knowledge system. For the sake of argument, without committing ourselves to any specific psycholinguistic theory, we can call these cognitive modules: • Acquisition • Cognitive categories

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Memory Social identity Ideology/Belief systems Praxis

This sociocultural competence, which includes communicative competence, is not uniform, identical for all members of society, since access to these different areas varies greatly from individual to individual and participation in the interactions in which knowledge is transferred and acquired is not always freely available to all. It depends on who you are, so that knowledge and identity are mutually defining. A doctor’s child, a farmer’s child and a factory-worker’s child have access to different bodies of knowledge. We do not all go to university, or even learn to write. Our religion, sex, age — every parameter of our social identity — is a factor in facilitating or hindering the availability of certain kinds of knowledge. And this social distribution of knowledge is largely paralleled by the social distribution of language. Discourse is the primary mechanism for the construction of identities because it is also the main channel for the operations of the social knowledge system. However, since no society or culture is monolithic, a grey uniform block, different discourses, contradictory discourses, will circulate within it. When these different cultural discourses are addressed to the same individual there is a strong likelihood that they will give rise to cognitive dissonance, with the individual caught in a double bind, subject to those contradictions for as long as it takes for him or her to resolve them. As we shall see, this is precisely what happens when an idea such as ‘autonomy’ is simultaneously promoted through one discourse and subverted by another.

The anthropology and ethnography of education Rearing practices The anthropology and ethnography of education is the study of how human beings bring up their young, with anthropologists looking mainly at common characteristics resulting from human nature and ethnographers looking at specific characteristics resulting from our social natures: the universal and the local. It is worth noting immediately that the degree of autonomy and permissiveness which is allowed to children in different societies has long been recognised by

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anthropologists as one of the most important factors in determining the types of person children become. Let us look briefly, then, at some of these rearing practices. All societies, in order to survive as societies, adopt rearing practices, ways of bringing up children, which aim to reproduce their idea of the competent adult (Ochs & Schieffelin 1984; Jahoda & Lewis 1988; DeLoach & Gottlieb 2000). However, there are very different expectations concerning this ideal or model figure, different concepts of personhood, of what it means to be and what it takes to be a competent and recognised member of a society. Consequently, there is considerable variation in rearing practices, since different measures have to be used to reach different goals. To outsiders, these practices may seem wrong, cruel and unnatural, but to insiders they are simply common sense. • It is difficult for us to accept the physical beating or whipping of small children, but generations of English parents believed in the proverb “Spare the rod and spoil the child”. Real physical cruelty was visited on children in England between the 17th and 19th centuries and beyond in the names of charity, salvation — and learning: children born in original sin, children with their natural propensity to distraction and evil, can only be taught through the imposition of physical and moral force of adults who, of course, will proclaim: “It never did me any harm”. • It is perhaps even more difficult for us to understand why on earth the mothers in the Beng ethnic group in the Ivory Coast give newborn children two baths and two enemas every day, but I am sure there is some Beng equivalent of “Cleanliness is next to godliness”. • And we shake our heads when we hear of mothers in Bali first spoiling their children rotten (literally treating them as divine) and then, when their own child is 18 months old, borrowing a new baby from the neighbours and spoiling it in their child’s presence, completely ignoring the inevitable temper tantrum. But the Balinese child needs above all to learn self-control, complete mastery of the emotions and this is where it starts. • Visitors to Norway are sometimes shocked by what they perceive as the sheer irresponsibility of Norwegian parents in allowing their children to take considerable physical risks without adult supervision, such as going out skiing after the evening meal with only siblings or friends for company. Starting with the work of

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Hendin (1964), a vast literature has developed comparing childrearing practices in Scandinavian countries with one another and with other countries and cultures. In her useful survey, de ConinckSmith (2004) recalls an incident which led to a Danish actress losing an action for wrongful arrest against the New York Police: She and her US partner had left their 14 month old daughter sleeping in a stroller outside The Dallas BBQ Restaurant at 2nd Avenue in the East Village. Passers-by had alarmed the police and the parents were arrested and accused of child-neglect, while the child was put into foster-care. The affair gained international status within few days. The Danish newspapers accused the New York police of Rambo methods — and the US-press and TV showed pictures of cafés in Copenhagen with strollers parked outside. Interview [sic] with Danish experts confirmed a specific “Scandinavian conviction that fresh, cold air is good for babies.” There might even be a scientific basis for this, as the New York Times wrote. Before vitamin D was discovered and used to fortify milk and other foods “babies born in the fall and unable to get adequate sunlight through the long, dark Northern European winter were at risk to develop and possibly die of rickets before spring. Keeping a baby outside, even in cold weather, maximised ultraviolet light exposure and vitamin D production.” (NYT, May 20, 1997) (de Coninck-Smith 2004)

One very important sub-set of rearing practices is verbal, the ways we speak to children. Children’s selves and their social identities are shaped in and through discourse: we tell them who they are, and how to behave in ways appropriate to their position in society according, for example, to the sex, class and religion they belong to. We say things like: Big boys don’t cry. Nice little girls don’t use words like that. (Gendered communicative practices) You can’t play with that child, she/he’s a Catholic/Protestant. (Social identity) What did you do at school today? Don’t interrupt, don’t answer back. (Turn-taking, rights to the floor: in the first case, the child is expected to answer; in the second, he or she is being forbidden to speak.)

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Mother: Good morning, Mr. Greenway. John, what do you say? Child: Good morning, Mr. Greenway. Child: Can I have another biscuit? Mother: Can I have another biscuit what? Child: Can I have another biscuit please. (Politeness and greetings, essential indicators of social relationships and social deixis)

Again, there is considerable cultural variation in the way adults speak to children. It is particularly surprising to many people to learn that there are a number of societies where adults do not speak to children, or not directly at least, because children are not considered to be potential communicative partners or to have achieved personhood, or where no attempt is made by adults to simplify their discourse. In most English-speaking countries, even people who abhor babytalk unconsciously adapt their speech to children in a number of ways (cf. Clark & Clark 1977): • Short utterances • Avoidance of anacoluthon (incomplete or ‘broken’ syntactical structures) • Lexical selection (Adults choose more or less specific items of vocabulary according to their perception of the child’s needs. For example, they tend to say “Drink your milk”, rather than “Drink your liquid”, but “Look at the lovely flowers” rather than “Look at the lovely hydrangeas”.) • Denomination (“Look, it’s a horse. What is it? It’s a horse. Can you say ‘horse’?”) • Higher pitch, wider intonational range • Attention signals, exclamations, frequent use of names • Reformulations, expansions, explanations (Adults develop both the quantity and quality of children’s utterances. For example, a child’s “Mouse hurt” can give rise to “Yes, the mouse has hurt himself. The poor little mouse has hurt himself. He’s hurt his leg. He’ll have to see the doctor …”) • Slow delivery • Onomatopoeia • Gestures and facial expression • Model dialogues and accentuation of turn-taking structure (For example, adults will answer their own questions — “What’s this? It’s a mouse.” — and then repeat the question for the child to answer.)

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Together, these behaviours form or manifest a very powerful and very profound set of beliefs about language and language learning, one which we could roughly summarise as being based on a discursive process of simplification, and a form of knowledge transfer we might call in a circular way teaching. This is so deeply ingrained into us that we think it is both essential and natural, and it has been observed that in societies where these communicative practices occur, those same modifications can be seen to happen even between children of different ages, with children as young as four years old modifying their speech along these lines when talking to children of two years old, for example. However, the point I wish to make here is that these same features can be observed in the behaviour of many Western language teachers in the foreign language classroom. Obviously I am not suggesting that all Western teachers behave in an identical manner, simply that their local rearing practices can influence their forms of interaction in the classroom. These are the areas of classroom behaviour that official, conscious teaching methods simply do not reach. In other words, we unconsciously bring into the classroom discourse based on a set of beliefs about language and learning, summarised in the two sets of examples above, which may not be shared by our learners. This certainly seems to explain, at least in part, why students of a foreign language may find the classroom language and behaviour of some foreign teachers to be shocking, improper and artificial, completely over the top, when the teachers themselves believe they are behaving naturally and appropriately. A very common belief is that you learn a language ‘to express yourself’. At the risk of labouring the obvious, we need always to remember that the ‘auto’ in autonomy means ‘self’ and there are cultural contexts in which the individual is expected to suppress his or her self. In such contexts any approach that encourages self-expression will be consciously or unconsciously resisted. To ask learners in these cultures to participate in discussion or debate, or even role-play, will be felt as an attack on their selves, their identities. And to ask them to take upon themselves behaviours and identities which they see as part of the teacher’s identity and role, as happens when an autonomous approach is adopted, will be profoundly destabilising, and ‘unnatural’ for the same reason. However, this should in no sense be taken as implying that there are either individuals or whole cultures ‘who aren’t suited for autonomy’. This kind of remark is just ethnocentric condescension masquerading as anthropology. For the anthropologist, autonomy is a

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species-specific cognitive imperative (Little 1999b). The real implication of the observation that there is cultural variation in attitudes to selfexpression is, almost by definition, ethnographic: the forms and practices of implementation (‘methodology’ in the widest sense) will have to vary from one society to another to take into account local traditions and representations. Folklinguistics Let us turn now to look briefly at some of the beliefs on which these attitudes and behaviours are based and, in particular, those which are related to language and language learning, ‘folklinguistics’. By ‘folklinguistics’, I mean the great amorphous mass of popular beliefs about and attitudes towards language (Niedzielski & Preston 2003). Much of this is closely related to, on the one hand, what has been studied as beliefs about language and beliefs about language learning, including the ‘simplification’ practices mentioned above, and, on the other hand, what Deborah Cameron (1995) has called ‘verbal hygiene’, including proverbs and letters to the editor, prescriptive grammar, style sheets, call centre instructions, or computer programs that select your spelling or grammar or the way you write the date or the lay-out of a letter: the whole social apparatus of language control and discipline, and the beliefs about the nature and purposes of language on which they are based — beliefs such as those exemplified below: It does you good to talk. You mustn’t split infinitives. The correct, truthful use of language (grammar) is logical./Figurative language like metaphor is literary/dangerous/untrue. You shouldn’t mention the possibility of some tragic event, because it’s tempting fate. The use of the third person singular pronoun by a child in the presence of its mother calls for the ritual utterance: “Who’s ‘she’? The Cat’s mother?” Girls are better at languages than boys./Women talk more than men. Empty vessels make the most noise. If a word isn’t in the dictionary, it’s wrong. Nice people talk nicely. People who don’t pronounce properly (Cockneys, Americans, Glaswegians …) are lazy and ignorant. If children aren’t taught grammar rules, standards slip and they don’t obey any rules, including those governing morality and hygiene.

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You learn a language by repeating what you hear. You learn a language by learning rules of grammar. You learn a language by living in the country in question for a year. You learn a language by having a good teacher who makes you work/ repeat things/talk.

Over the past 20 years or so there has been a considerable amount of research into learner beliefs, and it has become abundantly clear that no real progress towards autonomy can be made without attending to them because of the important influence they have on learner reflection and metacognition. Language teaching practices in the widest sense (methodology, assessment, aims and outcomes, teacher-pupil relationships, teacher-teacher relationships, status and roles, expectations, etc.) can vary from one place to another even when those places are neighbouring, consciously or unconsciously, with or without theoretical justification. In other words, there are local and national pedagogical traditions which operate independently of academic applied linguistics or language didactics.

Discursive dissonance and autonomy: some examples Do we find cases of discursive dissonance in the field of autonomy, between academic discourses about autonomy, or between autonomous approaches of whatever kind and popular beliefs? If we are honest, the answer can only be a resounding ‘Yes’. In schematic terms, we can find the following combinations or categories of discursive dissonance: • • • • •

Teacher contradicts him- or herself. Teacher contradicts other teachers. Teacher contradicts ‘The ministry’. Teacher contradicts materials, textbooks. Teacher contradicts popular beliefs, traditions (which usually means contradicting parents and learners).

• • • •

Institution contradicts Institution contradicts Institution contradicts Institution (school, traditions.

itself. teachers. materials. ministry) contradicts popular beliefs,

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Example 1: Les Instructions Officielles Let us begin with a relatively simple example of the sort of thing I have been referring to as discursive dissonance. In the Instructions Officielles issued by The French Ministry of Education,2 clear guidelines have been laid down as to how modern languages are to be taught in the secondary schools. In general terms, they recommend a communicative approach, to be kept on an even keel with a fairly solid ballast of grammar. It is also clearly implied in official texts that autonomy can only be achieved in the context of some kind of communicative approach. Now whatever you may think of the advantages or otherwise of such an approach, since the Instructions Officielles apply to all modern language teaching, you would logically expect all languages to be taught in much the same way in French schools. However, this is simply not the case for three closely related reasons: • The first is that each of the foreign languages brings with it into the French classroom elements of the cultural framework from which it comes and very often that includes part of the foreign pedagogical tradition. So, for example, the way German is taught in France tends to be influenced by the way languages are taught in Germany. • Secondly, the French themselves have their own tradition which includes firmly held popular beliefs about language teaching and learning, and these popular beliefs do not always coincide with theories on which the Instructions Officielles and the communicative approach are predicated. What is more, as we will see shortly, some of the strongest beliefs have very different implications for different languages. • Thirdly, although the French system is highly centralised — the very existence of the Instructions Officielles proves this — in fact, French teachers enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy in their classrooms (see below), so they really are free to follow the instructions or not most of the time. This is in itself a clear example of discursive dissonance, since official discourse gives the impression that all teaching is closely monitored, teachers having no option but to follow the very detailed ‘programmes’ or national curricula. Limiting our attention to the top three modern foreign languages, German, English, and Spanish, instead of finding a fairly consistent

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approach to the teaching of all three we find considerable differences, partly due to English, German and Spanish influences, partly to French perceptions of these languages: German Because of the relative complexity of the noun paradigm in German, that language has inherited the mantle of Greek and Latin and is perceived as having ‘lots of grammar’, ‘lots of difficult rules’. You don’t play around with German; it’s serious stuff and there’s simply no time for ‘communicative activities’, let alone games. Indeed, teachers of German who have tried to introduce communicative activities, that is who have actually tried to follow the Instructions Officielles, have found themselves besieged by parents demanding a return to common sense, back to basics and back to grammar. (The same is true for teachers who have tried to introduce autonomy.) Other fall-out from this folklinguistic belief is to see German as the language for the brighter students — more grammar requiring more intelligence, obviously, so it is the language for boys who are good at maths, rather than, well, girls who aren’t. English English, on the other hand, has no grammar. Interestingly, this does not mean that English is easy. Not at all: German is difficult because it has so many rules, and English is difficult because it doesn’t have enough (cf. Riley 1994). It follows, though, that the only way of learning English is not by studying its non-existent grammar, but by practice, actually using it, getting students to participate in what we might for want of a better term call ‘communicative activities’. So, by and large, French teachers of English do tend to adhere much more closely to the Instructions Officielles than their German-teaching colleagues — and their pupils’ parents do not complain. There are other practical pedagogical consequences of the differences in French attitudes to German and English: for example, the long and competitive Franco-German debate on ‘Kultur’ and ‘civilisation’ (Riley 2007) still finds an echo in differences in the selection of teaching materials and texts, so that French learners of German are likely to be confronted with classical poetry and Kant, whereas French learners of English will be invited to study the Beatles. There are also differences in the way student errors are perceived and dealt with. Mistakes in English are often seen as resulting from a lack of effort or practice, whereas mistakes in German are considered to be caused by lack of thought or faulty logic.

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Spanish Although in very recent years there has been a clear shift, especially among young people, in French attitudes and beliefs about Spanish, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that learning Spanish means learning Spanish literature. Our impression (but it is one that is based on observation) is that many French teachers of Spanish resist or ignore the Instructions Officielles and communicative approaches of even the mildest kind. Partly this seems to be due to the sheer weight of the Spanish scholarly tradition of teaching Spanish as a first language, partly to the Spanish pedagogical tradition, as perceived in France, with its emphasis on teaching as a vocation, a matter of inspiration rather than methodology, something you are born with, not trained for. We can therefore roughly summarise the gap between the official approach to the teaching of the three languages and the actual way in which they are taught as follows:

Language

Instructions Officielles

In practice

German

Communicative approach

Grammar-translation

English

Communicative approach

Communicative approach

Spanish

Communicative approach

Literature

Example 2: A language teacher in Luxembourg A second example of the ways in which folklinguistic beliefs about specific languages can lead to different methodologies has been reported by Kate Horwinski, a postgraduate student at the University of Nancy who was studying multilingual acquisition in Luxembourg. She observed one teacher who taught both German and Luxembourgeois to the same group of students. She reports that the teacher adopted completely different methodologies for the two languages, despite the fact that they are very closely related. Again, German received a fully grammatical treatment — rules, drills, translations — whereas Luxembourgeois, which has something of an inferiority complex and no pedagogical tradition, received a completely communicative approach (Ciekanski, Duda & Horwinski 2003).

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Example 3: “Une pédagogie de l’encouragement”? (“A pedagogy of encouragement”?) (Carton 1997; Bailly, Garcia & Riley 2005) For the past few years, the CRAPEL (Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues, a research centre in language didactics) has been carrying out an ethnographic comparison of French and English secondary school classrooms. We have an arrangement with English universities and education authorities which allows young French and English teachers to qualify in both countries. That is, they obtain both a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) in England and a Maîtrise (the one-year MA, now the first year of the two-year Master ’s in French as a Foreign Language in France). Setting up a programme of this kind implies intensive negotiations concerning the syllabus and there are numerous institutional constraints, but it was soon realised that there were a number of problems, on both sides of the Channel, that could not be considered technical or institutional. They were social matters, related to attitudes and beliefs, to folk models of teaching and learning, and they resulted in trainee teachers returning from their periods of teaching practice in varying degrees of culture shock. The CRAPEL researchers have been investigating the conflicting beliefs which give rise to that culture shock in a series of interviews. Differences are dealt with under the following four headings: 1. Time management 2. Classrooms: space and conduct 3. The school’s role 4. The teacher’s role Our findings are summarised as follows:

Table 4.1

Time management

Event

England

France

Lesson

30’–11/2 hours

1–2 hours

Dinner break

30’–11/2 hours

1–2 hours

(Secondary) School day

7–8 hours

8–10 hours

(Summer) Holiday

6–8 weeks

9 weeks

Homework

30’–45’ per day

2–3 hours per day

Detention

30’

2–3 hours

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Table 4.2 Classrooms and classroom behaviour British classrooms French classrooms Dirty, run-down, lively Dull Open: high visibility, visitors Closed, no visitors Multi-purpose Specialised Noisy, anarchic, freedom to move and Quieter, organised speak Undisciplined Disciplined Strict dress code: uniforms, rules for No dress code3 length of skirts, make-up Focus on the individual, teachers show Focus on syllabus, pupils show respect respect Teacher encourages Teacher organises Social relationship relatively informal, Social relationship relatively formal physical contacts taboo Table 4.3 Role England Pastoral education includes social and private life of whole person Includes non-academic subjects and activities: sport, art, drama, etc Course on ‘Personal, Social and Health Education’ Communal: assembly, uniform, school sports teams, school plays

of the school

France Instruction is limited to academic aspects of pupils Non-academic subjects or activities are seldom included Course on ‘Education civique’ No assemblies, uniform, sports teams, etc.

Table 4.4 Role of the teacher

Britain Teacher’s responsibilities extend beyond classroom: playground, corridor and refectory supervision.

France Teacher’s responsibilities stop at classroom door, end of class. Supervision of corridors, meals, etc., carried out by non-teaching staff.

Schooling specialist expected to carry out wide range of non-teaching duties, administration (including budget, recruitment), replace absent colleagues

Subject specialist, supported by specialists in educational psychology, social workers / administrators … Not expected to replace absent colleagues.

Full ‘9 to 5’ day.

Presence only during teaching hours (16–22 per week)

Team-teaching: collective decisions on syllabus, problems, methodology, assessment Hierarchy: class teacher, head of department or year, etc.

Wide degree of autonomy, little consultation or cooperation with colleagues, weak hierarchical structure in didactic (as opposed to administrative) matters

Regular ‘inspections’ by colleagues, visits by parents

Only the inspector has right of entry (once every 3–5 years)

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Space does not permit detailed comment on every point alluded to in Tables 4.1 to 4.4. They do, however, form the overall context whose importance I insisted on in my introduction, which is why they are given in full. It should, of course, be remembered that these are not the findings of a large-scale survey based only on measurable and objective criteria. They are the impressions of young teachers, working abroad for the first time — indeed, in many cases, teaching for the first time. For many of the young teachers concerned, these differences were a source of bewilderment, anger even, because to them they seemed so irrational and unnatural. This is understandable, as the pressures involved in their induction into a new community of practice — they are in a phase of transition, becoming teachers — is exacerbated by cultural and situational differences. For the moment, let us focus on just one aspect of this study, since it seems to illustrate and confirm the points made above about discursive dissonance with relevance to autonomy. If we examine Table 4.2, we see it provides us with the following set of impressions: • The French teachers found that English school buildings were badly maintained and dirty, but were struck by the number of exhibitions, posters and articles on display concerning topics such as the school journey. The English teachers found French classrooms uniformly dull. • Although in both countries teachers theoretically had ‘their’ classrooms, the French teachers found English classrooms were in fact multi-functional, since they often doubled as the school canteen, were used for club meetings, and so on. It was also rare to find a specialised room such as an infirmary in an English school. • French trainees were surprised to find how open their English classrooms were, both physically and socially. It was frequently possible to see into them from the outside, through windows in the doors or even along the length of a wall giving onto a corridor. However, it was the ease and number of interruptions which shocked them most. In France, except for the very occasional visit by a school inspector, the teacher shuts the classroom door and is left alone in charge until the end of the class, whereas the trainees had the impression that in England there was a constant flow of outsiders: the head teacher, colleagues such as the class teacher or the head of subject, administrators and pupils from other classes, many of whom did not knock before entering.

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The French trainees found that English pupils moved around the classroom much more freely. For example, if they needed something from a cupboard or desk, they did not ask for permission to fetch it. They also found English classrooms noisier, with pupils taking speaking turns more freely and initiating topics easily.

All of this gave the French trainees an impression of anarchy and indiscipline. Although some found this perturbing, others attributed it to a greater respect in England for individual freedom and for cultural and individual differences, along with English teachers’ constant attention to helping and encouraging their pupils. It would be difficult to exaggerate the strength of feeling expressed by these young teachers concerning the presence or absence of encouraging remarks by their opposite numbers. The English trainees are massively critical of the French, using terms such as ‘cruel’ and ‘sadistic’: • French teachers are sarcastic … • (They are) cruel … they even go as far as to make the pupils cry … • They shout a lot … they are cruel. • They criticise the pupils, rather than encouraging them … they don’t encourage them to work. • If something’s wrong, it’s wrong, so don’t expect any encouragement. • French teachers run down pupils who are having difficulty in front of the others. • Pupils know one another’s marks and results, which leads to a lot of jeering. The truth of these remarks was acknowledged by many of the French trainees — but not necessarily accepted as criticisms. For them, the constant repetition of expressions such as • What a good answer! • Very good, I knew you could do it! • Well done! was an irritant, an obstacle to communication and counter-productive in learning terms, hypocritical even, because it gave the pupils a false impression of their level of performance. Predictably, these trainees were extremely surprised when an English university teacher-trainer helpfully provided them with a long list of ‘encouraging expressions’. Encouraging remarks simply do not appear in the same quantity in the repertoire of communicative practices of French teachers, perhaps even of French adults.

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However, if you look again at official discourse — the Instructions Officielles, but also manuals for teachers, the teacher-training syllabus and so on — you will find that French teachers are exhorted time and time again to practise une pédagogie de l’encouragement. The misfit between this official discourse and the pedagogical tradition could hardly, it seems, be wider, and, although much classroom-related research remains to be done, I believe it at least partly explains why many French language teachers are uncomfortable with both the communicative approach and the idea of autonomy. They are caught between two stools: a traditional set of values, practices and relationships on the one hand, deeply embedded in their own beliefs and behaviour and in the structure and function of the school as a socialhistorical institution, and, on the other, a methodology with which they may well be in agreement in intellectual terms, but which in many ways runs counter to that tradition.

Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to identify and examine some of the social, cultural and linguistic factors which may impinge on the language learning situation in important ways, but which are often neglected because they form part of out-of-consciousness common sense or culture. I have argued that in order to take such factors into account, we need to widen the context of situation within which our studies are framed. In epistemological terms, this means seeing schools as just one node in the social knowledge system, and in communicative terms it means seeing teaching as just one form of knowledge management whose resources may include discursive practices other than those recognised and promoted by the institution. To describe the tension that arises when individuals or groups are the subjects of different or even contradictory discourses, I have suggested the expression ‘discursive dissonance’ and I have provided examples from the field of language teaching and learning where institutional discourse related to the communicative approach, autonomy and encouragement runs counter to folklinguistic beliefs and practices. This in no way disqualifies them as valid objectives, but it does imply that the methodology adopted must be culturally appropriate. There are at least two other kinds of discursive dissonance which impinge on autonomy which I have not dealt with here:

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•

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The first illustrates the fact that discourse on autonomy may enter into conflict with discourses that have nothing to do with language learning. For example, much of the discourse of globalisation is very much a matter of grooming consumers. Clearly, this is not conducive to autonomy, which is largely predicated on the ability to make informed choices (Block & Cameron 2002). The second case concerns intrapersonal discursive dissonance, that is what happens when within the individual two opposing discourses are striving for mastery (cf. ‘cognitive dissonance’, on which my expression is obviously based). Any learner who is in transit, so to speak, between two incongruent viewpoints or belief systems will go through this kind of inner struggle or debate, but there do seem to be conditions which produce extreme versions, and not surprisingly, if there is anything in the arguments I have been putting forward, they tend to occur when the learner is learning in a foreign culture and a foreign knowledge system and moving from learner to teacher in their professional formation. That is one of the implications of a recent innovative study, Colette Granger’s Silence in Second Language Learning (2004), which is of real interest and importance to our field because by projecting recent work on psychoanalysis onto problems of learner identity and the silent period, Colette Granger has taken us back to the very source of autonomy, the self, and its construction in and through intrapersonal dialogue. As was pointed out in the Introduction to this chapter, social theorists like Mead and Vygotsky have argued that learning takes place as the communicative strategies practised by individuals are interiorised as the fundamental functions of cognition. Being confronted by a different and poorly mastered set of practices will necessarily have repercussions for the quality of the intrapersonal dialogue and, to a greater or lesser degree, the individual will be a site of dissonance between the old and the new discourses.

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Controlling learning

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Practices of learner autonomy

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Controlling learning

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5 Controlling learning: Learners’ voices and relationships between motivation and learner autonomy Terry Lamb

Introduction The rationale for this chapter is closely linked to the context of foreign language learning in English secondary schools, a context in which motivation to learn languages is recognised as being in need of development (Nuffield Languages Inquiry 2000; King 2003). Research shows that languages are increasingly becoming an elite subject, with fewer children from poorer families choosing to continue to learn them (Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research, Association for Language Learning and University Council of Modern Languages 2003). Problems of motivation can lead to disappointing standards of achievement or, at worst, disruptive behaviour in the classroom, truancy and exclusion from school (Social Exclusion Unit 1998; Department for Education and Skills 2003, 2004). Faced with such problems, many teachers believe it is important to ‘tighten up’ classroom discipline in an attempt to control the pupils’ behaviour. In this chapter, I will suggest, however, that teachers’ attempts to increase control may be counterproductive and themselves lead to higher levels of disaffection. Drawing on research into learners’ constructions of language learning, I explore why there is an urgent need for teachers to consider the links between learner autonomy and motivation theory in order to find ways of transferring control to the learners. I take the position that locating the problem of poor motivation in learners themselves is socially unjust. Blaming the learners or their families for underachievement or lack of motivation is problematic,

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especially given the differential levels of achievement and engagement between children of different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds (Gillborn & Mirza 2000; Department for Education and Skills 2002). Rejection of such deficit theories leads to a more critical perspective, in which the education system itself (curriculum, structures, etc.) is construed as the problem, clearly failing particular sections of the population. Drawing on urban education theory and research from a critical theory perspective, I have previously reconceptualised disaffection as a search for a voice in a context of disenfranchisement (Lamb 2000). Here I develop this reconceptualisation further by reporting on a broader ethnographic research project designed to privilege young learners’ voices, and position them as experts in their own learning. These expert voices belong to children aged 14 to 15 (i.e. in Year 9 of compulsory education), learning French or German in a secondary school in a northern English city, where several years earlier a number of language teachers had introduced flexible learning, a system of classroom organisation which involved learners in making choices of learning activities from a bank of resources according to their own individual needs (Lamb 2003). I accessed the voices of these teenagers by means of focused group conversations (FGCs) (Lamb 2005), specifically designed as a tool which would offer young learners an inclusive and supportive framework for constructing and articulating difficult constructs. Four groups of six learners were involved in the research, with the groups organised according to levels of achievement and motivation (A1: low achievers, motivated; A2: low achievers, less motivated; B1: high achievers, motivated; B2: high achievers, less motivated). I transcribed the focus group conversations as accurately as possible in the local dialect, though for the purpose of comprehensibility by an international audience I am reporting them here in a slightly amended form. My main intention in this research was not to make generalised statements about the ways in which motivated and unmotivated learners construe learning (though interestingly there were broad differences between the groups in many of the conversations). Rather, I wanted to offer an environment in which young learners could feel comfortable about expressing their thoughts about language learning, suspending as far as possible the usual power relationships between adult and children. This was achieved by means of carefully devised FGC protocols influenced by a range of questioning techniques (Holstein

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and Gubrium’s [1995] ‘active interviewing’, Tomlinson’s [1989] ‘hierarchical focusing’, and Roy’s [1991] work on cognitive interviewing); varied activities such as ‘concept mapping’ (Powney & Watts 1987: 30), projective techniques (LeCompte & Preissle 1993: 164), drawing and self-rating scales; as well as critical consideration of my persona and role in the group, and attention to environment and atmosphere (Lamb 2005: 184–212). In the rest of this chapter, I will focus on issues of control which emerged in the focus group conversations and which are specifically related to motivational beliefs. Here I will make particular connections to general motivation theory rather than to the social-psychological approaches of Gardner and Lambert (e.g. 1972) which are specific to language learning. In doing so, I am building on the paradigm shift in motivation research in language learning triggered by Crookes and Schmidt’s (1991) encouragement to re-examine the direction which had been taken by research in this field. An important feature of this shift is that it encouraged a greater focus on the practical implications of motivation research for the classroom (Dörnyei 1994, 1996; Oxford & Shearin 1994, 1996; Williams & Burden 1997). It also ushered in aspects of general motivation theory which relate to autonomy, such as in the work of Dickinson (1995), Ushioda (1994, 1996) and Dörnyei (1998). Of course, motivation is contextualised (Dörnyei 1994, 2001b; Vallerand 1997), and learner autonomy is similarly ‘situated’ (Murphey 2003), which means that my arguments in this chapter need to be understood within the specific context in which the research was carried out. Nevertheless, I hope that it is possible to reflect on the implications for any context, be it teaching English or other languages to children or adults.

Learners’ voices Control and choice A recurring theme throughout the conversations with the learners was their desire to make choices about their own learning. Even if they could not make choices about the content of what they learned, they wanted choice in the process and sequencing of learning tasks. Penny expresses this desire in the following way:

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What they wanna do is … do you know that target sheet, they should have one of them and say like we’ve got to do all level one and all the level two and all the level three; “You’ve got to do that and I’ll give you two months to do it”, something like that, you know every lesson. Then you could pick and do it in turn like that; do it from t’hardest to the easiest or whatever. Pick what you want so you don’t have like t’same hardest all the time. So you could mix ’em up. It would be done quicker that way. (A2)

Penny is here asking for the opportunity to select according to level of difficulty, and she goes on to add language skill (“like a listening, or reading or writing …”) to her selection criteria. She has had experience of working in this way in the past, and gives examples of how much more she and others used to work when given choices. Unfortunately, she says that the class is no longer allowed to make choices since the new teacher arrived, and that this has led to a situation where she now dislikes German. The possibility of choosing appears to enable learners to perceive the work as more relevant to them as individuals, and to feel that they are not just one face in a crowd. In the same focus group conversation, Candice goes on to say: If they like put a list up and you had to pick one, that would be good that, because you are picking what you want to do, not what the teachers tell you to do. You’re doing all different to all t’other people, and I think it’s a change. (A2)

The young learners recognise that they need support in making choices about their work, and that the teacher may need to monitor what they are doing. Given some level of choice, however, they seem happier to take the teacher’s advice. Lucy describes how her class used to be able to make choices, albeit in careful negotiation with the teacher: Lucy: Last year we said we had to do so many tasks and we had to put like say one level one, two level twos, and like four level threes, five level fours and that, till we got up to how many we should be doing. T: And did you like that? Lucy: Yeah. (…) Yeah, because if we put … if we were going to do all level ones, and we showed Miss, she’d tell us to do … , because she like knew how clever and that we are, so she told us what to do. (B2)

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These learners are giving an important message to their teachers here, in which they call for involvement in the planning of their work with regard to objectives, target-setting and practice activities. They clearly desire learning opportunities which are differentiated, achievable and relevant to their needs and interests, and over which they have some control. There are clear links here to work on intrinsic motivation. Deci and Ryan (1991: 239) refer to intrinsic motivation as a “nonderivative motivational force”, one which originates in the individual and is not related to any external stimuli. It is seen to be a response to certain innate drives or psychological needs, postulated by Deci et al. (1991) as the need for competence, relatedness and autonomy. However, Deci (1980: 26) also distinguishes self-determination (autonomy) from will, which is seen as “the capacity of the human organism to choose how to satisfy its needs”. For Deci, will is insufficient to stimulate motivation; rather it is the activation of this capacity that he calls ‘selfdetermination’, or “the process of utilizing one’s will” (ibid.). One implication of such a view of motivation and self-determination is that not only do we need to be able to make choices (i.e. to have will) but we also have to be allowed to (i.e. to be self-determining). This distinction suggests that intrinsic motivation can be stifled if a person is not allowed to be actively self-determining. In fact, it is the process of self-determination itself which stimulates intrinsic motivation, more than the underlying need (such as the need to learn). The learners quoted above imply that this does not preclude teacher input into the selfdetermining process, but that the teacher certainly needs to offer them some control over what they are doing. There is, however, a fine balance to be found here, and teachers should be aware that choice has to be real even if it is supported. As Carl shows in the following part of a different focus group conversation, young learners can see through teachers’ attempts to control their learners’ behaviour by offering them inauthentic choice: Carl: You couldn’t choose though, could you? You could choose what tasks she wanted you to do. Helen: She puts them on the board and then you choose out of them. (A1)

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Control, behaviour and issues of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation Learners’ awareness of teachers’ attempts to control their behaviour as well as their learning shone through many of the conversations. A major preoccupation of the youngsters is the school’s system of rewards and sanctions. Rewards for good work begin with entries in their exercise books: Nadia: They were like … Louis: Stamps. Nadia: … smiley faces and whatever … T: Oh, right. Louis: Like stars and tens. (A1)

These then accumulate in a system of different rewards, the next step being the ‘gold slip’: Nadia: When you get ten you get a gold slip, so you like do all your work very good so you get a stamp. T: Ermm, what’s a gold slip? Helen: A thing. It’s like if you do well and that, and then a teacher thinks that you deserve it, then they give you like a gold thing, a golden thing like a pen for different, like, stuff and that. T: Yeah. Carol: Each subject has got a different kind of gold slip. It’s got different patterns on it. (A1)

The system becomes more complex as more gold slips are accumulated: Jimmy: You get special awards for it, like 10 gets you a platinum slip, 20 gets you a letter of commendation, 40 gets you a merit. Jodie: And if you get 50 you get like a book token. (B1)

This reward system is paralleled by a similar system of sanctions, involving slips of different colours: Penny: We just get pink slips and that in Science. Luke: I don’t. Penny: You do. You got a pink slip for walking out the lesson. T: Pink slips are bad then? Penny: Right bad, worse than a white slip. (A discussion ensues about which is worse.) Katy: A pink slip isn’t worser than a white slip is it?

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Candice: A white slip’s a concern slip, a pink slip’s better. Penny: Pink slips have to go home. White slips don’t. I’ve got five white slips now. Katy: I’ve got no white slips, I’ve got two pink slips, I’ve never been to room 21 [the ‘sin bin’], but I’ve been excluded about five times. (A discussion ensues about numbers of various slips — Luke becomes quite animated.) (A2)

The learners clearly enjoy this system of extrinsic motivation though they are aware of its weaknesses. For example, according to some of the young teenagers, it encourages them to complete less demanding activities if quantity rather than quality work is rewarded: Louis: Most people go for levels one and two because they’re easy. They don’t go for like level three and set themselves a challenge. T: Isn’t that boring? Isn’t that boring when you do easy things all the time? Nadia: It depends, if you like, say there’s a teacher who says you’ve got to do three tasks and then you get a gold slip, then everyone goes for t’easiest ones because then you know you’ll get a gold slip at the end of it. T: That’s clever! Louis: Because you get stamps, and people who are at one or two get them right and get more stamps than those … level three takes more time so that you don’t do as much in the lesson. (A1)

Carl is quite blatant about this, and is clear that he understands better than his teacher what he is capable of doing: Carl: I should pick hard ones because I’m quite clever me, but I don’t, I pick easy ones. T: Don’t you find that boring? Carl: No, then you get right more done don’t you, and they say “Ahh well done Carl — just keep on.” (A1)

Even more informal ways of rewarding learners lose their significance if not used appropriately, though teachers may be unaware of this. For example, teacher praise in the classroom can be understood by learners as manipulative, an attempt to control them. Such false praise is completely transparent to many youngsters, though the teachers may believe they are behaving in an inclusive way. Candice clearly disapproves of this:

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They shouldn’t like … teachers who go “Oh that’s right good, that’s very good”, even though they know it’s not right good. But they’ll say it’s good. (A2)

and goes on to offer an example from her own experience: No, because every time … we had her on Friday for a single and I hadn’t done one thing and she just said, “Very good Candice, you’ve done all your work”. And I was like “What?” I didn’t do no work. I just sit at the back of the classroom discussing hairdressers and things, and makeup and things like that. (A2)

Rewards clearly need to be used to reward positive learning habits such as effort. Unfortunately, they can reinforce ineffective learning habits, replacing planning on the basis of learning with planning on the basis of getting the rewards. Some learners will limit their work to copying from the board, for example: Penny: Just copying work out is what I’m best at. Copying out … Katy: Off the board and that. Penny: Off the board yeah. You get gold slips for it yeah. (Katy laughs.) I do anyway. (A2)

The value of self-assessment can also be undermined by extrinsic rewards, with the learners exploiting the system rather than using it formatively: Nadia: When we’ve got independent work, we’ve got a folder with all the answers in so we can mark our own. Louis: We used to have in year eight, we don’t in year nine because it’s like folders … and you can just write your answers from that, for the tasks, so we write a page of our answers … T: And people do that, do they, if they’ve got the chance? Why would they do that? Louis: To get the stamps to get the gold slips. (A1)

In fact, if not carefully used, extrinsic motivators can lead to dependency, as Jimmy points out: Jimmy: Clare only likes it if you get, Clare my cousin, Clare only likes it if you get prizes. (B1)

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The learners’ voices provide insights into how their motivation is increased by the degree to which the environment or social context supports the development of autonomy rather than attempts to control behaviour (Deci & Ryan 1992: 10ff). According to Deci and Ryan, what exactly supports or curtails self-determination and intrinsic motivation involves such contextual features as rewards used as a control, threats, deadlines, evaluation, surveillance, limited choice and particular forms of feedback (Deci & Ryan 1987). This latter feature is explored further by Deci and Ryan (1992) who suggest that the issue is not so much whether feedback is positive or negative, but whether it is seen to be controlling or facilitating learning progress. The idea of controlling behaviour, then, appears to suggest not only broad contextual factors (what we could call ‘ethos’), but also factors more closely resembling extrinsic motivational factors. Extrinsic motivation, put simply by Williams and Burden (1997: 123), is “when the only reason for performing an act is to gain something outside the activity itself, such as passing an exam, or obtaining financial rewards”. It can manifest itself in the classroom as systems such as the one described by the young learners in this research, put in place by teachers responding to the reality that learners may not always want to learn. Van Lier (1996) points to two possible problems with extrinsic motivation. Firstly, there could be the temptation to reward when reward is not deserved, in an attempt to boost learners’ self-esteem. However, this kind of teacher action underestimates the learners’ ability to evaluate themselves and renders the reward meaningless. Secondly, there is the possibility that the reward might actually undermine intrinsic motivation. This is backed up by much research evidence suggesting that the use of extrinsic rewards can be detrimental to intrinsic motivation (Lepper 1983; Deci & Ryan 1985; Sternberg 1990; Kohn 1991). Lepper (1983), for example, cites 47 studies which show that learners who were motivated before being offered an extrinsic reward become less motivated than before when the reward is eventually removed. In other words, learners actually become dependent on the external stimulation. In terms of control, behaviour and motivational forms, the young learners’ voices, together with our theoretical understandings, suggest that extrinsic rewards need to be handled carefully, and always with the long-term goal of developing intrinsic motivation. As Deci and Porac (1978: 159) claim, in order to lead to intrinsic motivation, extrinsic rewards need “to increase people’s sense of competence and self-

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determination” and therefore to be ‘informational’ rather than ‘controlling’ (1978: 162). The implication is that extrinsic rewards have their place, although they require a critical approach by teachers. This criticality can be supported by Deci and Ryan’s (1985) categorisation of different types of extrinsic motivation, which leads to a consideration of the degree to which the behaviour continues after removal of the external incentive (or, as they say, after the behaviour has been internalised). The four types can be presented as a continuum between what they call ‘controlled’ and ‘self-determined’ forms of motivation: 1.

2. 3. 4.

External regulation: This comes entirely from external sources, such as rewards and punishments, and involves no level of selfdetermination. Introjected regulation: Rules are imposed but accepted by the learner as norms. Identified regulation: This comes about when the learner sees the instrumental value of the activity (such as usefulness in a career). Integrated regulation: This refers to situations where the learner chooses to carry out an activity because he or she values it personally for its own sake.

Indeed, there is very little difference between intrinsic motivation and this latter type of extrinsic motivation, in which there is no external determination. However, the ways in which different learners shift along this continuum or become dependent on external regulation have not been explored. Further contextualised research here could usefully lead to new insights into ways in which extrinsic motivators can be planned so that “the energizing forces of intrinsic motivation” (van Lier 1996: 112) may emerge.

Control, influence and responsibility for learning One of the areas in which there was most difference between the four groups was in their conversations regarding teacher and learner roles in learning, in particular regarding who has responsibility for learning outcomes. Though it is impossible to generalise, the more motivated the learners, the more they appeared to be willing to accept that their success or failure may be related to their own behaviours. For some, a ‘good learner’ was defined in terms of his or her own active agency:

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T: So a good learner is someone who can … Carl: Listen to the teacher. (A1)

Generally, the learners in group B1 shared this perspective: T: What do you think then makes a good learner? Jimmy: One who listens and doesn’t mess about all the time. Jodie: Somebody who’s willing to learn really, somebody who’s going to put their mind to it. But somebody who’s going to like not be all concentrated and not mess about, somebody like who will mess about but you know concentrate as well so it makes lessons a bit more fun. Jimmy: You want ’em both really don’t you, a bit of fun and … Jodie: Somebody who can get on well with the teachers as well because if you can’t get on well with the teachers, you’re stuck then aren’t you? T: And how do you get on well with your teachers? Jodie: Just respect them but they have to respect you for you to respect them. (B1)

Jimmy adds later: You have to want to learn. If you don’t want to learn you just don’t bother. (B1)

For others, their learning depends on someone else’s behaviour: T: What would be a good learner? Candice: If they encouraged you more. (A2)

When asked to offer advice to a younger child starting to learn languages, the learners in group A2 (i.e. ‘low achievers, less motivated’) could not find anything that the learner could do to affect learning. Group B1 members (i.e. ‘high achievers, motivated’), on the other hand, suggested a number of ways in which the learner could have an influence: Jodie: Try it yourself first; help each other; and set targets. Jimmy: Listen carefully; check or re-revise work for tests — after you’ve revised it all, revise it again; speak clearly; ask when you’re stuck; try very very very very very hard for your tests, or your best; and set targets. (B1)

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This contrast was revealed in a number of conversations. When asked how they may learn better, learners in A2 generally suggested changes in the teacher. These included general issues of personality, such as being less sensitive: Candice: You could learn better if like they’d got more courage … if they helped you more … Penny: Courage? What are you coming out with? T: If who had more courage? Candice: The teachers. If like they’d … Penny: The teachers should all be tested on their attitude and talent and stress. Candice: Our science teacher has got such an attitude problem, like. He looks at you and like if you are saying something under your breath he will say “Was that aimed at me?” Penny: Even if you’re talking to someone else. (A2)

This ‘attitude problem’ clearly affected more than one teacher, in Penny’s opinion: Sir, you know the reason why me and Katy don’t understand German is because if you don’t listen to her then she don’t pay no attention to you, she ignores you. Goes to the ones who know what they’re doing. She never helps you. If you don’t listen then she never helps you … You shout her and she just walks away. That’s why we don’t know nothing because if you don’t know it then she blanks you out. (A2)

The problem for Penny then is not that she does not listen to the teacher, but that the teacher ignores her when she wants attention. According to Penny and Candice, the onus of change is on the teacher: T: In order for you to learn French or German better, say you wanted to, who’d have to change the most, you or the teacher? Penny and Candice: (immediately) Teacher! Penny: If teachers change then I’ll change. Candice: Like Miss Roberts, she can be all right sometimes and then other times she’s like a tiger, she goes (‘roaring noise’), and our Miss, she’s just evil. I swear her eyeballs turn red and she just turns. (A2)

Clearly there has been a breakdown in relationships, the origins of which cannot be determined by this research. The frustration is apparent on both sides, and the battle for control is fierce.

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It is fair to say that, according to these teenagers, the teacher is not the only reason for their unsatisfactory learning. Furthermore, for some learners, the other causes are equally outside their control. One problem for them was other learners in the class: Candice: Some kids have got learning difficulties and that. Yeah fair enough, but they (teachers) spend more time with them than they do us. (A2)

Another perceived problem was the difficult nature of the language itself: T: Very last question. Would you say that learning a language is different from learning another subject? Darren: Yeah, it’s harder. T: Why? Darren: Because you just can’t learn it in two seconds. (A2)

And for Peter, luck plays an important part in success: It’s a talent you’re given I think. (A1)

As I have already stated, however, some pupils do appear ready to accept responsibility for their learning, but they do not suggest that others have no role to play. In a conversation about parents, Jimmy and Jodie compare the ways in which their mothers encourage them to learn: Jimmy: I know what my Mum is, the minute you walk through the door, “How much homework?” and “You’ve got to get straight to it”, the minute I walk in. Haven’t even time to take my shoes off before she asks. Jodie: My Mum isn’t like that, my Mum just keeps me like, she says “Oh if you do it, do it. If you don’t, it’s your own fault”. She’s not one of these that stands over you and says “You will do your all your homework”. But she’s not one of these that says “You best do your homework”, she says “Oh you’re responsible enough now, if you’ve got it, you go and do it, I’m not going to tell you to do it”. And she’ll say “Oh what have you done today at school?” and that, or if there was a test she will ask how I’ve done. If I say “Oh I don’t think I’ve done right well”, she’ll go “Did you try?” and if I went “Yeah”, then she’ll go “Oh well I’m not bothered then, as long as you’ve tried. It’s the teacher’s fault if you’ve not learnt it”.

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T: So what makes you do it then? Jodie: Because I want to succeed, and my brother did right well, so I don’t want to look stupid at side of him. (B1)

In Jodie’s case, there is intervention by her mother, but in a way which appeals to her sense of control over the learning outcomes. Mark’s teachers appear to be having a similar effect to Jodie’s mother, though this is closely related to his knowledge about his own potential: I know I can do just about everything. Everything I’m asked to do I find it … I know I’m quite, I know I’m clever, but I’ve been told that I lack concentration, so I know I can do it. Because all my teachers put me down because of my concentration, so I want to do well, so at the end of the year, when I get a better grade than what was predicted I can take it to them and say “I’ve done better than you thought”, and put them in their place. (B1)

Mark later stresses the importance of the teacher: […] I think if you don’t get it given to you in school you don’t really want to find it out yourself, but if you’ve got a good teacher at school, they encourage you and you feel like you should do it to learn more, because you get credit for it. But you need a good teacher that helps you be a good learner. (B1)

These conversations offer us insights into the different ways in which pupils have, or do not have, a sense of control over and responsibility for their learning. Interestingly, the learners’ (expert) voices are once again generating their own theories, which are very close to those of experts on motivation. Here there is very close correspondence with motivation theories related to locus of control (for reviews of the psychological literature in the area of locus of control, see Findley & Cooper 1983, Deci & Ryan 1985, and Pintrich & Schunk 1996). Rotter (1966) argues that those with an external locus of control believe that their actions have little impact on events, and that there is little they can do to change them, whereas those with an internal locus of control believe that they have control over events. What is suggested by this research, and reflected in the learners’ voices above, is that having a sense of internal, personal control over what is happening (and, hence, a sense of personal responsibility) is a key factor in both initial and continuing motivation, and even academic

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achievement (e.g. Findley & Cooper 1983). As Williams and Burden (1997: 102) write: Those with a high internal locus of control show strong tendencies to seek information and use it appropriately in problem-solving tasks, to be active and assertive and to exhibit a high degree of exploratory behaviour and excitement about learning. They exhibit a great deal of persistence and show a willingness to delay rewards in order to maximise them. Those demonstrating high externality, on the other hand, tend to be relatively passive, compliant, non-exploratory and inattentive.

Also crucial to continuing motivation is the way that learners explain or attribute success or failure. Attribution theory (e.g. Weiner 1984) tends to analyse causal attributions for success or failure according to whether the cause is perceived to be external or internal, and whether the causes are considered to be stable (e.g. due to ability) or unstable (e.g. due to effort). Positive motivation is more likely if success is perceived to be due to internal, stable causes or if failure is put down to unstable causes, internal or external. In other words, a learner will be more motivated if she or he views success as resulting from high ability (internal, stable) rather than an evening’s hard work (internal, unstable), whereas failure will be easier to cope with if it is attributed to short-term illness (internal, unstable) rather than lack of talent (internal, stable). The ways in which the learners in this study explain success or failure, and what they do as a result, thus enable us to understand attribution theory in action. The high achieving, motivated learners in B1, for example, are confident in their own abilities to learn languages (stable), whereas the high achieving, less motivated learners in B2 lack confidence in their own ability; for the latter, this is largely because they are unsure of how to memorise language and produce it “from our heads” (to quote a common ambition expressed by members of this group). They attribute this failure to themselves (“When he just says write a conversation I don’t know what to write” is one example given by Lorna), and, unfortunately, they perceive their failures as stable and recurrent. Where there is some external attribution of failure to teachers, again a marked difference in the two groups emerges. The children in B1, confident in themselves, feel that sometimes the teacher does not give them the opportunities they need, but that they can change this through positive action, thus rendering the external constraints on learning unstable. For example, Mark makes the following point:

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Once last year in science we were doing a topic and all we did every lesson was get a book out and write out of the book. […] I asked everyone else if it were any good and a few of us went to our tutor and said that we weren’t doing anything in the lesson because she’d complained about us for not doing anything, so we told the tutor why. And the tutor went back and explained what the problem was and she changed it a bit. (B1)

The learners in B2, on the other hand, believe that the teachers could help them more to put the language ‘in their heads’; unfortunately, however, they believe that this external constraint on their learning cannot be changed and is thus stable: Mick: If the teachers know they’d probably get t’pog on wi’ you [get annoyed with you] and start treating you totally different. Lorna: Yeah, they’d probably treat you nasty in class and that. […] Mick: […] If you complain about their teaching scheme, they’ll just like ignore you, not treat you proper. (B2)

Of course, it is important to note that these comments reflect individual perceptions of the situation, which are not necessarily related to the reality of the situation. The voices in this study indicate these learners have internalised beliefs about their own control over and responsibility for learning (or absence of such a sense of control or responsibility), which in different ways have been reinforced by their prior experiences in school. The question for teachers is how their actions may impact on such beliefs, creating a learning environment to challenge them where this is necessary. De Charms’s (e.g. 1984) research into locus of causality offers a way forward here. According to this work, locus of control/causality is not static and can change or develop over time or between contexts, which means that it is susceptible to classroom practices. For example, de Charms developed programmes (such as Personal Causation Training) to help learners develop what he calls ‘origin beliefs’ (i.e. beliefs that they have control over and responsibility for learning) as opposed to ‘pawn beliefs’ (i.e. where they are pawns in the hands of the teacher who takes full control and responsibility). He worked together with teachers to integrate such training into academic activities, developing exercises to enhance self-concept, realistic goalsetting and personal responsibility. Alderman (1985) similarly applied goal-setting and self-evaluation to a senior high school girls’ Physical

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Education class with similar positive outcomes, including reduced absenteeism. The implication of such research is that the learning context can influence how much control an individual believes he or she has over his or her learning outcomes. In other words, it should not be assumed that some individuals are pathologically unable to accept control over and responsibility for learning. Changes in classroom practices can make a difference. The learners in this study themselves suggest a number of ways in which they have been, or could be, better prepared to take responsibility for their work, which in some cases involves opportunities to develop basic learning strategies: Jimmy: Some of it, the children’s responsible, you can revise it for tests and that, but the teachers could help you, and give you tips for revising, and having like a revising lesson where you go over everything you’ve done, not just say “Go home and learn it”. (B1)

They also suggest the need to develop skills and understanding in selfmanagement activities such as self-evaluation (see also Lamb 2006). For example, Candice finds it difficult to identify errors: She doesn’t tell you where you’ve gone wrong in your work. You know like, if I ask her, she says “Work it out then”. If you do do your work, she’ll just say you’ve done it wrong, she’ll say, “You need to do your mistakes” but I won’t know where the mistake is so I’ll just have to copy it all out again and do it all again. (A2)

Andy also stresses the importance of evaluation and reflection: Yes because if you think about what you’re not good at, you can improve on it. (B2)

Structures which encourage target-setting can also enable learners to feel more responsible for their learning: Jodie: Yes because you know, once you’ve put it down and you understand what you need to do, you can focus on that more. Lucy: Set yourself targets. Jodie: Yes because you have to set yourself targets as well. T: Do you like working with targets? Lucy: Yes.

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Jodie: Yes because you can say like “I want to get 5 As by the end of this term in my independent tasks” and you’ve got to work towards it. You might get a gold slip if you reach your targets. (B1)

On the other hand, it may be that teenagers need advice and support on basic organisational skills. Of course, some are already well organised: T: Would you describe yourselves as being organised? All: Yes. T: Organised learners? All: Yes. Jodie: Because like I always do my homework in everything on the night it’s been set … Jimmy: Yes you just like tick it off in the order, when you’ve done something, and stuff what you haven’t done. Jodie: If we didn’t have the homework diary we’d be lost. Jimmy: You’d forget what you’ve got and what you haven’t got. (B1)

Unfortunately, some learners are unable to analyse their learning in such ways, making it difficult for them to manage it, and these learners need to be taught how to do so. My research reveals strong levels of variance among learners in the ways in which they are able to speak about language learning. Generally speaking, these young teenagers are able to talk about their learning given the time, space and environment to construct their knowledge. Some of them are clearly more articulate and have a more sophisticated language to enable them to describe and discuss learning, as well as a broader metacognitive knowledge on which to draw. What is apparent is that the students in this study who have this capacity have a better chance of feeling more in control of what they are doing. Other pupils talk about their learning experiences in very different ways, appearing to be engaged in a more basic struggle for control, in which the discourse of resistance has precedence over the discourse of metacognition. The challenge for the teacher is to listen to, reflect on and respond to these voices, systematically providing access to and encouraging further development of discourses of learning, without which the learners may flounder and lose motivation. This may be achieved by offering opportunities to learners to identify and discuss their own strengths and weaknesses, develop their own plans and take responsibility for carrying them out, choose learning activities and evaluate their progress, while at the same time ensuring that the learners are supported in such metacognitive activity through discussion

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and negotiation (see, for example, Wang 1983; Williams & Burden 1997; Dam & Legenhausen 2001; Lamb 2003).

Conclusion The challenge for schools is to find ways of harnessing the energy of students’ insights in support of their learning; instead students often use their understanding to avoid schoolwork and they may, therefore, unwittingly conspire in the construction of their own disadvantage. (Rudduck 1998: 1)

Benson (2001: 2) has broadly defined autonomy as “the capacity to take control over one’s own learning” and explored different levels of control in terms of control over learning management, cognitive processes and learning content. The learners’ voices in this study all reveal aspects of these levels of control, though the context of this English secondary school appears to lead to a greater focus on a more politicised form of control — namely control which is contested and fought over by both teachers and learners. It would appear that learners want to have some control over the choice of learning activity, in order to be able to select according to their own perceived needs, but that such choice is restricted by some teachers who themselves wish to control their learners’ learning. This is bound up with a perceived need on the part of these teachers to control the learners’ behaviour, particularly where learners are not motivated to learn languages. This leads to tighter controls in the form of extrinsic motivational interventions, rewarding or punishing according to whether the learners are working or not (rather than according to the quality of their work), with learners in turn wresting control through exploitation of these interventions in order to work the system. These struggles for control appear to divert the classroom activity away from a focus on the learners’ development as autonomous learners. Instead, they reinforce the internalised beliefs of some learners that they cannot influence their own learning, and that it is not their responsibility. In such cases, it is possible that the learners will attempt to take some control through unruly behaviour. The young learners in this northern English school are clearly experts with regard to their own constructions of (language) learning, and these constructions teach us a great deal about the need to reconsider some of our taken-for-granted beliefs about control. Firstly, learners need to have opportunities to make choices and to be involved

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in planning their work so they have greater control over the content of the lessons. Teachers need to support their learners in making appropriate choices by helping them to prioritise their needs and to understand the nature and purposes of different learning tasks. Teachers also need to be honest about constraints on choice (which may come from the curriculum or from limitations of the learning environment), and help learners to find ways around these constraints, instead of pretending to them that they have choice when they do not. Secondly, faced with potentially unruly behaviour, teachers should carefully consider the long-term purpose of extrinsic motivation, avoiding rewards designed to achieve short-term control over the learners, such as empty praise or gold slips which encourage learners to complete a greater number of tasks to the detriment of quality. Extrinsic motivational strategies should instead encourage effort, effective planning, initiative and responsibility for learning so that learners will experience the value of such autonomous behaviour and, hopefully, develop greater intrinsic motivation. Thirdly, explicit attention needs to be paid to encouraging learners to understand that they have a role to play in their own learning, that they have control over their learning outcomes. This will involve opportunities to manage their learning, development of a language to describe it, sharing of learning strategies and reflection on existing beliefs about learning through enhanced metacognitive knowledge. In summary, teachers need to let go of rather than tighten up some of their control if their learners are to develop greater control not only over their learning environment but also over their own learning and their own motivation. However, the young learners in my research clearly desire control and influence which extend beyond access to resources and the development of capacities. The learners also reveal that they want to have their voices heard through political participation in the classroom. In other words, we need to find ways of developing structures through which learners can express their opinions (and be heard), negotiate and compromise, as well as resisting the imposition of learning which is not perceived to be relevant (or where the relevance is not made clear), and finding appropriate and viable learning alternatives. My research has shown that it would be beneficial to find ways of enabling these voices to be expressed and heard as an integral part of classroom processes. In this way, young learners would have the opportunity to make their voices heard in constructive rather than destructive ways.

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6 Learner autonomy in a mainstream writing course: Articulating learning gains Sara Cotterall

Introduction The starting point for this chapter was my interest in exploring gains in metacognitive knowledge about writing which occurred during a onesemester course in academic writing (WRIT 151) that I was teaching and coordinating. The course aimed to develop both learners’ knowledge of the characteristics of effective academic writing, and, at the same time, their independence as writers. I was therefore interested in tracing possible links between individuals’ understanding of the tasks they were engaged in, and their willingness and ability to attempt those tasks with diminishing amounts of support. To do this, I examined in detail an extended piece of reflective writing that each of the 15 learners in my workshop group submitted at the end of the course. The learners’ writing provided numerous instances of sophisticated task knowledge, as well as examples of person and strategic knowledge (Flavell 1979). It is likely that the course’s requirement that learners constantly reflect on and discuss their writing goals, strategies and difficulties helped develop their understanding of the essay writing process, and their confidence to approach future writing tasks independently. Exploring development in the metacognitive knowledge base of second language learners is an important issue for those committed to promoting learner autonomy. This is because metacognitive knowledge “is a prerequisite to the deployment of … self-regulatory processes” (Wenden 2001: 62) involved in independent or autonomous learning behaviour. In other words, learners can only begin to develop

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independence in learning once they possess: (a) awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in relation to the tasks; (b) an understanding of the tasks they are engaged in; and (c) knowledge of strategies which can help them undertake such tasks. For learners such as those described here, gaining some independence as writers is of the utmost urgency, since most learning at university (at least in the New Zealand context) is assessed through essays and other written tasks. In this chapter, I first refer to previous research into the acquisition of metacognitive knowledge in language learning, and specifically into its role in second language writing. I then provide some background on the writing course and the learners, and explain how the development of metacognitive knowledge was a central and explicit course goal. In the main section of the paper, I present statements about metacognitive knowledge reported in the reflections of learners in the workshop group I taught, and consider the possible relationship between those instances of metacognitive knowledge and the development of learner autonomy. I then discuss some instances where the learners reported having transferred learning gained during the writing course to new situations. Finally, while acknowledging the limitations of this small-scale piece of research, I discuss some of the challenges for writing teachers and researchers which it highlights.

Previous research on metacognitive knowledge in language learning According to Flavell (1979: 906), metacognitive knowledge is a specialised portion of a learner’s acquired knowledge base that includes what learners know about learning. Wenden claims that metacognitive knowledge is stable, develops early, is stateable and consists of a system of related ideas (Wenden 2001: 45). Three different types of metacognitive knowledge — derived from a taxonomy developed by Flavell — are referred to in the cognitive and foreign and second language literature: person, task and strategic knowledge. In the literature on second language acquisition, these correspond to learner, task and process variables. Flavell’s taxonomy (1979: 907) distinguishes between the three different types of metacognitive knowledge in the following way: person knowledge (the knowledge people have about themselves and others as cognitive processors); task knowledge (the knowledge people have about

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the information and resources they need to undertake a task, and about the nature and degree of effort required to perform the task); strategy knowledge (knowledge regarding the strategies which are likely to be effective in achieving certain goals and undertaking certain tasks). Both Wenden (2001) and Victori (1999) claim that metacognitive knowledge has not been sufficiently investigated as an ‘individual difference’ variable that may account for differential performance in language learning. Furthermore, Wenden asserts (2001: 63): There is a need for research which documents the metacognitive knowledge learners bring to specific tasks of language learning and language use.

Wenden (2001) presents a summary of two types of previous studies of metacognitive knowledge: firstly, those which have attempted to explore the content of various subjects’ metacognitive knowledge, and, secondly, others which have sought to explore the relationship between learners’ metacognitive knowledge and other variables. Among the latter, she cites studies of metacognitive knowledge as it relates to goalsetting behaviour (Holec 1987), reading outcomes (Carrell, Pharis & Liberto 1989), the use of learning strategies (Yang 1999) and readiness for autonomy (Cotterall 1995). Wenden also presents excerpts from the introspective and retrospective accounts of three language learners. These accounts shed light on the way in which the three categories of metacognitive knowledge impact on the learners’ processes of task analysis and monitoring. In my own study of learners’ metacognitive knowledge about language learning (Cotterall 1995), three factors appeared most likely to indicate learners’ readiness for autonomy: the learners’ beliefs about learner independence; their beliefs about the role of the teacher; and their confidence in their ability to learn successfully (often termed ‘self-efficacy’). In a follow-up study (Cotterall 1999) with a different cohort of learners, I found a significant lack of awareness of the key metacognitive strategies of monitoring and evaluating progress, and a low level of self-efficacy. This suggested to me the importance of attempting to enhance learners’ metacognitive knowledge (both strategic and person) as part of an effort to promote their learning independence. Victori’s (1999) case study of two effective and two ineffective EFL writers also examined examples of their metacognitive knowledge in

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relation to writing. She found that the less successful writers’ metacognitive knowledge was limited and inadequate. This had an effect on the strategies these learners deployed, “underscoring the major role played by metacognitive knowledge in providing a rationale for the learners’ approach to writing” (1999: 537). In contrast, the metacognitive knowledge of the more effective writers was described as presenting a “more appropriate and comprehensive view of the writing process, which they were able to apply more flexibly” (1999: 537). Examples of the more effective writers’ metacognitive knowledge included their concern for the ‘audience‘ of their writing, and their dependence on planning as a strategy for organising their texts. This leads us back to the question — how does metacognitive knowledge contribute to learning outcomes? Wenden (1998: 526) suggests that metacognitive knowledge helps learners transfer prior learning to new situations: In learning transfer, metacognitive knowledge facilitates the appropriate choice of previously learned strategies to achieve learning goals and/or deal with problems encountered during the learning.

In other words, she believes that it is what learners know about their learning that equips them to deal with future learning tasks. If indeed metacognitive knowledge plays such a pivotal role in learning, how can it be stimulated? Flavell (1979: 907) claims that metacognitive knowledge is activated deliberately under three conditions: firstly, when the nature of the learning task requires conscious thinking and accuracy; secondly, when the task is new; or thirdly, when learning has not been correct or complete. This account of the way in which metacognitive knowledge is triggered seemed to fit WRIT 151 well, since the course tasks asked learners to consciously think and talk about the decisions they made in producing their texts. In addition, many of the tasks involved in producing the essay — identifying relevant source material, constructing an argument, integrating references — were new to students. Finally, all revision tasks required learners to articulate their understanding of what they had done differently in redrafting their texts, and why. During the semester, I hoped to gain insight into the relationship between my learners’ developing metacognitive knowledge about writing — one aspect of their “readiness for autonomy” (Cotterall 1995) — and their adoption of particular writing strategies. In investigating

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the learners’ readiness for autonomy, I set out to determine how willing and able they were to operate more independently as writers by the end of the semester. Given the relationship between metacognitive knowledge and autonomous learning behaviour, it seemed likely to me that the extent of individual learners’ metacognitive knowledge about writing would impact on their readiness to assume more responsibility for their writing as the semester proceeded. As their tutor, I had access not only to what the learners said about their writing, but also to their texts at all stages of the drafting process, and their reflections on the process. All this learner data was used in exploring the threeway relationship.

The structure of the writing course ‘Academic Writing in English as a Second Language’ (WRIT 151) was offered by the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, from July to October 2003. The course was open to all students whose first language was not English — both undergraduate and postgraduate — though the majority of the 150 students who enrolled each semester were undergraduates. Most, in fact, enrolled in the course in their first semester at university. The course lasted for 12 weeks and consisted of one 50-minute lecture and three hours of small group work each week. The workshop groups consisted of approximately 16 students each. The lecture (which I gave each week) was designed as an opportunity to efficiently convey information about the writing process, aspects of text organisation, selected writing strategies and more general academic topics such as the importance of critical thinking at university. The lectures also served as an opportunity to introduce the two major essay topics, stimulate thinking about those topics and present information on items included in the recommended reading list. I also made an effort to include practical writing activities and discussion tasks in each lecture, but given the size of the group, it was difficult to ensure active participation by all those who attended. While students were strongly recommended to attend the lectures, a small minority never did so, and therefore tutors regularly reviewed information presented in the previous lecture at the start of each workshop, for the benefit of those who had not attended.

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Workshop time was devoted to discussing ideas about writing; practising writing skills and strategies; giving, receiving and incorporating feedback; and reflecting on learning. Tutors were given a full set of guidelines on the desired focus and possible activities for each workshop, but the precise content and delivery were determined by individual tutors. Variables influencing the dynamics of different workshop groups included the proportion of students from a particular language background, the ratio of non-English-speaking-background (NESB) students born and educated in New Zealand to the number of international students recently arrived in New Zealand, and the degree of language proficiency of members of the group. It was impossible to control any of these variables since workshop groups were formed on the basis of student availability at the times of the scheduled workshops. Furthermore, at the time of the study, it was against the law to require a New Zealand–born NESB student to sit an English language test. As a result, every semester a number of such students had to be counselled to withdraw from the course as a result of their lack of academic literacy skills. In most cases, these students agreed to enrol in an intensive ‘English for Academic Purposes’ course before proceeding with their university studies. Given that one of the explicit goals of the course was to develop the learners’ independence as writers, the course aimed to integrate elements considered likely to encourage learners to assume responsibility for their writing development. Neither instruction on writing skills nor knowledge about writing in itself was considered sufficient to foster independence. However, when instruction and understanding are combined with opportunities to try out new skills, receive feedback and (crucially) reflect on how that experience modifies understanding and suggests action, there is real potential to foster independence of thought and action (Cotterall 2000; Cotterall & Cohen 2003). Learner independence was promoted in WRIT 151 through four key elements: 1.

Developing learners’ understanding of academic writing genres and expectations This part of the course — delivered principally through lectures — aimed to spell out some of the university’s expectations of undergraduate assignments in the Faculty of Humanities. While

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many students were enrolled in other faculties, it was considered impractical and potentially confusing to attempt to present the requirements for all of these. Instead, the conventions which applied to essays submitted in WRIT 151 were presented and explained to all students enrolled on the course. Given the range of countries and learning contexts the course members represented, information on the nature of argumentative essays and conventions relating to referencing and layout formed a central element of the knowledge base. This aspect of the course was considered fundamental knowledge underpinning satisfactory academic writing performance at university. Such knowledge is not, however, always made explicit at university. 2.

Providing instruction on and modelling of composing, revising and editing strategies At relevant points during the course, time was spent in lectures on the modelling of composing, revising and editing strategies, and giving the students time to experiment with them. The rationale behind this was that if students had had some exposure to a range of strategies already, tutors would be able to expand on this input in workshops. In practice, there was seldom time during lectures to do more than briefly introduce a particular strategy (e.g. ‘cubing’ — a strategy for generating ideas presented in Leki 1995: 29–30), allow five minutes for students to experiment with it, invite comments from one or two volunteers, and move on. The workshops were the main site for practising strategies.

3.

Providing opportunities for learners to practise composing, revising and editing strategies and receive feedback on them The third element of the course occupied the greatest amount of time and occurred principally during the workshops. Extensive opportunities were provided for learners to experiment with various strategies under the guidance and support of the tutor and their classmates. This element was central to the course design. Given the complexity of academic writing, learners needed time to practise and seek individualised help. Some learners were quick to pick up new ideas; others needed more time. The workshops provided the most flexible context for this kind of skill development.

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Integrating opportunities for reflection with instruction in strategies and process The final component of the course sought to integrate opportunities for the learners to adopt various writing strategies with prompts to reflect on their writing experiences. Reflection as a key psychological component of learner autonomy is well-documented in the research literature (Kohonen 1992; Little 1997; Lor 1998, cited in Benson 2001).

In the WRIT 151 context, I felt that reflecting on their writing could help the learners appreciate the relationship between the strategies they adopted and the texts they produced. I therefore considered it essential to encourage the learners to stop and think about what the cumulative experience of their writing practice on the course was teaching them. Reflection tasks asked learners to consider: (a) what they were learning about writing and about texts; (b) which strategies were helpful; (c) what additional knowledge they might need to complete future tasks; and (d) what they might do differently the next time. From a research point of view, I was most interested in the first and last of these four elements — the learners’ understanding of the writing tasks and their reflections on the learning process. I assumed that by reflecting on what they were learning as they completed various writing tasks, the learners might also be developing their “readiness for autonomy” (Cotterall 1995) by making their metacognitive knowledge explicit — a necessary precondition for informed action. The 12-week course was organised around the process of researching, planning, drafting, revising and editing two 1,200- to 1,500word essays. The assessment structure for the course was somewhat novel, in that credit was given (in the form of marks contributing to the final grade) not only for the final draft, but also for a revised form of the final draft, modified on the basis of feedback and reflection: Essay 1 Revision of Essay 1 Essay 2 Revision of Essay 2 Test

20% 15% 30% 15% 20%

More marks were allocated for the second essay based on the principle that learning from the process of producing and revising Essay 1 ought to contribute positively to the production of Essay 2, so raising expectations of a higher quality product the second time. In most cases,

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these expectations were fulfilled, with many students gaining bare pass marks for Essay 1, but performing significantly better on Essay 2. The course also involved a 50-minute test which required students to produce an argumentative essay in response to a prompt. The test was assessed both in terms of the quality of the product and of the writing processes. In attempting to evaluate the learners’ writing processes, the teaching team looked for evidence of planning, revision and editing. Lectures and workshop activities focused on principles and strategies related to key stages in the writing process. Lecture topics included the following: 1.

Critical thinking; unpacking the essay question The content of this lecture was twofold: firstly, a definition of the term ‘critical thinking’ was presented, accompanied by a discussion of reasons why critical thinking is considered an important part of university study in the New Zealand context; secondly, a series of strategies for understanding essay questions along with steps for organising a ‘plan of attack’ in addressing them.

2.

Developing an argument This lecture focused on the characteristics of the argumentative essay, explaining that both essays in the course would fit this classification. The lecture then modelled the way in which an argument might be developed for two fictitious topics, emphasising the need for coherence and support for key claims.

3.

Setting writing goals; planning and writing the first draft This lecture focused on individuals’ personal goal-setting. Learners were asked to identify aspects of their writing process that they wished to improve and to make a plan for working towards those goals. Attention was also drawn to the timeline involved in planning and producing a first draft, and to the need for learners to meet the advertised deadlines if they wished to take advantage of opportunities for peer review in class time.

4.

Signalling hierarchies of ideas in text This lecture presented conventional ideas about the structure of paragraphs, options for linking ideas within and between

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paragraphs, and examples of different kinds of support that can be provided for main ideas. 5.

Integrating sources This lecture presented some of the conventions associated with quoting and paraphrasing published authors’ ideas within the essay, as well as conventions for in-text citations and for listing references at the end of the essay. While some practice occurred during lecture time, this was followed up in workshops.

6.

Achieving coherence and cohesion in texts This lecture demonstrated the way in which texts can be made coherent and cohesive by drawing attention to the use of repetition, pronouns, synonyms, transition signals and other devices to link ideas in texts.

7.

Understanding and using feedback In this lecture I presented (anonymously and with permission) actual examples of tutor feedback on student essays, and asked students to discuss what the tutor might have intended by her or his comments. One key idea I attempted to convey here was that tutor feedback is not always easy to understand (or read) and therefore that it is acceptable to ask for clarification. In reality, of course, few of our first-year international students ever asked for clarification from their tutors in other courses. While their confidence gradually grew in their writing workshop groups through intensive practice with the same group of classmates and tutor over a 12-week period, the same dynamic seldom applied in their other courses, where they were often the only NESB student in a group of New Zealand students.

The learners The learners whose writing is reported on below belonged to the workshop group that I taught twice a week (see Appendix). Partly because of the unsociable hours at which the workshops were timetabled, the group consisted of only 13 learners (eight male and five female). All were undergraduates, but not all were in their first semester at university.

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Of the 13 learners, 11 were classified as ‘international’ by the university’s enrolment system, meaning that they had entered New Zealand on study permits for the express purpose of pursuing their education; and the other two were classified as ‘domestic’ students. This classification meant that, although they had not been born in New Zealand, these learners had obtained the right to reside permanently in the country, and had been resident in New Zealand for three and four years respectively. Six of the students came from the People’s Republic of China, two were from Malaysia and one each came from Cambodia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Nine of the students were enrolled for a Bachelor of Commerce degree and four for a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Instances of metacognitive knowledge in the learners’ writing While reflection was encouraged throughout the course — in all workshop activities, in one-on-one conferences with students and in peer feedback activities — the final piece of reflective writing was more substantial in length (800 to 900 words), and also broader in focus than any other such piece. Furthermore, whereas reflections written during the course tended to focus on discrete aspects of the writing process, or on issues related to specific essay topics, the final piece summarised learners’ understanding of the writing process, and their strengths and weaknesses as writers. Given my research questions — ‘What developments in learners’ metacognitive knowledge about writing can be observed during WRIT 151?’ and ‘What is the relationship between learners’ metacognitive knowledge about writing and their willingness to operate more independently as writers?’ — I felt that this final piece of writing would be more interesting to examine than any of the other pieces. The statements discussed below are therefore excerpts from the final piece of reflective writing submitted by members of my workshop group. (Consent to make copies of my entire workshop group members’ writing was obtained at the start of the course.) Given that one of the course goals was to develop the students’ metacognitive knowledge about writing, I set out to identify in these texts what knowledge about writing the students could report, and, where possible, to consider how that knowledge had informed their writing. In what follows, I report and discuss relevant instances of person, task and strategic knowledge (Flavell 1979).

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Person knowledge As mentioned earlier, person knowledge is the label used to refer to general knowledge learners have acquired about personal factors that facilitate or inhibit their learning, and also how those factors operate in their learning. For example, in writing about his experience of peer review, Daisuke noted: The reason why the peer response was not effective for me is because I write the essay very slowly. Therefore when we had the peer response, I had just written the outline of the essay. Consequently my partner struggled to give me some suggestions, because there was not enough information … I should have been better organized.

Here Daisuke recognises that his tendency to write slowly had prevented him from taking advantage of the opportunity the course provided for peer feedback. This is valuable learning about the impact of his personal approach to the task. His final words — “I should have been better organized” — may even indicate a willingness to modify this aspect of his writing behaviour in future, given that he can see the potential benefit of obtaining a peer response on his writing. In the next example, Andrea notes an increase in the fluency of her writing: Above all, during the WRIT 151 course, the significant development of my writing is increasing fluency … at the beginning of the course, I wrote 144 words in ten minutes, but at the end of this course the figure is growing up to 267 words. This is almost two times compared with the first one.

Andrea is referring to an increase in the number of words she was able to write during journal writing (10 minutes at the start of each workshop) by the end of the course. She reflects positively on the progress she made, expressing satisfaction at the dramatic increase in her rate of fluency. One clear outcome of this aspect of her person knowledge is satisfaction with her achievement. More than likely, her increased writing fluency encouraged and motivated her in her writing development. Additional examples of person knowledge in the data included statements of other positive outcomes of learning such as an increase in confidence and even a newly found enjoyment of writing.

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Task knowledge Task knowledge refers to what learners know about the purpose, nature and demands of tasks. The learners’ reflective writing included numerous examples of this kind of knowledge in relation to the task of writing an essay. Statements the learners made related to five aspects of writing-related task knowledge: • the essay-writing process • planning • task requirements • feedback • writing practice Michelle wrote about her understanding of what an academic essay involved: I learned the complete process of writing an academic essay in the last 3 months. There are four steps that I learned about writing an essay, understand the topic of the essay before writing and make a plan, find references and select them, start to write an essay and organize it, edit mistakes after finish writing.

Michelle’s words reflect what she understands about the steps involved in producing a university essay, and the sequence in which she believes a writer should undertake them. This simple summary is backed up by her experience of having produced two B+ essays; Michelle was the only learner in the group to achieve such high grades. Another student commented on the way in which planning helped in producing her writing. Christine explained: The effective plan could help us to improve fluency and make a good organisation. Before writing, brainstorming and planning the main ideas first can efficiently develop the organisation. I used to hesitate to write the next idea after finishing one idea, and this often wasted my times! Now I just spend about 5 minutes to plan, thus I can follow the procedures to organise quickly.

Christine’s metacognitive knowledge about writing includes an understanding of the positive effect of planning. Her comments suggest that, whereas previously she did not always plan or appreciate the value of planning, now she regularly plans her writing.

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Within this category of task knowledge, another learner (Tacey) commented on the particular requirements of academic writing: During this course I learnt … that supporting references are essential in academic essays. This is because if there are no supporting references, then the argument is based on my own opinions, which is subjective and not convincing, while a published reference is more authoritative …

Here, Tacey is able not only to identify the need for supporting evidence as one of the requirements of academic writing, but also to explain its rationale. The confidence with which she asserts this new knowledge suggests that Tacey is likely to incorporate supporting references in all the academic writing she produces from now on. The learners’ comments on feedback concerned its benefits in guiding the revision of their texts, and in one case, a perception that the value of peer review depended on the skills and preparation of the peer. The emphasis on peer feedback in the course was one of the features intended to support learners in the transition to more independent writing activity once the course was over. However, there was significant variation in the skill and commitment individual learners brought to feedback sessions. Finally, two learners commented on the role of practice in writing. While many of the learners referred to their intentions to practise more in the future, one learner (Sinath) also commented on the value of practice, saying: In this semester I learned that practicing writing more helps improve my skill.

Tammy’s reflection included a detailed plan for implementing writing practice in the future: I hope I can consolidate what I learn and improve the quality of my journal writing after this course. Firstly, I will keep practicing it. As I know, just practice is not enough. I will do more English reading and try to use more academic vocabulary. Thirdly, I will spend about 10 minutes for each of my journal writing of checking the new vocabulary and grammar (articles first) with my dictionary and related materials.

Tammy’s plan incorporates all the elements required for continuing growth as a writer. She intends to commit time to practising, but she

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also intends to increase her English language input by reading more. She will also attempt to ‘stretch’ her current competence by making an effort to incorporate new language items. Finally, she will subject her writing to scrutiny by editing it. Interestingly, her plan requires no tutor input; she is planning for independence. All these examples reflect knowledge about writing that the learners acquired during the course and that is now part of their understanding of the nature and demands of the process of writing academic essays.

Strategic knowledge Strategic knowledge refers both to learners’ general knowledge about strategies and their usefulness, as well as specific knowledge about when and how to use them. The students reported having learned about strategies related to many different aspects of writing an essay. For instance, they reported having learned how to: • plan an essay; • organise an essay clearly; • edit writing; • incorporate a quotation smoothly; • cite references accurately; • research a topic using the library and the Internet; • think critically; and • get started by writing the easiest part first. Typically the students expressed this knowledge in simple statements such as “I know how to plan my essay without referring to any instance of having adopted the strategy”. Clearly, then, this list reflects the learners’ awareness of these strategies without indicating their skill at adopting them. However, in a number of cases, this awareness developed into action, as will be discussed in the next section. Table 6.1 shows a breakdown of the number of different statements occurring in the data in each category. (The total number of statements was considerably more than 37, but many aspects of writing-related knowledge were reported by more than one student.) As can be seen, statements of task knowledge were most numerous, making up over half of the statements collected, and referring to 21 different aspects of task knowledge.

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Table 6.1 Breakdown of different types of knowledge statements

Person knowledge

Task knowledge

Strategic knowledge

(8)

(21)

(8)

22%

56%

22%

It is not clear why the learners produced more statements about task knowledge than about other types of metacognitive knowledge. It may be that task knowledge is the most concrete of the three types of knowledge and therefore easier to talk about. Person knowledge, on the other hand, can be thought of as involving a broader kind of reflection incorporating consideration of past as well as present and future experiences. Finally, strategic knowledge — perhaps the most abstract of the three — involves thinking about and articulating complex cognitive and metacognitive processes.

Transfer of learning In this chapter so far, I have presented evidence of learners’ understanding of factors affecting their learning, of the nature of the writing process and of strategies for completing writing tasks. But what use is such knowledge? How does it help learners? The most encouraging excerpts from learners’ reflections concerned a number of instances where learners reported having put their metacognitive knowledge into practice. I have labelled these instances as examples of ‘transfer of learning’ — transfer, that is, from the instructional setting of the writing course to some new task outside the writing class. Here is one report of this kind of transfer: I discover the principles that I was learning and practicing in WRIT 151 are very useful and helpful for my other academic writings. One example is that the effective plan can improve fluency in my IBUS essay. The number of words in the first draft was over 2500 words, which was more than the words required. It is known from experiences that reduce words are easier than increase words … (Christine)

Here Christine reports that she has successfully applied the principle of planning (that she learned about on the writing course) to the writing of an essay in her International Business course. As reported above, Christine identified planning as a valuable strategy for producing a

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well-organised and fluent essay. Here she reports having applied that knowledge in completing a new task. Similarly, Daisuke wrote about transferring his knowledge about paragraphing to his writing in other subject areas: When I wrote the essay for Asian Studies, I applied the basic structure of paragraphs (thesis statement, support, restatement) to all paragraphs in the essay. I succeeded to express my ideas clearly by applying the principle of writing.

As can be seen from Table 6.2, four of the 13 learners reported instances where they had transferred the learning gained on the writing course to other contexts. Table 6.2

Instances of learning transfer

Learner

Type of learning

Transfer to

Michelle

Planning strategy

Other courses

Christine

Planning strategy

Int’l Business essay

Christine

Referencing conventions

Int’l Business essay

Andrea

Critical thinking

Literature assignments

Daisuke

Paragraph structure

Asian Studies

I began the chapter by asking what gains in metacognitive knowledge about writing the learners might make during the WRIT 151 course. The previous section has provided examples of various gains in person, task and strategic knowledge attested to by the learners. Table 6.2, however, demonstrates that some of the learners not only acquired metacognitive knowledge, but also demonstrated the ability to apply that knowledge in new contexts. This, for me, is evidence of the development of their independence as writers. For example, by adopting a planning strategy in writing her International Business essay, Christine indicated that planning had become part of her strategic repertoire and that she was able to adopt this strategy appropriately in completing a task in a different course and context, without any prompting from a tutor. In other words, she was becoming more autonomous as a writer.

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Conclusion So what can we learn from this modest study? Firstly, the study’s limitations must be acknowledged. Clearly, what I have reported here are statements the learners made about their understanding of the writing tasks, writing strategies and their own skills as writers. These statements are not all accompanied by instances of learners acting on that knowledge. While I was able to consider informally the extent to which learners’ stated knowledge was borne out in the skill of their writing, no attempt was made to systematically test these claims. (Anyone who has coordinated a course of 150 students, while teaching one undergraduate and three postgraduate courses at the same time will understand why!) Indeed, some disjunction between the learners’ newly acquired metacognitive knowledge about academic writing and their ability to put it into practice was to be expected. Also, what people state they know and what they actually know may be two different things. However, my interest lay in documenting and exploring the learners’ stateable knowledge about academic writing by the end of the course, on the assumption that being able to articulate knowledge is a key stage in its acquisition. Examining different individuals’ understanding of the nature, demands and process of academic writing provided some indication of their readiness for assuming greater responsibility for their writing, since independence can only be acted on once understanding of the task involved has been achieved. Nevertheless, I also believe some lessons can be learned from this study. Firstly, the learners’ reflections indicate that metacognitive knowledge about writing was indeed emerging during the course. This suggests that the conditions created on the course favoured the development of this kind of understanding. Secondly, the data also revealed a small number of instances where learners reported applying their new knowledge to solve problems in new contexts. In these cases, the learners were sufficiently confident of their understanding that they took action on the basis of that knowledge. Each of these instances indicates a certain degree of independence on the part of the learner since they are autonomously applying lessons learned in one context to their activity in another. This study also highlights a number of pedagogic and research challenges. First and foremost, the learners were operating under extreme time pressure. At the same time as they were participating in

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the writing course, they were enrolled in other university courses which constantly required them to produce written texts of various kinds. For most learners, the writing course represented about 25% of their course load for the semester. In reality, this meant that few students had the time to reflect on their learning in the way that might be considered optimal. Furthermore, 12 weeks is a very short period in which to acquire significant knowledge and skill in formal academic writing. Secondly, the tutors faced the challenge of providing constructive feedback on learners’ drafts while ensuring that the students retained ownership of their texts. As is common in academic settings, the learning situation reinforced the tutors’ status as ‘expert’ writers. (Most of the tutors were either experienced university staff, or Master’s or Doctoral students in Applied Linguistics.) This meant that even tentatively worded feedback from the tutor on a learner’s draft often resulted in learners abandoning their original text and adopting suggestions made by the tutor. Clearly, such a situation is far from desirable, but the expertnovice nature of the tutor-student relationship made this difficult to avoid. Thirdly, this study suggests that, in addition to providing input on writing and practice opportunities, teachers of writing need to provide opportunities for learners to think about learning. This can be done by creating the circumstances which encourage metacognitive knowledge to develop. According to Flavell (1979), one of the conditions that encourages the activation of metacognitive knowledge is conscious thinking — in the sense of articulating understanding about learning in either speech or writing. This kind of conscious thinking was the hallmark of WRIT 151. Learners became comfortable in talking about their understanding of writing in relation to their composing and revising strategies, and the way they drew on that understanding to solve problems at various stages of the writing process. This thinking was accessible to me as researcher since they committed their ‘thinking about learning’ to paper whenever completing the cover sheets that accompanied all writing submitted to the tutor. A further challenge for teachers who wish to encourage their learners’ autonomy as writers is to structure the course in ways that not only support the development of metacognitive knowledge but also encourage learners to apply the knowledge they gain in class to the completion of new tasks outside class. For the students involved in this study, the kind of knowledge they were acquiring in the writing course was highly relevant to tasks they were required to complete on other

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courses, which gave them the ideal opportunity to try out the learning and put it to the test. However, links between WRIT 151 and their writing experiences elsewhere in the university were random at best. The challenge for researchers is to find ways of gathering evidence of learners’ metacognitive activity and the application of that knowledge in new contexts. Typically, the writing tutor has little access to the learners’ writing in other courses (but see Dunbar 2004 and Dunbar, in progress, for ongoing work in this area). Case study methodology (e.g. Hoffmann 1999) is well suited to this kind of approach since it allows the researcher to focus on an individual learner in considerable detail and produce an in-depth picture of the learner’s learning processes and development within that context. In order to internalise learning, learners need to link their metacognitive knowledge to their actions. This ability to transfer learning to new contexts — to activate it in completing a novel task — is the true test of a learner’s ability to acquire, internalise and act on relevant knowledge. For this reason, the development of metacognitive knowledge should be considered an important goal of any activity that seeks to promote learner autonomy.

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Appendix: Workshop group learners

Name

Nationality

Status

Gender

Degree Major

Samuel

Malaysia

Int’l

Male

BCA

Accounting

B

Qing

PRC

Domestic

Male

BCA

Info Science

C+

Chen

PRC

Int’l

Male

BCA

Marketing

B-

Andrea

PRC

Int’l

Female

BA

Education

B

Christine PRC

Int’l

Female

BCA

Int’l Business

B

Gu

PRC

Int’l

Male

BCA

Marketing

B

Daisuke

Japan

Int’l

Male

BA

Asian Studies

A-

Tammy

Korea

Int’l

Female

BA

Media

B

Pedro

Hong Kong Int’l

Male

BCA

Marketing

B-

Philip

PRC

Male

BCA

Money & Finance

B-

Sinath

Cambodia

Int’l

Male

BCA

Economics

B

Tacey

Malaysia

Domestic

Female

BA

Japanese

B

Michelle

Taiwan

Int’l

Female

BCA

Accounting

B+

Int’l

BCA = Bachelor of Commerce and Administration BA = Bachelor of Arts PRC = People’s Republic of China

Final grade

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7 Reflective lesson planning: Promoting learner autonomy in the classroom Lindsay Miller

Introduction Learner autonomy is a somewhat nebulous concept. It is, in Holec’s (1981: 3) widely used definition, “the ability to take charge of one’s own learning”. However, for language teachers wanting to develop a more student-centred approach in the classroom which might lead to the promotion of autonomy, this definition does not help to identify how autonomy can be achieved. A more detailed definition is Dam et al.’s view (1990: 102) that an autonomous learner is: an active participant in the social processes of classroom learning ... an active interpreter of new information in terms of what she/he already and uniquely knows ... [someone who] knows how to learn and can use this knowledge in any learning situation she/he may encounter at any stage in her/his life ...

This definition, I believe, helps us as teachers to understand what it is to encourage our learners to become ready to take charge of their own learning — to be autonomous. Dam et al.’s (1990) definition merits close inspection. For instance, the classroom is the focus of learning; the learner has to be active; the learner has unique knowledge that he or she can contribute to lessons; and what happens in the language classroom has some impact on what happens, or can happen, outside the classroom. In this paper I shall refer to Dam et al.’s definition of autonomous learners and illustrate, via a process I call ‘Reflective lesson planning’, how the concept of autonomy can be realised in the classroom.

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Background to learner autonomy The debate about learner autonomy has a long history, and one in which language has not usually been the central focus. Benson (2001) lists some of the philosophers and educationalists who have proposed autonomy as a learning goal: among them are Galileo, Rousseau, Dewey, Kilpatrick, Freire and Illich. These thinkers and scholars situate their discussion of learner autonomy in the realms of political philosophy, psychology or educational reform, and it is useful to keep these realms in mind when considering issues related to language learning autonomy as they help us to frame our discussions about language learning within the wider domain of the goals of education. The global issues related to learner autonomy are directly related to any debate about language learning and vice versa. Based on the previous writing on learner autonomy (see Benson 2001), Gardner and Miller (1999) highlight three possible reasons why teachers may wish to promote language learning autonomy: it enhances the personal characteristics of learners; it has political implications inside and outside the classroom; and it can be seen as an integral part of educational practices. From the perspective of personal characteristics, writers such as Kenny (1993) maintain that all students have different needs and wants which are often not met in conventional language lessons. As a response to teacher-fronted language lessons, students often follow the stereotype inherent in passive ‘consumer’ education: they follow the instructions but do not actively participate in their learning. Kenny states that language learners need to be given the opportunity to manage their own learning, to be active producers of their own knowledge rather than only passive consumers of education. Following a similar perspective on empowering learners, Benson (1997) and Pennycook (1997) argue for a more political view of language education. These writers advocate a critical pedagogical approach to language education in order to help learners move towards becoming autonomous. Benson and Pennycook see autonomy in an overtly political manner: autonomy is possessed by those who have power (the teachers) over those who do not (the students). Learners can only become more autonomous if they become more critically aware of the learning process. However, to become critically aware, learners need to be involved in, and given power over, their learning within the different stages of the language lessons that they take part in.

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Thus, approaches stressing either personal characteristics or a political orientation both argue for the rights of the individual learner within the educational system. Paradoxically, the oppressive nature of the educational system itself may also be the driving force that encourages autonomous learning. Benson (1997: 31) states that “Many teachers have turned towards practices such as self-access and learner training out of dissatisfaction with conventional teaching methodologies which are seen as socially oppressive or simply too constraining for effective and appropriate learning to take place”. When these practices are built into the educational process, then we have another view of how language learner autonomy can be achieved. Boud (1988) maintains that good educational practice should contain an approach to learner autonomy as part of the overall goals of education, and that promoting autonomy should become an integral part of the students’ learning experience as teachers cannot, and should not wish to, control every aspect of the learning process. As Boud (1988: 21) says, “It is not likely that students who are dependent on their teachers are going to be as effective in the world of learning or subsequent employment as those who have developed strategies which enable them to find and use their own resources for learning”. Encouraging learners to become autonomous in their language learning is a justifiable goal, regardless of whether we have a psychological, political or educational rationale. In the past 15 years, the Hong Kong government has made various efforts to increase teachers’ and students’ awareness of this goal — from offering teacher development sessions focused on preparing self-access materials (Education Department 2001) to promoting the establishment of selfaccess centres in all universities and many of the secondary schools in the territory (Gardner & Miller 1999; Curriculum Development Institute 2004). One area, however, where teachers still seem to need some guidance is in raising students’ awareness of their autonomy in the language classroom.

Raising learner awareness: examples from Hong Kong School teachers in Hong Kong are currently trying to implement the new curriculum guidelines of the Education and Manpower Bureau (EMB) (now the Education Bureau [EDB]) which focus on the need to promote learner autonomy in the classroom (see Miller, Tsang &

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Hopkins 2007). Teachers are encouraged to design and implement their school-based English language curriculum to include: “Promoting independent and lifelong language learning through developing students’ learning how to learn skills and encouraging learner-centred pedagogical approaches …” (Curriculum Development Council 2005: 4). However, many teachers I have talked with maintain that they are still unsure how to promote learner autonomy in their classes. The following two recent discussions I had with Hong Kong secondary school teachers illustrate that promoting autonomy in the classroom may not be all that difficult, or alien to what we already do as language teachers. The issue may not be ‘What can we do differently?’ but ‘Do we, as teachers, understand what we are already doing?’ and ‘How can we inform our learners that what they are already doing promotes learner autonomy?’ For example, in one conversation, a teacher asked me, “What is SALL [Self-access language learning] in the classroom?” I told her what I thought it might be in terms that would be familiar to this teacher — that is, group work, project work, presentations of work, peer help, etc. — at which point the teacher exclaimed, “But we do all of that already!” The teacher immediately brightened up as she realised that SALL did not have to involve complicated tasks and activities which would take her hours to prepare and perhaps even longer to introduce to her students. At the end of our conversation, the teacher decided that she might try and use the labels ‘self-access’ and ‘independence’ more when asking her students to take part in the activities we had discussed. In this way, the teacher began to frame better her own concepts of SALL and indicated that she would begin to make her students more sensitive to their roles as independent language learners. The second example shows how labelling something differently helped a trainee teacher re-orient her students to participate in an activity. The teacher told me that when she attempted to introduce Jigsaw Reading (JR) to her junior school students, the first experience was a disaster. The students did not respond well to the JR activity and their feedback was that it was boring and that they did not like the ‘reading’ task. A week later the teacher tried JR again with the same class, but this time she introduced the activity as a ‘game’. She explained to her students that they had to help each other learn something about what they had read in order to complete the game. At once, the whole class responded well to the idea of playing a game, and they eagerly took part in a similar type of activity to the one they

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had shunned the previous week. Once again, we see that how the teacher frames the activity helped the students to become more actively involved in their learning and hence take more responsibility together for what they are doing — even although the activity was teacherdirected to begin with. How we label things in classroom teaching is important. Introducing our students to the concept of autonomy by identifying how they are taking responsibility for some of their learning may be a good start in creating a culture of autonomous learning in the classroom. However, caution should be exercised so that we do not label everything as ‘self-access’ or some other buzzword; otherwise, the students will become confused when a lesson changes from teacher-centred to learner-centred. This shift from teacher- to learnercentred can be understood in different ways, and because learner-centredness is a concept which can be most closely associated with promoting autonomous learning in the classroom, it is important to have some way to contextualise this for teachers and learners. In the next section, I examine Nunan’s (1995) five stages of learnercentredness as one way to achieve this contextualisation for reflective lesson planning.

Five stages of learner-centredness Learner-centredness is a concept which is much discussed within the framework of learner autonomy. However, there are many interpretations of what learner-centredness is and for the term to be of use to language teachers we need some way to deconstruct it. One way this deconstruction can be usefully understood is in terms of a number of key dimensions. Nunan (1995), for example, looks at ways of closing the gap between the teacher and learners in language classes in relation to the experiential context, learning process and language content. From the experiential context, Nunan refers to teachers’ and learners’ beliefs about language learning, saying that “there is [often] a mismatch between the pedagogical agenda of the teacher and that of the learner” (1995: 135). The learning process refers to learner strategies and how learners need to become more aware of how they approach language tasks. The language content deals with the issue that learning and acquisition must both be accommodated in the classroom because better learning occurs when both are present.

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In order to close this gap between the experiential context and the learning process, Nunan suggests that there are five levels of tasks which can allow learners to become more involved in language lessons, and more aware of their learning strategies. These five levels are: awareness, involvement, intervention, creation and transcendence. The five levels for increasing learner-centredness have a lot in common with SALL activities, and the principles of learner autonomy, as cited by Dam et al. (1990), so we will consider Nunan’s five levels in more detail. These five levels have implications for the changing roles of learners and teachers in the classroom when developing learner autonomy, and I will also comment on this as we examine the different levels.

Awareness Awareness refers to sensitising learners to the classroom tasks and to the type of learning strategies they may use in the lesson. Raising learners’ awareness of their language learning may be considered a first stage in including learners more in their learning. By becoming more aware of what they are about to learn and how they might achieve this learning, the teacher is preparing learners for later, more demanding, roles in the lesson. Awareness-raising may simply be writing a topic such as ‘holiday’ on the board and bringing this to the attention of the learners, or asking learners to think about a previous holiday in preparation for taking part in a later discussion about holidays. The teacher’s role here is still very much the provider of information or stimulator, promoting learners to think.

Involvement Rather than the teacher always selecting the task or specifying how a task can be done, learners can be involved more in both these processes. For instance, in a reading lesson students may be asked to consider their own goals when reading the text: reading for complete comprehension versus reading for a general understanding to begin with. Then, if the reading text has several types of comprehension exercises, the learners may be asked to choose which exercise they would like to do first, second, third, etc. and why they want to do them in that order. Here the teacher’s role is more that of a guide and monitor.

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Intervention When students are allowed to adapt or modify a task or the way a task is done, then we have student intervention. This may be achieved, for example, when we ask students to take some responsibility for the lesson’s goals, and when we adapt or modify the tasks to take account of the students’ suggestions. This is in line with aspects of a negotiated syllabus and involves learners in taking more control of the content of the lesson and their approaches to learning. The role of the teacher now changes to that of a facilitator of learning and task negotiator.

Creation In order to give learners even more control over their learning, we may invite them to decide their own goals and prepare their own learning tasks during a lesson. In this way, the learners create their own lessons. In a writing lesson about ‘love letters’, learners may be asked to decide what kind of love letter they want to write (e.g. to a boyfriend or girlfriend, or to a favourite aunt) and what the purpose of writing such a letter might be (e.g. to show undying love, or to show you care for someone). One of the main roles of the teacher at this level is as a motivator for students to think creatively, and realistically.

Transcendence Transcendence, the last level of Nunan’s stages of learner-centredness, occurs when learners go beyond the classroom and work with authentic materials, and/or become teachers to their peers. In this situation, the teacher becomes more of an adviser or monitor while the students take control of most aspects of their learning. Nunan’s model is particularly valuable when considering the concept of lesson planning as his stages look at how to make tasks and task sequences more learner-centred. His sequential model is particularly useful in situations where teachers have to work from set textbooks but also want to encourage greater autonomy in their learners. By linking the concept of learner autonomy to lesson planning, we assist teachers to understand more clearly how the five dimensions can be realised in the classroom.

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Applying the concept of learner-centredness In this section, I illustrate how we can apply the five stages of learnercentredness, as outlined above, to the classroom in order to encourage greater learner autonomy. I focus here on one language skill — listening — and look at how we can understand it from the learners’ perspective; and in the following section I look at how we can use these insights to organise a reflective lesson plan for a listening class. Although listening is the language skill we use most prominently in our daily lives (see Burely-Allen 1995), it is the least taught in language classes. Some of the reasons for this are that listening is something many language teachers consider a skill which can be ‘picked up’: speaking a foreign language has always been seen as more important than listening by teachers and students; and most language teachers have probably never been taught how to listen themselves, so perhaps they do not see the need to develop this skill in their learners. Some recent research has highlighted the need to encourage a more rigorous approach to developing listening skills, especially for foreign language users, both outside and inside the classroom. In a series of articles, Goh (1997, 1998, 2000) describes how having language learners keep ‘listening diaries’ helps them to identify the strategies they use outside the classroom, and raises their awareness of their use of strategies. Some of Goh’s findings which are relevant to this chapter are that learners were able to activate a variety of metacognitive listening strategies while listening to authentic spoken texts (1997); that high-ability and low-ability language listeners made use of similar strategies, but that high-ability learners had a wider repertoire of strategies (1998); and that all her learners had similar types of listening problems, mostly to do with perception — they did not recognise words they knew, and they could not chunk streams of speech (2000). The issue of helping learners develop good listening strategies is the focus of Vandergrift’s (1997) work. Vandergrift has produced a summary of listening strategies based around the concept of metacognitive, cognitive and socio-affective strategies (see Table 7.1). This taxonomy of listening strategies, the main categories of which are shown in Table 7.1, is the culmination of much research into second-language listening. Teachers will find it useful to consult this taxonomy when planning a listening lesson with a focus on learnercentredness, and I draw on it later to illustrate the different learner

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Listening strategies taxonomy (based on Vandergrift 1997)

Metacognitive strategies

Planning: Advanced organization; directed attention; selective attention; selfmanagement. Monitoring: Comprehension monitoring; auditory monitoring; double-check monitoring. Evaluation: Performance evaluation; problem identification. Cognitive strategies

Inferencing: Linguistic; voice; paralinguistic or kinesic; extra-linguistic; inferencing between parts. Elaboration: Personal; world; academic; questioning; creative, imagery. Summarisation Translation Transfer (transferring information from one medium to another, e.g. listen and fill in a form) Repetition (e.g. drills) Resourcing (using a variety of resources to aid comprehension, e.g. dictionaries, notes) Grouping (grouping words together based on common attributes) Note-taking Deduction/Induction (using the language rules they have learned or developed themselves to aid comprehension) Substitution (using words that are familiar to the learners in place of complex vocabulary) Socio-affective strategies

Questioning for clarification Cooperation (working in pairs or groups to achieve a learning goal) Lowering anxiety Self-encouragement Taking the emotional temperature (learners realise that they will not always be happy with their level of comprehension)

strategies which may be employed when preparing a ‘reflective lesson plan’. (See Flowerdew & Miller 2004 for more discussion on the application of Vandergrift’s listening taxonomy.)

Reflective lesson planning In a series of short articles I wrote for Modern English Teacher (Miller 2000a–b, 2001a–d, 2002) I demonstrated how lesson planning can be done to involve students more in their learning. I would now like to

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take that idea further by applying the main concepts of promoting autonomous learners as identified by Dam et al. (1990), Nunan’s five levels of learner-centredness, and a strategy approach to planning a listening lesson to what I call ‘reflective lesson planning’ (RLP). Lesson planning is an activity all language teachers have been trained to carry out, and something which many teachers perform on a daily basis. However, the detail of planning depends on local and personal circumstances. For instance, when teaching in a traditional context with a heavy focus on learning from a textbook, teachers may write brief lesson plans which follow closely the exercises in the textbooks. On the other hand, when they have control over developing the materials, they may feel obliged to write more detailed lesson plans to guide them through the lessons. Teachers also have different approaches to lesson planning; for example, newly trained teachers may want to plan their lessons step by step, whereas older, experienced teachers may prefer to rely on what they know best, or may feel confident to involve their students in negotiating what will happen in the lessons. For the purposes of this chapter, a lesson plan is a written document which outlines the stages of the lesson with a concise description of each activity. A reflective lesson plan: 1. encourages conceptualising language learning in terms of enabling learning to become more autonomous within the classroom; 2. takes as its focus the promotion of activating learning strategies; 3. focuses on involving learners with their unique knowledge more in tasks in order to achieve mastery goals in their learning; and 4. empowers learners to continue developing their learning strategies outside the classroom environment. Thus RLP addresses the four key elements of the Dam et al. definition of learner autonomy that I identified in the introductory section. In addition to establishing clear learner goals for the students, RLP also involves the teacher in revisiting the lesson plan once it has been completed, prior to the lesson and also after the lesson. Becoming a reflective teacher is an important teaching goal which all teachers should strive for (Richards & Lockhart 1994), and this, I believe, can be achieved in part through reflective lesson planning. RLP is a different approach from normal lesson planning. In a normal lesson plan, the teacher focuses on the stages of the lesson with reference to language goals, which relate to the syllabus and materials, and so this type of lesson promotes performance goals in the learners.

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A performance goal is defined as learners seeking positive evaluations of their learning while trying to avoid negative ones (Hidi & Harackiewics 2000); that is, students attempt to outperform others in the class, with the emphasis on ability rather than proficiency. RLP emphasises mastery goals — an orientation towards trying to improve overall learning competency and achieve a greater understanding of the material rather than simply to comprehend it (Hidi & Harackiewics 2000).

Example of a reflective lesson plan for listening In this section, I examine a listening lesson on Gloria Estefan from a commercial textbook (Bell & Gower 1993). As presented in the textbook (Upper Intermediate Matters Unit 1), the materials suggest a performanceoriented goals approach. I then demonstrate that such a lesson can be changed using a more learner-centred approach by applying Nunan’s model and Dam et al.’s guidelines for learner autonomy to encourage a mastery orientation to learning goals. The textbook presentation of this lesson involves: 1. 2.

3.

A pre-listening activity, four while-listening activities and one post-listening activity. The pre-listening activity asks students to brainstorm what they already know about the singer, and the post-listening activity asks them to talk about their own families. As such, these two activities are learner-centred. The four main while-listening activities are text-focused and display features associated more with testing listening than developing listening, e.g. (a) Each exercise is based on extracting specific information from the tape-recording. (b) There is only one correct answer to the questions. (c) Students are either right or wrong. (d) There is no room for discussion about the questions or answers.

The listening lesson above can be redesigned using a learner-centred strategy-based approach. With this in mind, I have created a simple lesson plan containing three columns (see Table 7.2):

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Table 7.2 Reflective lesson plan

Activity

Language learning objectives

Strategy objectives/roles

Awareness 1. Pre-listening Teacher asks students to tell her/him who their favourite singers are, and why. Teacher introduces Gloria Estefan and elicits any information students may have about the singer.

Vocabulary activation To encourage learners to use adjectives to describe singers and their voices.

Objectives Teacher raises the students’ interest in the lesson by introducing the topic. Activation of students’ world knowledge. Strategies Metacognitive strategy: preparing to listen. Roles Stimulator of interest, provider of information.

Involvement 2. While-listening Teacher explains that they are going to listen to a tape about Gloria to find out something about her life. She will talk about work, family, personality, childhood. Teacher asks students what kinds of words they might expect to hear.

Vocabulary development Teacher elicits words from students about work, family, personality, childhood. Writes words on board. Has students explain words to classmates.

Objectives Learners are involved in selecting goals for listening. They can select the type of vocabulary they will listen for. Strategies Metacognitive strategy: directed attention. Roles Guide, monitor.

Intervention 3. While-listening Teacher has students draw a table (see below). They are told that while they listen to the tape, they can write some notes about Gloria. If they are more interested in one aspect of her life, then they should write more notes about that, e.g. focus on her personality.

Contextualisation of language Students consider their predicted vocabulary in the context of the singer talking about herself.

Objectives Students have a choice since they can: • focus on listening for their predicted vocabulary; • focus on one aspect of the singer’s talk; • listen for specific information; • listen for a holistic understanding of the singer. Strategies Cognitive strategy: focused monitoring. Roles Facilitator, negotiator.

Creation 4. Post-listening (group work) Teacher tells students that they all now have some information about Gloria,

Speaking/Listening skills development Use of vocabulary Agree/disagree Negotiate amount of information required.

Objectives Students must set some goals for themselves regarding the amount of information they wish to have about Gloria. They (continued on p. 121)

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Table 7.2 (continued)

Activity

Language learning objectives

and they must now share that information with each other in groups. They need to decide how much information they want for each of the categories in the table, and whether the information they share with each other is the same or different (i.e. have they all heard similar information from the tape?). Transcendence 5. Post-listening Teacher gives students 10 minutes to consider their own families. They can make some notes under similar categories as for Gloria. Then, in groups, they can tell each other something about their families.

Strategy objectives/roles can also decide how much time each member of the group has to present her/his information. Strategies Cognitive strategy: focused listening. Socio-affective strategy: group cooperation. Roles Motivator to be creative.

Speaking/Listening skills development Use of vocabulary Transaction language use Listening to extended texts

Objectives Each student has the opportunity to ‘teach’ the other group members about her/his family. They can use the type of language/vocabulary already used in the lesson, or use any other language they have. Strategies Metacognitive strategy: planning what to say. Cognitive strategy: directed attention. Socio-affective strategy: group work. Roles Adviser, monitor.

Post-lesson teacher reflections How well did this lesson go? Did I make the right decisions before the lesson? Did I make the right decisions during the lesson? Were there any problems? Can I overcome these problems in another lesson? Were the students involved in the lesson? Was I involved in the lesson? What would I like to do differently when I teach this lesson again? Gloria Estefan Table What I already know Work Family Personality Childhood

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Activity: This shows the level of independence in respect to Nunan’s model. Language learning objectives: This illustrates the language objectives of the lesson which are still very much part of the teaching and learning process. Strategy objectives/roles: This highlights other aspects of the learners’ roles and responsibilities as commented on by Dam et al. and Vandergrift.

Reflective lesson planning has two reflective stages: (1) after planning the stages of the lesson (first and second columns), the teacher should consider what strategy objective/roles (third column) are achievable. This helps to ensure that the teacher is aware of how much control she or he wishes to have in the lesson, and how much control the learners have; (2) after completing the lesson, the teacher can consider how well the lesson went, and make any necessary changes for future lessons (post-lesson teacher reflections).

Teachers’ comments on reflective lesson planning After presenting the idea of reflective lesson planning to a group of secondary school teachers on an MA TESL programme, I asked them to try this technique out in a lesson they were going to teach the following week. After they had given their lessons, I invited the teachers not only to reflect once more on their lesson plans but also to write a few comments on what happened in their classes and how they felt about using such lesson planning. Here are some of their representative comments: Teacher A: I found this very difficult to begin with as I have to look at the strategy table all the time [Table 7.1] and see what kind of things I am trying to do with the lesson. But after a while I got more used to the strategies and I think it is useful. Teacher B: I am not sure I can use this all the time as it takes up a lot of time, but it is interesting. In the class I found that the way I taught the lesson was different from my usual style ... something different was happening in this lesson today. Teacher C: I don’t usually make lesson plans now as I am an old teacher and I know how to teach from the book. But I tried the reflective

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lesson plan and I liked it. Why? Because it makes me think about what I am doing with my students. Also, I remembered to talk more with the students about what we are doing in the lesson and not just do it. Teacher D: Wow, big difference in my class today. My students are very good and always easy to teach but today when I use my new lesson plan they get even more noisy and ask so many questions. Really, I feel that I was not teaching English, but talking about learning with them a lot. I like this but I am not sure I can do this every lesson ... my panel chair will kill me for not getting through the book!

There are a few points to make about these comments. Changes involve a certain degree of additional work, and preparing RLPs may take additional time out of the teachers’ already busy day. Although these four teachers all thought RLP was useful, they were also aware that they had to do something extra to make it happen. The interesting point is that something did happen. Teacher A is somewhat noncommittal, but Teachers B, C and D all realised that when they changed their own perceptions of what they wanted to achieve in their lessons, then something ‘different’ took place. These four teachers had only one experience of preparing an RLP and then one opportunity to consider its usefulness. My contention is that if we, as teachers, make the effort to become familiar with such a technique, it will not be long before it is an integral part of our teaching practice. Even if we do not have control over the materials we use in the class (as is the case in many secondary schools in Hong Kong), we can still prepare lesson plans that encourage learners to be autonomous. RLP helps us do this. And if teacher educators promote this type of lesson planning to novice teachers, then this is how these teachers will approach each lesson to begin with.

Conclusion Much of the discussion in the literature about language autonomy and the types of activities associated with the promotion of autonomy has been situated outside the classroom context. The premise has been that learner autonomy is not something which can happen in a controlled learning environment like a classroom (but see Miller 2007). However, in this paper I argue that autonomy is an ideal which can be achieved

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in a classroom context through a reconceptualisation of how teachers plan their lessons. One way to do this is through reflective lesson planning. RLP ensures that teachers consider more than language goals when planning their lessons. Teachers also need to think about goals which involve learners more in their learning and promote the active use of learner strategies as a way of promoting greater autonomy. But autonomy is not an all-or-nothing concept, and several writers have argued for degrees of autonomy (e.g. Nunan 1997; Gardner & Miller 1999). The classroom context is one situation in which learners can begin to take control of their learning. The classroom is a known context in which learners can be introduced to learner strategies in a variety of ways (i.e. to different ‘levels’ in terms of Nunan’s model introduced here) so that they become more focused on developing mastery goals rather than proficiency goals in their language learning. By using RLP in the way I have suggested in this chapter, teachers can help learners to begin to take control over their learning — both within and beyond the classroom.

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8 The use of logbooks — a tool for developing learner autonomy Leni Dam

Introduction Even though it is nearly 30 years since the first steps were taken towards developing learner autonomy in the EFL classroom in Denmark (see Dam & Gabrielsen 1988), it is my experience that very few teachers have actually taken up the principles of autonomous language teaching and learning in their classes. It is still surprisingly difficult to get teachers to change from a traditional — usually entirely teacher-directed and teacher-fronted — approach to one which develops learner autonomy, where learners are given specific opportunities to get actively involved in their own learning.1 If a change of teacher role actually does take place, then it seems to be a problem for the teachers to continue the process towards learner autonomy. After a period of time, many teachers return to their usual and well-known teaching approach (cf. Taylor 1990; Eriksson 1993; Miliander 2008). Thus, the questions that we were asking over a decade ago, at the 1994 ‘Autonomy in Language Learning’ conference in Hong Kong, are obviously still relevant and of interest today: • Why have more teachers not taken up the principles of autonomous language teaching and learning in their classes? • How do we as teacher trainers support change towards learner autonomy in the EFL classroom? • How do we get teachers started? • How do we get them to continue?

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However, a possible solution to at least the last two questions might have been found. It looks as if the introduction and use of learners’ and teachers’ logbooks in the teaching/learning environment has provided both teacher trainers and teachers with a useful tool, partly for getting started, partly — and more importantly — for continuing with the development of learner autonomy.2 This chapter, which is based on experiences with my own classes over the years as well as with teachers in language teacher training workshops, deals with the use of logbooks in the EFL classroom aimed at developing learner autonomy.3 I will describe how school teachers wanting to develop learner autonomy in their classes can be introduced to the use of logbooks; and I will give examples of the actual use of logbooks in an autonomous classroom, showing how learners become actively engaged in their own learning through using logbooks in a way that supports individuality and encourages autonomous language learning.4 Finally, in my conclusion, I will reflect on future aspects in connection with the use of logbooks in our work towards promoting and encouraging learner autonomy in language learning classrooms. The use of logbooks will be discussed against the background of my previous attempts to get teachers to implement learner autonomy in the EFL classroom. In order to do so, I will describe a small survey I carried out in 1993.

Autonomy implemented ‘Autonomy implemented’ was the title of a paper I read at the AILA conference in Amsterdam in 1993 in which the survey was presented (Dam 1993). Data were collected during the years 1986–93 from 300 teachers from Denmark, Sweden and Spain who had attended workshops during that period. The aim of the workshops was, as stated above, to get teachers to start developing learner autonomy in their classes. The structure of the workshops was basically the same as is described in Breen et al. (1989: 125–33). They would begin with a session — lasting from one to three days — involving theoretical input, together with participants’ engagement in activities of relevance to the autonomous language-learning classroom.5 This first session would end up with participants planning steps to be taken in their own classrooms. The plans would act as a kind of contract with myself and

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the other course participants and would include details about the following items: • What am I going to change or develop or try out in my classroom? • Why am I going to do so? • How am I going to do it? • Problems or successes foreseen? After a period of about two months in which the plans were tried out in their classrooms, the teachers would meet again, partly to share experiences and partly to plan new steps to be taken towards promoting learner autonomy. In most cases, a new session of sharing experiences and planning ahead would again take place after two to three months. The total number of days allocated to the course depended on the economic situation of the municipalities who were sending their teachers to the workshops. Although courses varied in the number of days they lasted, all followed the basic sequence of: input — practice — sharing of experiences, leading on to further practice. The plans from the 300 teachers in question showed the following first steps to be taken towards the development of learner autonomy in their classes: • a change of learner role, involving more responsibility for the learners as regards choice of homework, choice of activity and planning of small projects; • a change of teacher role, involving giving more responsibility to the learners, speaking the target language all the time and letting the learners work in groups; • the introduction of a logbook/diary to be used by the learners for keeping track of the process of learning inside as well as outside school;6 • the introduction of new activity types focusing on authentic learnerlearner interaction and communication; • a focus on learners’ written as well as oral evaluation of the work undertaken; and • other individual preferences. These first ‘steps’ towards developing learner autonomy derived from a brainstorming session in which participants discussed possible changes they might carry out. Their ideas mirrored the input given and the activities undertaken during the workshop. The teachers were then asked to decide which step they found the most important when

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implementing the principles of learner autonomy. They were requested to focus only on one of the steps suggested. Table 8.1 shows the choices of the 300 teachers in percentage terms. Table 8.1

Percentages of teachers planning to try out the various changes in their classrooms

What to change or try out

Percentage of teachers

Change of learner role

52

Change of teacher role

16

Introduction of a diary

10

Introduction of new activity types

8

Focus on evaluation — i.e. what to evaluate, how to evaluate, and when to evaluate in the English lessons

7

Focus on materials — i.e. try out new or alternative types of materials

1

Other things e.g. the organisation of the classroom, the use of posters, group work

7

It was interesting, though not surprising, to see that just over half the teachers believed that the development of learner autonomy starts with the learners. As I followed the teachers progressing through the training workshops, it was also of interest to me that the group of teachers focusing on a changed teacher role seemed the most successful in pursuing the development of learner autonomy in their classes (cf. Dam 2003). Unfortunately, most teachers did not pursue the development of learner autonomy, although some of them did change their traditional teaching towards something that might eventually turn into some kind of learner autonomy. Although most teachers still saw that learner autonomy required a change in learners rather than in themselves, their written self-reflections and evaluations at the end of the courses showed that they had to a certain extent incorporated the ‘new’ ideas from their action plans into their teaching. They also claimed that the workshops in one way or another had had a positive influence on their teaching: they had become more aware of what they were doing in their classrooms and why they were doing it. However, later meetings and also interviews with some of the teachers revealed that many classrooms remained teacher-directed and teacher-controlled, with no space for the learners to truly influence or control the learning process. This phenomenon is also reported in Taylor (1990), Eriksson (1993) and Miliander (2008).

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There is no doubt that the structure and the basic intentions of the workshops were excellent for introducing change. A phase starting from and based on the teachers’ own experience, followed by actions taken in their own classrooms, and ending with the sharing of experiences with other teachers as the trigger for new actions in the classroom, was in reality an action research model that was socially mediated. However, once the workshops ended, the question of how it would be possible not only to get the teachers started, but also to keep the process going, became pertinent. How could teachers keep the wheels running, so to speak? Which ‘tool’ would do the trick? Looking at the data from the survey it was obvious that a tool which is perceived by the teachers as unthreatening is the best way to encourage them to change their role and their teaching — in this case towards implementing learner autonomy. Even though the introduction of a diary/logbook had been chosen as the most important first step by only 10% of the teachers in the survey, the use of logbooks could be an answer to the above questions. At first sight, the introduction of learners’ logs into the classroom looks as if it simply involves a change of learner role and learner behaviour, so it would not be perceived as threatening to the teacher. Also, the use of learners’ logbooks would out of necessity imply a change in both teachers’ and learners’ roles. Furthermore, it would facilitate evaluation — a most important issue in the autonomous classroom. Before specifying the function of logbooks in the process of developing learner autonomy, a definition of an ‘autonomous classroom’ might be useful. I define it as a teaching/learning environment in which the teacher is expected to provide learners with possibilities to be consciously involved in their own learning — to be autonomous learners. It is also a setting in which the learners are expected to be actively engaged in their own learning. Active involvement facilitates awareness of the different elements involved in, and when, learning — an awareness to be made use of in other learning contexts (lifelong learning). In other words, the autonomous classroom entails a shift from a teacher-directed teaching environment to an approach which offers the possibility of a learner-directed language learning environment. It is this shift that might be facilitated by the use of logbooks for teacher and learners alike (see Dam 1995, 1999a). When used in the autonomous language learning classroom, a logbook acts as a record of the events taking place during a teaching/ learning period, inside or outside the classroom. Learners use individual

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logs in order to keep track of their learning process; and teachers can use logs to enter plans for the teaching/learning sequences and subsequently make notes in order to be fully aware of the ongoing process. Apart from being a tool for the individual learner to have a record of events and thus keep track of his or her personal learning process, the log can also be used for authentic communication between the learner and the teacher — orally when looking at the learners’ entries together, and in writing if and when the teacher gives written feedback in the logbooks. In this way, the log gives the teacher insights into the learners’ thoughts and ways of learning when going through the learners’ record of events — insights which otherwise are not easily obtainable (see also Toogood 2006: 11). A teacher’s logbook is similarly a tool for the individual teacher to keep a record of events taking place during a teaching/learning period. It will ultimately show the planning, the carrying out of plans and the evaluation of the ongoing process in the classroom. My focus in this chapter, however, will be the use of learners’ logbooks as tools for learners as well as teachers when developing learner autonomy.

Introducing logbooks to teachers in workshops It is important that change — in this case, the introduction to the use of logbooks — starts from an insight into the rationale underlying the change. Moreover, personal experience of the change in question is needed. It is therefore essential that the teachers become acquainted with the use of a logbook before they are asked to make use of one in their classrooms, for themselves and their learners. Consequently, I have more or less forced the teachers in my workshops to use a logbook during the course, similar to the way their own learners could be encouraged to make use of a logbook. Teachers are required to: • keep a record of the ongoing events in the workshop; • enter any reflections they might have in connection with an activity or a theoretical input; • evaluate the process as well as the outcome of a session; and • enter plans for steps to be taken in their classrooms (‘what’ and ‘why’) — as well as other things to be done ‘out of class’ — their homework, so to speak.7

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However, in order to turn it into a successful tool, it is important that these notes are made use of in the process of learning — in this case the teachers’ own learning. Space and time are therefore given during the workshops for sharing and discussing reflections among the participants themselves as well as between participants and the workshop leader. I also urge the teachers to make use of their logbooks from the course when carrying out action plans in their classes. In this way, a teacher’s course logbook is the beginning of a teacher’s logbook in the autonomous classroom.

The use of logbooks in the language-learning classroom Getting acquainted with the use of a logbook in the course of teaching and learning is a long and hard process for teachers and learners alike. This can, of course, be said for every aspect of the development of learner autonomy (Dam 1995: 6). Although there is no single correct way of using logbooks, some ways seem more successful than others when it comes to the development of learner autonomy. In my experience the following issues are of utmost importance: • The learner must feel ownership of the logbook and regard it as a useful tool in the learning process. • The teacher’s reasons for introducing the logbook, her expectations and demands for the use of the logbooks, and any ‘rules’ regarding ongoing negotiations between teacher and learner, must be made clear to the learners from the very beginning. • The teacher must set aside time and space for the learners to keep their logbooks and use them for reviewing learning incidents, for self-evaluations and for discussions with their peers or teacher. The following section gives examples of how these three issues can be handled in the language classroom.

Personalising logbooks The most important issue seems to be the degree to which it is possible for the teacher to come up with suggestions which allow learners to make the logbook a personal document. Let me mention a few practical

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ideas. In classes with younger learners, making the log personal can be done by giving the learners time and ideas for decorating the covers of their exercise books, so that they really become ‘My own English book’. Learners can also cut out English words from magazines or advertisements and glue them to the cover — an excellent first-lesson language activity for beginners. Older students, as well as the teachers in the workshops, also enjoy having a nice, personal book for their work. Another way of making the logbook personal is to let the first page be ‘About myself’, an idea which is, of course, relevant at all ages and levels at the beginning of a language course. The idea is the same, but the contents will vary according to the setting. Figure 8.1 shows an ‘About myself’ page from a 10-year-old beginner’s log. It shows that at a complete beginner’s level it is possible to express things ‘About myself’ in simple terms and with the help of a photo.

Figure 8.1 An introductory page in a beginner’s logbook

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Apart from these — to a certain degree slightly technical — ideas, it is also important that the logbook provides a personal documentation for the ongoing learning process. Included in this documentation will be: • personal aims and objectives within the overall curricular guidelines and objectives; • plans and the carrying out of these plans in the daily work in class; • what has been learned or achieved, and how; • individual homework, according to the aims and goals set up; and • an evaluation of the work undertaken.

The daily use of the logbook — structure and contents Especially at the beginning when the logbook is being introduced, it is important that the teacher specifies her expectations for the contents as well as the use of the logbook. This can and should be combined with the teacher’s reasons for introducing the logbook into the process of classroom learning, such as: • an insight into the individual learner’s ongoing work and processes: How did I spend my time? What did I achieve?; • documentation of work done; • a reminder of aims, contracts, homework; • progress; • a tool for awareness-raising for learners and teachers alike; • a tool for the teacher to get to know the individual learner better; and • a starting point for communication between teacher and learner, and between learners themselves, about the work undertaken. Particularly when working with schoolchildren, but also with adult refugees with very little language, it is my experience that using the logbook as part of a daily routine is most successful. This works best when the logbook is kept as a notebook while work is undertaken and not only at the end of a lesson. In addition, it is important that the teacher provides a model of logbook use in the classroom. Does the teacher have the logbook open next to her when discussing things with individual learners or groups of learners? Do the learners see the teacher making notes about agreements or problems mentioned during a discussion? Does the teacher start a discussion by looking at a previous date in the logbook and the contract made then? Does the teacher enter her

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evaluation at the end of a lesson, to be used in a joint evaluation with the whole class? The teacher’s logbook is in many ways similar to that of her students, but it is not open for students to see or comment in, as it is a tool for the teacher when planning, carrying out and evaluating lessons. The point is that the teacher keeps the plans, comments, and evaluations open for discussions with the students. In my experience, if learners at school level leave their logbook entries till the end of a lesson, the logbook will not become an active tool for involvement in their own learning.8 My worst experience in this respect was the following story from a teacher in one of my workshops. Her plan was to introduce the logbook in her class of 7th graders (14-year-olds). When she returned to the second phase of the workshop, she claimed that her learners had more or less stopped working in the English lessons. Of course, I was just as shocked as she was and asked her to explain to me exactly how she made use of the logbooks. “At the end of a lesson the learners have to enter what they have been doing during the lesson and write what they have learned and how they liked the lesson”, she said. Now, the majority of this class were boys who hated writing and they had soon found out that the less they did, the less they had to write! It is clear from the way this particular teacher used logbooks in her classroom that they were not an interactive element of the learning process. This story underlines how important it is for teachers to make their expectations and demands for the use of the logbook clear to their learners. This is especially important if the logbook is going to be used for communication and cooperation between the teacher and learner in the learning process. The demands that I myself have outlined for my students’ use of logbooks at intermediate level can be seen in Figure 8.2. Hopefully, it is obvious that these demands form a frame within which the individual student’s learning will be documented, i.e. visible for the learner as well as for the teacher. These demands will be placed on the inside of the cover of the logbook and will vary according to the age group in question — they will be much simpler at beginners’ level, with very young learners perhaps even specified by means of pictograms. Apart from placing them in the learners’ logbooks, it is also a good idea to write the demands on a poster that can be displayed in the classroom.9 A simple page showing the outline of the structure indicated above can be seen in Figure 8.3.

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Your logbook should clearly show: — your aims for a specific period or task undertaken; — what you have done and with whom you have worked during a lesson; — evaluation of the work undertaken at the end of a lesson; and — homework and perhaps plan for the following lesson. In order for me to support you in your learning, it is important that you remember to: — write day and date at the beginning of a lesson; — number your pages; — enter a margin for my comments; and — write in a reader-friendly way. Figure 8.2

Teacher’s demands for the structure and contents of the learners’ logbooks

Figure 8.3 An original page from a logbook showing the structure required by the teacher

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Examples of entries in learners’ logbooks The following examples are entries copied directly from logbooks belonging to 14- to 15-year-olds in their fifth year of English.10 The extracts show how learners at this age can and will express the work taking place during a lesson. The basic structure of the entries follows the structure shown in Figure 8.3. The data derive from average to above-average learners who at this stage are capable of writing their comments and thoughts in English. Weaker and younger learners’ entries will be shorter, less correct and with more Danish words, but the basic structure shown in Figure 8.3 will be there (for more data from learners’ logbooks, including entries from weak learners, see Dam 2006). Younger learners will also to a large extent evaluate their work by the use of smileys or scales from 0 to 10 followed by a few comments, and ‘contracts’ (plans for work) might be written in Danish. The selected extracts show in particular examples of: • personal aims within the curricular guidelines (distributed to the learners at the beginning of term); • learners’ selection of partners and work undertaken with peers; and • self-evaluation as well as peer-evaluations. Figure 8.4 comes from the beginning of term. An above-average learner, Karsten, and a weak learner, Lasse, worked together, with the partnership being decided by them. As far as I remember, the reason was

Monday, 12th August 1. Share homework with Lasse Lasse has written some about my holiday, as he should. But with so many mistakes, that I didn’t bother to correct them. 2. Official demands handed out — Read it (again). — Find important things. 3. My contract First get just as clear in my speech as I was before the holiday. Become better at talking like English is my first language This year I would like to work with different sorts of accents and ways to write. 4. Homework — Find out what to do tomorrow (Find a reader and read) 5. Evaluation: An ordinary lesson, nothing bad, nothing good. Figure 8.4

Above-average boy working with a weak learner

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that Lasse needed, and wanted, Karsten’s help for reading the curricular guidelines. Karsten’s remark about Lasse’s mistakes in “share homework” might sound a bit arrogant — an arrogance that wouldn’t be shown towards Lasse — but it illustrates a ‘good teacher’s insight’ as regards when and when not to start correcting mistakes. The example also shows Karsten’s very precise and well-argued personal aims for the term. In the middle of term, similar clear arguments (partly for progression made, partly for new personal aims) can be read in a logbook from an above-average girl (see Figure 8.5). — I decided to become better at: varied vocabulary, new expressions, use more new words in my texts, learn to speak more fluently, a.m. (a.m.= and more) — I have become better at: Making new expressions, learn to speak more fluently, and varied vocabulary. — I know it because: My mum has told me that I have become better at speaking more fluently, in my story on page 17 I have used more new expressions in it and I fell that I also use more varied vocabulary when I talk. — My objectives for next period: I will: Again try to get a (better) varied vocabulary* and still speak English all the time and still use more good/new expressions in my language. And last but not least, I will find more new words. * such as I will try not to write then or now or …, twice in the start of a sentence. Figure 8.5

An above-average girl

As opposed to these very precise decisions on and arguments for personal aims by ‘above-average learners’, the average learner in Figure 8.6 shows less distinct aims. This does, however, have an Monday, 6th January 1. Who to work with and what to focus on in January. Things I want to focus on: — speak fluentcy English — practise my grammar — develop my vocabulary — practise my pronunciation The students I want to work with: Emrah, Karsten, Lars P, Jan Louise. 2. Leni is doing her best to form the groups we want, it looks a little problematic, but I guess she will find out in a minute. 3. Homework: Read in my book called “Rebecca”, and make a January page. At home: I forgot that I didn’t have my book anymore, so all I did was making my January-page. Figure 8.6

An average boy

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advantage when it comes to cooperation with others as being less precise gives scope for an open discussion with his partners when having to decide on a project: Which joint project can support his needs? Eventually, the teacher’s intervention and help might be called for when having to set more precise aims for the work to be undertaken. Figure 8.7 is an example of entries made by an above-average girl working with a weaker girl over a period of one month from 30 April till the beginning of 3 June.

Tuesday, 30th April 2002 1. Present the last projects. A story + tape by: Kasper S and Nicolai. Comments: I think that it was a good, but short story. Because they had a good internation and they were good at acting like other persons. A magazine by: Simon and Jonas. “The small magazine”. Comments: I read a page about some girls from Baywatch, and think it was a borring page because it didn’t have any colours and almost no text. 2. Form new groups and find new projects. I’m going to make a story and record it on tape and I’m going to do it with Louise A. We want to do it because we want to improve our language by speaking, new expressions, and writing. It is also a long time ago since Louise A and I have worked together. We need two weeks. 3. Homework: May page, find ideas for a story, read+translating 4. Evaluation of the day: I think it was a good day, because I’ve got a good partner to work with & we have promised each other that we will work hard. So that’s why it was a good day. Tuesday, 21st May 1. 2 minutes’ talk with Louise A. We talked about: what we have done in the “holiday”. Louise has been at her big brothers place and they have been rollerblading. 2. Write our story. 3. Homework for Monday: Read+translating, find ideas for what can happen in our story. 4. Evaluation of today: I think it has been a good day, because we keep finding new ideas and new words for our story. I think that I have improved my vocabulary a little, because we have learned some good new words. Such as flank. Monday, 3rd June 1. Share homework with Louise A. Louise has made a very nice and colourful June page, but there isn’t so much text. She has also read in her book. She was very good at reading aloud and translation. But I think it is too easy for her, because she, almost, can’t find any new words in it and she have no problems by reading it. Figure 8.7

An above-average girl working with an average to below-average girl

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The entries in Figure 8.7 show: • peer-evaluation of peer-presentations of projects as well as the partner’s homework; • forming groups and deciding on a project; and • self-evaluation of a day’s work. What is of interest here is the nice way that this girl — as opposed to the boy in Figure 8.4 — manages to give very useful peer-feedback. She comments on the positive things and gives ideas for improvements. Furthermore, she has reached a stage where she automatically gives reasons for her decisions and arguments. As mentioned earlier, dialogue between the teacher and the individual learner via the logbook is vital. It can of course be oral, but this takes time if done properly. Teachers’ written comments and responses in the learners’ logbooks have several advantages. They can be read and used by the learners themselves in their process of learning and developing learner autonomy, and they can be the starting point for discussions between the teacher and learner (cf. Figure 8.8). Most important, though, might be the fact that written comments force the teacher partly to enter into the thoughts of the learners, and partly to consider carefully how best to support them. Very brief teacher comments can be seen in Figure 8.8.

Figure 8.8 A page from a logbook with teacher’s comments

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Learners’ evaluations of the use of logbooks At the end of their 8th grade11 (fifth year of English), the class in question was given two questionnaires about the use of logbooks. Apart from a newcomer that year, I had been teaching this class since they were beginners in learning English and logbooks were introduced to the class from the very first day (see Figure 8.1). Unfortunately, only 14 out of 17 students were present on the day they were given the questionnaires. In the first questionnaire the learners were asked two questions: • Good things about keeping a logbook/diary? Why? • Bad things about keeping a logbook/diary? Why? The learners were allowed to answer in English or in Danish, and two learners chose the latter language. This is a typical answer to the first question: You will always know what you did. That’s very useful. You will know what your homework is. You will remember things better, because you are writing them down. You won’t have all these loose papers. You will be better at spelling because you are writing all the time what you did and other things. You will get a better view over the things you are doing.

I have summarised below the answers from the whole group. The numbers in brackets indicate the number of students coming up with identical or similar reasons: • Is a reminder of what you have done and when — even after many years (9) • Keeps things in order (everything in one book — no loose papers) (6) • Reminds you of your homework (5) • Supports writing and spelling (4) • Helps you to keep track of what you are doing, your outcome, and your progress (3) • Is a place for useful and important notes (2) • Makes things easier (1 weak student) • Other comments: – You can express your thoughts in writing — instead of just storing them in your head. – You will remember things better when writing them down.

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To the second question, an atypical answer — coming from the newcomer in the class — was: It can be a little boring to write the same things all the time. Sometimes it’s a little waste of time, especially the evaluation; maybe you could be a little more ‘creative’? (translated)

However, seen in the light of the discussion in the previous section, it is obvious that this is a student who has not reached the stage of autonomy equivalent to, for example, the above-average students cited earlier. He still finds evaluation “a little waste of time”, and is still relying on the teacher’s “creativity”. It is clear that the teacher has not provided adequate support for this learner’s learning process and development towards learner autonomy. The other answers were as follows: • Nothing (9) • It takes time (2), with the following arguments: – but if you are interested it doesn’t matter. – it is annoying if you haven’t got time for it. • If you forget your logbook you haven’t got anything to work in (1) • It shows you haven’t done your homework (1) • Not used to it (1 new boy) • Sometimes a waste of time if you write the same things (the quote above) (1) In the second questionnaire, the learners were asked to react to some statements about the benefits of using logbooks by indicating on the lines to what degree they agreed or disagreed with them. The statements derived partly from previous learners’ experience expressed in questionnaires similar to Questionnaire 1, and partly from my own and other teachers’ experiences (see Dam 2000: 33–5). Figure 8.9 shows the design of the questionnaire and the learners’ answers. The lines were ‘open’ with no marked sections, a format the learners were familiar with and often used when evaluating in their logbooks. In my view, the above evaluations are significant for two reasons. Firstly, the use of a logbook has without doubt influenced the learners’ awareness of their own learning and their ability to express this awareness. Secondly, the learners’ comments are by and large equivalent to the comments from teachers when they mention either problems or successes when using logbooks in their classes (see Dam 2000: 33–5).

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Also, the learners’ voices in evaluation, together with the examples of entries in their logbooks, show that they are capable of taking over responsibility for their own learning in cooperation with and under the guidance of the teacher. This ‘evidence’ is, of course, supportive for teachers when entering into a new teacher role with less control and subsequent uncertainty.

It is said that the following reasons support the learning of English by the use of a diary/logbook. Indicate on the lines whether you agree or not — and give reasons for your answer. 1. By using the diary one’s written English will be improved. Disagree........................................................................................................... Agree

Nine learners fully agreed; the rest placed their responses in the marked area. Why? • I think that you learn a lot by writing, and it is also good that not everything is done orally. (translated) • Yes, because you write all the time. Then you must improve your writing, I suppose. (translated) • E.g. if you write an evaluation of the day every day then you will definitely improve your written English because you learn a lot of new words by writing an evaluation, but also by writing small notes of what you’ve done when you’ve finished something. • You are writing all the time, and I think it’s obvious that you in that way improve your writing. 2. By using a diary one keeps track of what one has done and what one has learned. Disagree......................................................................................................... Agree

Nine learners fully agreed; the rest placed their responses in the marked area. Why? • I definitely agree. And it is also fun to look back. (translated) • I suppose you do when you write down everything — every lesson. (translated) • As I mentioned on page1, it’s very important to keep up a nice and useful diary because you can keep an eye on what you’ve learned over the year, and use the important notes you’ve written down. • Yes, I nearly agree, but sometimes you don’t use the diary in that way. Sometimes you forget to go through it. I think it would be better if I had done that a little more.

(continued on p. 143) Figure 8.9

Responses to statements about the benefits of using logbooks

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3. By using a diary you become more aware of how you learn English. But you also learn to structure your own work e.g. projects. Finally it supports cooperation with your partner(s). Disagree.......................................................................................................... Agree Nine learners fully agreed; the rest placed their responses in the marked area. Give reasons: • I suppose you do. It is good, because you can look back to see how you worked with your projects, who you worked together with and how you felt about working — the evaluations. (translated) • Yes, because everything is written down: your opinion, the activities, comments on the group’s work, etc. (translated) • You learn to keep track of your things and how you work with a project. You also comment on your group work. A logbook can help you keep track of many things. • I agree because you can see in the diary that you are improving. 4. It is claimed that the logbook is a good tool for communication between parents, students and the teacher Disagree...................x..............................................................x........................ Agree 10 students fully agreed; 2 placed their responses in the marked area; the crosses indicate the last two learners. Give reasons: • Of course it is. Unfortunately, my parents are not always interested. But when they are, it is good; because then they can see what I am doing and the demands. (translated) • Everybody can see what the student has done, and can see if the student has progressed. (translated) • Because teacher and parents can follow the student’s work and see if he/she works seriously and concentrated. Possible improvements can also be seen in the logbook. • Only if the parents see the diary. Figure 8.9

(continued)

Concluding remarks I started out by asking the following questions: • Why have more teachers not taken up the principles of autonomous language teaching and learning in their classes? • How do we as teacher trainers support change towards learner autonomy in the EFL classroom? • How do we get teachers started? • How do we get them to continue?

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There is no doubt that the model described for teacher training, both pre- and in-service, is extremely powerful when it comes to introducing and supporting change — in this case towards the development of learner autonomy (see Breen et al. 1989; Dam 1999b). In this chapter, I have argued that the use of logbooks for both starting and sustaining the development is similarly powerful for a number of reasons: • First of all, the introduction and use of a logbook in the EFL classroom is not face-threatening to the teacher. • By using logbooks in the way described, the teacher will of necessity get involved in the learners’ learning process and is forced into a role which differs from that in the traditional teacher-fronted classroom. At first sight this might seem more difficult, but the satisfaction gained from being a ‘professional’ and yet ‘open’ participant in the learning process will soon make up for this. • Because the use of logbooks is an open and never-ending process for the teacher, I believe that we have here come across a tool for ‘keeping the wheel going’ — for getting teachers to continue their work towards learner autonomy in their classes. New technologies have provided teachers and learners with a number of tools for creating and working with electronic logbooks. However, unless the teacher is fully aware of the underlying principles for the use of a logbook in the course of developing learner autonomy (cf. Little 1991), it can turn out to be a useless and time-consuming tool in the language classroom. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the use of the logbook along the lines suggested in this chapter, in whatever form, has a central place in teacher training courses. There is no doubt, either, that teachers and learners are prepared for a change towards lifelong learning — towards the development of learner autonomy. Therefore, the question ‘Why have more teachers not taken up the principles of autonomous language teaching and learning in their classes?’ will hopefully be superfluous in the not-toodistant future.

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9 Learner autonomy, the European Language Portfolio and teacher development David Little

Introduction This chapter is about learner autonomy and the contribution that the European Language Portfolio (ELP) can make to learner and teacher development in language learning contexts where learner autonomy is a central goal. The first part of the chapter explores the concept of autonomy as a basic human need, a general educational goal, and a determinant of language teaching programmes; the second part describes the ELP, first as a generic concept and then in the version developed by the EU-funded Milestone Project; and the third part reports on the use of the Milestone ELP with adult learners of English as a second language in Ireland. A brief conclusion draws together the threads of the argument and identifies goals for future research and development.

Learner autonomy Autonomy and interdependence as basic human needs The American social psychologist Edward Deci defines autonomy as follows: Etymologically the term autonomy derives from being self-governing. To be autonomous means to act in accord with one’s self — it means

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feeling free and volitional in one’s actions. When autonomous, people are fully willing to do what they are doing, and they embrace the activity with a sense of interest and commitment. (Deci & Flaste 1996: 2)

According to Deci, the opposite of “autonomous” is “controlled”: […] to be controlled means to act because one is being pressured. When controlled, people act without a sense of personal endorsement. Their behaviour is not an expression of the self, for the self has been subjugated to the controls. In this condition, people can reasonably be described as alienated. (Deci & Flaste 1996: 2)

The distinction between autonomy and control is fundamental to Deci’s view of human motivation: autonomous behaviour is by definition motivated behaviour, whereas the alienation induced by controlled behaviour undermines intrinsic motivation (which is what makes us curious about our environment and ready to be proactive in exploring it). Deci argues that autonomy is one of three psychological needs that must be satisfied if we are to achieve self-fulfilment, the other two being competence and connectedness, both of which (like autonomy) exist in a symbiotic relation to intrinsic motivation. We have a feeling of competence when we confront and successfully overcome “optimal challenges” (1995: 66); and we experience connectedness when we love and are loved by others (1995: 88). It is sometimes assumed that the need for connectedness conflicts with the need for autonomy, but as Deci points out, that is to confuse autonomy with independence: Independence means to do for yourself, to not rely on others for personal nourishment and support. Autonomy, in contrast, means to act freely, with a sense of volition and choice. It is thus possible for a person to be independent and autonomous (i.e., to freely not rely on others), or to be independent and controlled (i.e., to feel forced not to rely on others). (Deci & Flaste 1996: 89)

Deci’s view of what we need for self-fulfilment implicitly recognises our dual nature. On the one hand, each of us incorporates cognitive and affective processes to which no one else can have direct access: you cannot have my thoughts and feelings, and the extent to which I can penetrate your thoughts and feelings is limited. On the other hand, we are inescapably social beings: from the moment of our birth, we depend on other people in an infinite variety of ways. Without physical care

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babies die; without nurture their development is impaired; and without love they are exposed to emotional deformation. A human life lived from beginning to end in total isolation is literally unthinkable. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (e.g. 1978, 1986) gave us a new understanding of the relation between the individual-cognitive and sociocultural dimensions of human experience, especially in child development. It is not that we are organisms whose cognitive processes just happen to occur in one or another social context; rather, the social context and social-interactive process shape cognition, while cognition in turn can act on social context and social-interactive process. In one sense, the individual-cognitive dimension has priority: remove a child from her social context and you merely remove her for the time being from the possibility of social interaction. But in another sense the sociocultural dimension has priority: Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level: first between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals. (Vygotsky 1978: 57; italics in original)

According to this view, our higher cognitive functions do not develop spontaneously but are gradually internalised from social interaction. Speech is the symbolic tool that makes such internalisation possible. In any adequate definition of what it is to be human, both dimensions — individual-cognitive and sociocultural — are always and simultaneously present. But if our cognitive capacity is inbuilt, what about our capacity to interact with others? Must it be acquired, or is it too part of our innate endowment? Over the past quarter of a century, research on early child development has shown that it is part of our innate endowment, that we have an inborn capacity for ‘intersubjectivity’ that makes us interactive by nature. In particular, the work of Colwyn Trevarthen and his associates (summarised in Trevarthen 1998) has shown that children are born with “motives to find and use the motives of other persons in ‘conversational’ negotiation of purposes, emotions, experiences and meaning” (Trevarthen 1998: 16). In other words, children enter the world primed to take the initiative in establishing reciprocal relationships with their caregivers. One remark of Trevarthen’s is specially relevant to our present purposes since it

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suggests an inevitable and necessary link between motivation, autonomy, development, reflectivity and communication: This inborn intersubjective faculty of the infant must be seen as a direct effect of pure, unthinking motivation. Nevertheless, it has a rudimentary reflectivity and an autonomy that presage thoughtful message-making in the head, and communication of interest in a shared world. (Trevarthen 1992: 105)

The concept of intersubjectivity provides a basis for exploring the mechanics of first language acquisition (e.g. Akhtar & Tomasello 1998) and the development of our capacity for reflective thinking (e.g. Hobson 1998). It implies that to be culturally embedded is to be dialogically constituted, and that language itself is essentially dialogic in nature (Rommetveit 1998: 371). It also explains why autonomy and the interdependence of connectedness are fundamental human needs. Deci’s theory of human motivation, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of child development, and the related theory of child development based on intersubjectivity all claim to describe universal features of human nature that derive from our biological constitution. They thus imply that different child-rearing practices, for example, are all responses to the same basic biological and psychological facts, the same inescapable developmental mechanisms.

Autonomy in formal learning contexts If we narrow our focus to autonomy in formal learning contexts, it is clear that Deci’s definition still applies: the literature on learner autonomy agrees that autonomous learners are “fully willing” to learn, “free and volitional” in their learning, and embrace their learning with “a sense of interest and commitment” (Deci & Flaste 1996: 2). If we are autonomous in Deci’s general sense, we promote our own development, manage our own experience, regulate our own behaviour and control our own emotions. Similarly, the concept of learner autonomy entails the learner managing his or her own learning: sharing in the setting of goals, the planning of activities, the monitoring of progress and the evaluation of outcomes. There is an important difference, however, between learner autonomy and autonomy in Deci’s more general sense. Whereas it is possible, for example, to control one’s emotions as a matter of unconscious habit, learner autonomy always implies conscious

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intention and explicit reflection. This is because formal learning happens only on the basis of deliberate decisions and conscious plans. It is impossible to study, say, the life cycle of the earthworm without having a conscious intention to do so. There are two reasons for wanting learners to be autonomous. Firstly, because autonomous learners are motivated and reflective learners, their learning is efficient and effective. To put it the other way round, all learning is likely to succeed to the extent that the learner is autonomous rather than controlled (and alienated). Secondly, the very efficiency and effectiveness of the autonomous learner means that the knowledge and skills acquired in the classroom can be applied to situations that arise outside it. To borrow Douglas Barnes’s (1976: 81) terms, “school knowledge” becomes part of the learner’s “action knowledge” (“that view of the world on which our actions are based”), which means that action knowledge in turn may become explicit and thus available to conscious manipulation. Educational systems have always assumed that learners should be able to apply the knowledge and skills acquired in school to the business of living outside and after school. Yet learner autonomy has always been a minority achievement, and it remains so today, even though it is a stated goal of more and more national curricula. The reason for this is not difficult to identify. As we have seen, our need for autonomy and connectedness arises from the fact that we come into the world primed to take the initiative in establishing reciprocal relationships with others. The internalisation of higher cognitive functions depends on reciprocity, and the symbolic tool that makes internalisation possible is language, understood as an inescapably dialogic phenomenon. Yet since schooling was first invented, it has mostly been founded on the assumption that teaching is a matter of transmitting a fixed body of knowledge to learners in a succession of monologues (from the teacher or the textbook). As Paulo Freire puts it: Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and “makes deposits” which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. (Freire 1972: 45–6)

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It is predictable from what we know of our biological constitution, but also a matter of historical fact, that education as the monologic transmission of knowledge commonly results in alienation. Certainly it is not apt to produce autonomous learners in large numbers. In every historical period and culture there have, of course, been individuals who appear to find their own way to reflective self-management in learning, but they often turn out to have done so thanks to a teacher who was unusually committed to reciprocity and dialogue. When formal learning is dialogically mediated, the roles in the teaching-learning process tend to merge. To quote Freire again: Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-theteacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-whoteaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in their turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. (Freire 1972: 53)

Freire’s dialogue is a process of negotiation and sharing in which reflection necessarily plays a central role: hypothesising, exploring, comparing, evaluating and all the other acts involved in educational dialogue are impossible without discursive thinking. They all depend on what Bruner (1986: 125) calls “the metalinguistic function [of language], or turning around on one’s use of language to examine or explicate it”. Clearly, gradually learning to master the metalinguistic function is central to the development of autonomy, for as Bruner goes on to say: If he [sic] fails to develop any sense of what I shall call reflective intervention in the knowledge he encounters, the young person will be operating continually from the outside in — knowledge will control and guide him. If he succeeds in developing such a sense, he will control and select knowledge as needed. If he develops a sense of self that is premised on his ability to penetrate knowledge for his own uses, and if he can share and negotiate the result of his penetrations, then he becomes a member of the culture-creating community. (Bruner 1986: 132)

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Autonomy in formal language learning and the teacher’s role If we narrow the focus still further, from formal learning in general to formal language learning in particular, learner autonomy is still defined in terms of reflective involvement in planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating learning. However, the fact that the goal of learning is now the development of proficiency in a second or foreign language introduces an important new factor. Small children learn to communicate in their first language as a by-product of their involvement in the reciprocal activities of their immediate environment: learning a second or foreign language in formal contexts likewise depends crucially on language use. There are obvious things we can do to support our learning. For example, we can memorise chunks of language that we need to use frequently, such as greetings, leave-takings and conversational fillers; and we can memorise basic vocabulary — numerals, colours, days of the week, months and seasons of the year, etc. But neither of these learning activities results directly in the development of communicative proficiency. In the end, we can learn to understand speech only by listening to speech; and we can learn to speak only by speaking, to read only by reading, and to write only by writing. And if our listening, speaking, reading and writing have a genuine communicative purpose, our learning is more likely to be successful than otherwise. It is important to note that the rapid generation of extensive written text depends on the same psycholinguistic mechanisms as we use to generate speech. It may be possible to learn the written form of a language without learning to speak, but we shall be able to write spontaneously, fluently and at length only if we can also speak spontaneously, fluently and at length. Now, if we want our learners to be fluent and flexible users of their target language, and if language learning depends crucially on language use, it follows that classroom communication must be organised so as to give learners access to a full range of discourse roles, initiating as well as responding. In other words, in discourse terms, the optimal environment for language learning is exactly the same as any formal learning environment designed to promote the development of learner autonomy through negotiation and sharing. What is more, the metalinguistic function is part of proficiency in any language, which means that all reflective processes should be carried out in the target language. Note that writing plays a key role in maintaining a record of learning, capturing the target language ‘off line’ (which helps learners

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to segment the speech stream and focus on linguistic form) and creating prompts to support oral communication. The classic account of classroom procedures organised along these lines is provided by Leni Dam (1995). Six things are fundamental to the pedagogical approach she describes: 1.

From the beginning the teacher uses the target language as the preferred medium of classroom communication and requires the same of her learners (inevitably, in the early stages their interlanguage bears powerful, sometimes overwhelming, traces of their first language).

2.

The teacher involves her learners in a non-stop quest for good learning activities, which are shared, discussed, analysed and evaluated with the whole class — in the target language, to begin with in very simple terms.

3.

The teacher helps her learners to set their own learning targets and choose their own learning activities, and these too are subjected to discussion, analysis and evaluation — again in the target language.

4.

Although learners are required to identify individual goals, they mostly pursue these via collaborative work in small groups.

5.

All learners are obliged to keep a written record of their learning — plans of lessons and projects, lists of useful vocabulary, whatever texts they themselves produce.

6.

The teacher engages her learners in regular evaluation of their progress as individual learners and as a class — in the target language.

As I have argued elsewhere (Little 1999a, 2001b), this pedagogical approach is underpinned by three general pedagogical principles: learner involvement, appropriate target language use and learner reflection. It should be clear from the foregoing argument that these three principles are not hierarchically related to one another: each embodies the other two. Their interrelation explains why in formal language learning the scope of learner autonomy always depends on what the learner can do in the target language.

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It should also be clear from my summary of Leni Dam’s pedagogical approach that the teacher has a crucial role to play in developing learner autonomy. As we have seen, Freire’s educational dialogue leads to a merging of roles, so that instead of a teacher and students the classroom community comes to comprise a teacher-student and students-teachers. However, as these latter terms indicate, the merging of the roles can never be complete. By adopting a dialogic approach, teachers may also learn, but they retain primary responsibility for creating and maintaining an interactive learning community. Teachers must help learners to identify their individual and collective learning needs and find ways of meeting them; and they must initiate, model and support the various forms of discourse required for learner involvement, learner reflection and appropriate target language use. The skills that language teachers require in order to develop the autonomy of their learners all too rarely play a central role in programmes of language teacher education; in most cases they must be acquired on the job. The rest of this chapter is concerned with the role that the European Language Portfolio can play in supporting both the development of autonomy in language learners and the professional development of teachers.

The European Language Portfolio Background The European Language Portfolio (ELP) has three obligatory components: a language passport, a language biography and a dossier. The language passport summarises the owner’s linguistic identity and his or her experience of L2 learning and use, and it also records the owner’s periodic self-assessment of overall L2 proficiency. The language biography is designed to accompany the ongoing processes of learning and using L2s and engaging with the cultures associated with them. It supports goal-setting and self-assessment in relation to specific learning objectives, and encourages reflection, sometimes schematic and sometimes narrative, on learning styles, strategies and intercultural experience. The dossier is used to collect evidence of the owner’s L2 proficiency and intercultural experience; and in some implementations it is also used to store work in progress. There is no single version of the ELP. The Council of Europe has approved Principles and Guidelines

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(Council for Cultural Cooperation 2000; Council of Europe 2006) that define the functions of the ELP and describe its different components and established a Validation Committee to accredit ELP models submitted from the member countries (for further information on the background to the ELP and discussion of some of the challenges posed by its implementation, see Little 2002). The ELP was developed in order to serve two complementary functions. The first is pedagogical, to make the language learning process more transparent to learners and to foster the development of learner autonomy — hence the central role assigned to reflection and self-assessment. This function reflects the Council of Europe’s longestablished commitment to learner autonomy as fundamental to education for democratic citizenship and a prerequisite for lifelong learning. The second function is to provide concrete evidence of L2 communicative proficiency and intercultural experience, which reflects the Council of Europe’s concern to find ways of reporting language learning achievement in an internationally transparent manner. Both functions depend on the common reference levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2001; Little 2006). These define L2 communicative proficiency • in behavioural terms, in the form of ‘can do’ statements; • at six levels arranged in three bands: A1, A2 — basic user; B1, B2 — independent user; C1, C2 — proficient user; • in relation to five communicative activities: listening, reading, spoken interaction, spoken production, writing. The common reference levels are summarised in the so-called selfassessment grid (Council of Europe 2001: 26–9), against which the ELP owner periodically carries out ‘global’ or ‘summative’ self-assessment in the language passport. For example, overall proficiency in spoken interaction at level B1 is defined as follows: I can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. I can enter unprepared into conversation on topics that are familiar, of personal interest or pertinent to everyday life (e.g. family, hobbies, work, travel and current events).

To support goal-setting and self-assessment in relation to particular learning tasks, the ELP also contains checklists of more specific descriptors that together expand the summary descriptors of the

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self-assessment grid. The Swiss ELP for adolescents and adults (Schweizerische Konferenz der kantonalen Erziehungsdirektoren 2000), for example, contains the following checklist for spoken interaction at B1 level: • •

• • • • •

I can start, maintain and close simple face-to-face conversation on topics that are familiar or of personal interest. I can maintain a conversation or discussion but may sometimes be difficult to follow when trying to say exactly what I would like to. I can deal with most situations likely to arise when making travel arrangements through an agent or when actually travelling. I can ask for and follow detailed directions. I can express and respond to feelings such as surprise, happiness, sadness, interest and indifference. I can give or seek personal views and opinions in an informal discussion with friends. I can agree and disagree politely.

Integrate Ireland Language and Training and the Milestone ELP Integrate Ireland Language and Training (IILT), a not-for-profit campus company of Trinity College Dublin, is funded by the Irish government to provide courses in English as a second language for adult immigrants with refugee status. It caters for learners at all proficiency levels, from beginner to advanced; some beginners are without literacy skills in their first language. Most of IILT’s clients are allowed one year of full-time training. Classes typically comprise 15 learners from a variety of linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. Courses are necessarily delivered entirely in English; run for four months; are articulated in four-week cycles, each cycle being followed by a week devoted to reflection, selfassessment, teacher assessment, target-setting and appraisal interviews; and they entail 20 contact hours per week and 10 additional hours of self-access and homework. IILT’s goal is to enable its learners to operate as autonomous agents in an English-speaking society. In harmony with the principles elaborated in the first part of this chapter, the pedagogical approach emphasises the development of individual learner responsibility within a framework of collaborative planning, monitoring and evaluation. The principal pedagogical tool is the Milestone ELP, which takes the place of a course book.

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The Milestone Project (2000–04) was funded as part of the European Union’s Socrates-Comenius 2.1 Programme. It had nine partners: institutes of teacher training in Dublin and Hamburg; a refugee school in Dublin (IILT); and vocational schools and colleges of adult education in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Örebro. All the partners were concerned with teaching the language of the host community to adult migrants. The Milestone ELP was developed collaboratively on the basis of three earlier ELPs designed by IILT to cater for learners at different levels of target language proficiency. Its distinguishing features are as follows: • The three components are arranged in the order: language biography, dossier, language passport. • The language biography is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the owner ’s previous language learning and intercultural experience, important life events, and his or her proficiency in the language of the host community at the beginning of the course. Part II is concerned with ongoing language learning, helping learners to become more aware of their attitudes, expectations and learning styles, requiring them to draw up a learning contract, and (via ‘can do’ checklists) supporting the setting of personal learning goals and regular self-assessment of learning outcomes. • The language passport is the so-called ‘standard adult passport’, which helps to give the ELP a recognisable international profile. • The dossier contains details of the owner’s language course and a page for recording attendance. It also accommodates work in progress and samples of finished work.

Working with the Milestone ELP General principles On Monday, students begin by writing down their individual learning targets for the week; then the class negotiates a theme for the week’s learning and divides into groups to work on projects appropriate to individual targets; and after that the groups plan their projects. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the groups work on their projects; and on Thursday projects are brought to a conclusion and group members test themselves and one another to demonstrate their ability to carry out the tasks embedded in their projects. On Friday, the work of the groups

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is brought together in further self-assessment and reflection, the teacher gives feedback and draws attention to areas that need more work, and the first steps are taken towards identifying learning targets for the next week. The strong emphasis placed on planning, monitoring and evaluation, and the central role played by peer- and self-assessment, are deliberately calculated to develop the students’ mastery of the metalinguistic function of language. Without the capacity to “turn around on [their] use of language to examine or explicate it” (Bruner 1986: 125) — in ways appropriate to their level of proficiency — they will find it difficult to manage their lives in an English-speaking environment, especially when they have family responsibilities that require them to interact with doctors, dentists and representatives of officialdom. The Milestone ELP is foundational to this process. The common reference levels as summarised in the self-assessment grid (language passport) provide a point of reference for determining learners’ proficiency levels at the beginning and end of their training. This typically lasts for between 6 and 12 months, most learners starting somewhere in A1 or A2 and finishing somewhere in B1. The descriptors in the checklists (language biography) provide a basis for identifying individual needs and negotiating the curriculum; the two parts of the language biography provide a focus for awareness-raising; and the gradual accumulation of work in the dossier provides the most practical reminder possible of learning progress. All learners leave IILT with an ELP that reflects their learning process, tracks their learning progress and shows what they can do in English. Although use of the ELP is obligatory, teachers are free to introduce it in whatever order they prefer — to some degree, of course, this is determined by their learners’ educational background and level of proficiency in English.

Some examples The ELP is sometimes misunderstood as an exercise in form-filling, nothing more than a way of recording learning after it has happened. In IILT, by contrast, every ELP page provides a focus for interactive learning activities of one kind or another. To this end, often working collaboratively, IILT’s teachers have developed a large number of activities and worksheets that lead their students into the different parts of the ELP. For example, the very first page of the language biography

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requires the owner to record personal details — name, address, date of birth, country of origin, etc. But before this page is filled in, it is used as the basis for an activity in which students first formulate for themselves the questions implied by the page (see Figure 9.1), then put the questions to a fellow student and record the answers. This not only develops students’ questioning skills but also helps to make them aware of the interrogative intentions that underlie official forms and thus supports their encounters with officialdom. Students keep this and all other worksheets in their dossier for future reference.

Figure 9.1 Milestone ELP example: formulating questions

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As we have seen, self-assessment against the common reference levels of the Common European Framework is central to effective ELP use. Self-assessment in a more general sense is also at the heart of the reflective processes that drive the development of learner autonomy. We can plan, monitor and evaluate our own learning only to the extent that we are able to stand back and objectify both the learning process and our efforts at target language use. This entails writing things down. In the second part of the Milestone ELP’s language biography, the owner records his or her personal expectations of the language course just begun. Figure 9.2 is taken from the ELP of an Algerian learner in his early thirties. What he says he expects from the course itself reflects the curriculum that the teacher has negotiated with the class. The fact that ‘review’ is listed along with various social topics and situations shows that the teacher has already emphasised the central role reflection will play in the teaching-learning process. This learner’s expectations of the teacher suggest that his previous educational experience was of a traditional teacher-led kind. On the other hand, what he expects of himself shows that IILT’s ethos has begun to make an impact on him. Helping students to first make explicit and then think about their learning habits and the things they find easy and difficult is a priority in the early stages of IILT’s courses. Figure 9.3 shows the same learner’s guided analysis of the things he does to develop his writing skills, while Figure 9.4 shows a simple exercise in self-assessment. Reading and reciting the alphabet are still small problems for him, perhaps because his first language is Arabic. Telephoning IILT if he is unable to attend class is the one big problem he identifies. From the beginning, IILT insists that students are individually responsible for monitoring their attendance and maintaining contact if they are unable to attend classes — aspects of learner autonomy that can easily be transferred to other domains of life. As noted above, some of IILT’s students begin not only with very little English but also without literacy in their first language. Helping them to master basic literacy skills in English is thus an early priority, and we expect them to use that mastery immediately to assist their learning. Figure 9.5 is part of an alphabetical word list gradually compiled by an Ethiopian student, also in her early thirties, who came to IILT with no English and just one year of primary education. Many of her spellings — incorrect but phonetically approximate — resemble those produced by native-speaker children in the early stages of literacy acquisition, but as Figure 9.6 shows, that does not prevent her from

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Figure 9.2 Milestone ELP example: recording expectations

using the same worksheets as rather more advanced students, provided that the worksheets are effectively mediated by the teacher and her classmates.

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Figure 9.3 Milestone ELP example: analysing writing skills and strategies

One inevitable consequence of learner autonomy is that learners acquire the vocabulary appropriate to their personal interests and priorities, which may entail the early learning of low-frequency words and technical terms (cf. Dam & Legenhausen 1996). Consider, for example, the vocabulary list compiled by a 30-year-old Ukrainian student who was still working towards full mastery of level A1 (see

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Figure 9.4 Milestone ELP example: early self-assessment

Figure 9.5 Milestone ELP example: part of a word list

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Figure 9.6 Milestone ELP example: quantifying English-using activities

Figure 9.7): it reflects IILT’s autonomy-oriented approach to learning (e.g. assessment, self-assessment) but also his need to be able to communicate with the family doctor about illnesses (e.g. operation, inflamed, tablets, temperature). The ELP values all language learning, wherever it takes place and however it is organised. It is in any case fundamental to the development and exercise of learner autonomy that learning skills are applied to occasions of language use that arise in the world outside the classroom. IILT’s courses attach considerable importance to developing students’ awareness of the ways in which they can learn English outside school. In Figure 9.8, a Congolese student in his late thirties, well

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Figure 9.7 Milestone ELP example: weekly vocabulary list

Figure 9.8 Milestone ELP example: evaluating out-of-class strategies

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educated and working towards level B1, reviews a number of possibilities. He then makes a note of the positive strategies that he has already used (see Figure 9.9), which is subsequently expanded and transferred to the language biography in his ELP (see Figure 9.10). Figure 9.11 shows the same student analysing his use of English outside school, while Figures 9.12 and 9.13 show him identifying topics that he wants to cover in his course.

Figure 9.9 Milestone ELP example: identifying personal strategies

Figure 9.10 Milestone ELP example: listing personal out-of-class strategies in the language biography

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Figure 9.11 Milestone ELP example: analysing recent out-of-class use of English

Figure 9.12

Milestone ELP example: identifying topics for the course (1)

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Figure 9.13 Milestone ELP example: identifying topics for the course (2)

Learner and teacher development In May 2004 Barbara Lazenby Simpson, deputy director of IILT, recorded a conversation with four of IILT’s teachers. The first focus of the conversation was the impact of the ELP on IILT’s students. Here are some of the things the teachers said:

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Ruth Powell: The ELP gives students a sense of the learning process and it gives their course a structure. The checklists help them to set targets at the beginning of the week and evaluate their learning at the end, and they get into this learning habit. Stefan Piskorski: Yes, the different sections of the ELP help them to organise their learning and they have the idea they are building their own book. Helen Kelly: The ELP encourages a step-by-step approach to learning. Students can move gradually from level to level without becoming overwhelmed. Also, my students are very aware that new students joining the class don’t have the same bank of learning to refer to. Suzette Bedard: The ELP works even with beginners and gives them a sense of pride and achievement as they track their own progress. And the fact that the ELP recognises their own language, culture and ethnicity — things that Irish people don’t have — simply astounds them. Ruth Powell: Each student is responsible for his or her ELP, and each ELP is different, an expression of the student’s individuality. If a student has a piece of work he is particularly proud of, it’s very empowering to keep it in the dossier. Stefan Piskorski: By focusing on students’ expectations of their course, their teacher and themselves, the ELP helps to pass responsibility from the teacher to the students.

According to this testimony, the Milestone ELP helps IILT’s students to organise their learning, develop a step-by-step approach and build up a detailed record of their learning, while accommodating their individuality and empowering them to take responsibility for their learning. The second focus of the conversation was the impact of the ELP on the teachers themselves: Helen Kelly: For me as a new teacher, the checklists outlined the syllabus and helped to keep me focused. Also, the students’ ELPs were a very effective way of making me aware of them as learners — especially the targets they set and the dates they put on their targets. Suzette Bedard: Each of us is working at a different level, and each level is catered for in the ELP, so it helps to ensure continuity from class to class.

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Ruth Powell: Suzette and I use the ELP in different ways — she starts at the front and I start at the back. Yet we both achieve the same results. Because the ELP accommodates different teaching styles, it makes a school that uses it a varied but very integrated school. Suzette Bedard: What I like is that responsibility for what happens is not completely on the teacher. The students are also involved. In this sense we and they are at the same level, working together. That’s very new for teachers and learners from traditional backgrounds. Ruth Powell: When things don’t go so well, the learners quickly understand that they are partly responsible because they chose the learning focus for the week. They learn to be very careful when selecting group and individual goals. Stefan Piskorski: The joy of teaching with the ELP — the payback — is when you help your students to achieve goals that give them confidence and improve their quality of life, like being able to talk to the doctor when one of the children is ill. The joy of education for teacher and for student is quite apparent.

By helping the teachers to maintain focus and develop an awareness of their learners as individuals, by accommodating different proficiency levels and different classroom approaches, and by constantly reminding learners that they share responsibility with their teacher, the Milestone ELP supports the development of a Freirean teaching-learning dialogue: The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in their turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. (Freire 1972: 53)

As Stefan Piskorski’s final words confirm, IILT’s implementation of the Milestone ELP develops learner autonomy in the fullest possible sense, giving the students the capacity to live their lives autonomously at least partly through the language of their host community. But it also provides a focus for ongoing teacher development that increasingly assumes the characteristics of action research. According to McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead (1996: 8), this is a matter of “praxis” rather than “practice”: Praxis is informed, committed action rather than just successful action. It is informed because other people’s views are taken into account. It

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is committed and intentional in terms of values that have been examined and can be argued. It leads to knowledge from and about educational practice.

IILT’s teachers are required to report regularly on their use of the ELP, but also to work collaboratively in small teams to investigate and further develop different aspects of the teaching-learning process. In doing so, they mirror the interactive-reflective processes that characterise their classroom: the development of teacher autonomy arises from, but also feeds back into, the development of learner autonomy.

Conclusion According to the Council of Europe’s Principles and Guidelines (Council for Cultural Cooperation 2000; Council of Europe 2006), the European Language Portfolio is a tool to promote learner autonomy. The Principles and Guidelines nowhere define ‘learner autonomy’, nor do they describe the kind of pedagogical procedures most likely to lead to its development. It has been my purpose in this chapter to make good these deficiencies, first by articulating a theoretical understanding of learner autonomy and then by showing how the ELP can support the implementation of key principles that emerge from such an understanding. I began the theoretical part of the chapter with the idea that autonomy and connectedness are basic human needs, and drew on research into early child development to argue that our dual nature — individual-cognitive on the one hand, sociocultural on the other — explains the essentially dialogic character of first language acquisition, the development of our capacity for reflective thinking, and language itself. I went on to explore the concept of autonomy in formal learning contexts, drawing attention to the fact that, unlike more general notions of autonomy, learner autonomy always implies conscious intention and explicit reflection. I argued that only pedagogies rooted in negotiation, sharing and reflection are apt to develop learner autonomy. Narrowing the focus to language learning, I described autonomy-oriented language pedagogy in terms of three principles: learner involvement, appropriate target language use, and learner reflection. I pointed out that because the target language is at once goal, content and medium of learning, the scope of learner autonomy is always constrained by what the learner

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can do in the target language. And I concluded by briefly discussing the role of the teacher. The practical part of the chapter showed how the ELP can support the development of learner autonomy as defined in the theoretical part. It also provided evidence to support Freire’s dialogic understanding of effective teaching and learning and his view that learner and teacher development are two sides of the same coin. From the beginning, the Council of Europe has emphasised that the ELP is the property of the individual learner. However, the ELP may yet turn out to be most effective when its use is embedded in interactive processes that promote teacher as well as learner development in a never-ending quest for greater understanding of the language-learning process. In terms of the arguments with which I began, this would hardly be surprising.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Barbara Lazenby Simpson for collecting the examples of learners’ work and interviewing the four teachers; to Ruth Powell, Helen Kelly, Suzette Bedard and Stefan Piskorski for talking about the impact of the ELP on themselves and their students; and to all the teachers of Integrate Ireland Language and Training for their commitment to the reflective processes that develop learner but also teacher autonomy.

Four web addresses • • •

•

For all key documents related to the CEF and the ELP: www.coe.int/ portfolio For further information on the activities of IILT and some downloadable documents: www.iilt.ie To access the Milestone ELP in the various language versions, the Teacher ’s Handbook, and classroom activities: www.eumilestone.de For information about Irish ELP projects and an extensive overview of the Irish post-primary ELP project, including examples of pupils’ work: www.tcd.ie/clcs (select PROJECTS on the homepage)

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10 The teacher as learner: Developing autonomy in an interactive learning environment Barbara Sinclair

Introduction In this chapter, I consider how teachers of English in China may be encouraged to develop greater autonomy, both as teachers and learners, through e-learning in an interactive learning environment. Using data from an extensive needs analysis research for two collaborative elearning projects involving universities in China and the UK, I will explore the currently held perceptions of Chinese teachers of English concerning learner and teacher autonomy. I will then go on to describe the influences of the teachers’ voices and the pedagogical principles informing the project work to design exemplar e-teacher training materials, and highlight some of the design features for supporting and developing autonomy. When considering the content of this paper, I was drawn to recollect some of the issues I was facing as a materials developer in 1994 and which I described in Sinclair (1996a). At that time, I was writing a series of coursebooks for adult learners of English which aimed to break new ground in integrating the development of learner autonomy with language teaching (Sinclair 1995; Sinclair 1996b–f; Sinclair & Prowse 1996a–f). As discussed in Sinclair (1996a), the challenges included how to make the ‘learning to learn’ sufficiently explicit without overwhelming the learner or detracting from the main business of learning the language, the wording of rubrics and instructions, and so on. I wrestled with the issues that writers face when publishers aim their materials at an audience which has been defined at only a very

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general level, and whose needs, therefore, have only been considered in the broadest sense. One of the greatest challenges, of course, was that of introducing the concepts of autonomy and ‘learning to learn’ to learners who may have had little experience of reflecting on such issues or of taking control of their own learning. An equally great, if not greater, challenge was that of informing and supporting the teachers who might not focus on developing autonomy in their teaching. To this end, detailed teachers’ books explaining the rationales and theoretical perspectives for each learner training activity, practical guidelines for implementing the activities, as well as alternative approaches, were written to accompany the materials. Sadly, despite enthusiastic reviews, the coursebooks were only moderately successful in terms of sales, and I never became an ELT millionaire. I received much positive feedback from teachers who were keen to introduce greater learner control into their teaching, but the real failure was with those teachers who were unfamiliar with the concept, or could not conceive of how such an idea could be applied to their own teaching and teaching contexts (and I learnt that teachers almost never read teachers’ books!). Currently, I find myself once again, as part of a larger team of ELT specialists, e-learning designers and IT specialists from both the UK and China, grappling with materials design to promote autonomy, but, instead of being concerned with how to present and integrate learner training tasks into print materials, I am working on the design of etraining materials for teachers of English in China. Thus, when embarking on the projects described in this chapter, I was mindful of the lessons learnt some years earlier. It was clear that no development could be undertaken without an extensive needs analysis and a clear understanding of how the Chinese teachers in question viewed autonomy.

The ‘e-China’ projects In September 2003, the University of Nottingham (UoN) started work on two Sino-UK projects, known as ‘e-China’, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE) and the Chinese Ministry of Education. The principal aim of the projects was to support the collaborative development of e-teacher training materials which were to be exemplars of ‘cutting edge’ materials, rather than the development of whole courses. Significantly, the materials were to be pedagogy-led, rather than technology-led, and this has brought about

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the development of a number of innovative e-learning tools (freely available from http://echinauk.org/tools/tools.php) and extensions to the freeware Moodle platform. (Details of the projects can be found at http://echinauk.org/.) In the first project, UoN collaborated with Beijing Normal University (BNU) to provide exemplars of e-training materials for middle school teachers of English in China who had followed a three-year training programme, but did not possess a BA. These materials are intended to become part of a top-up BA course that will be accessed by middle school teachers (who teach students aged 12 to 18 years) throughout China under the auspices of local Study Centres. Prototype materials were piloted in November 2004. In the second project, concurrent with the first, UoN worked with Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) and Beiwai Online (the university’s e-learning institute) to produce exemplar materials at postgraduate diploma/MA level for teachers of English in Chinese tertiary education. The principal aims of both projects were to enable teachers to develop: • greater knowledge, understanding and experience of alternative ways of organising English teaching and learning, particularly with regard to learner-centred methodologies and the use of new technologies; • their own capacity for independent learning and self-directed professional development; and • greater confidence and independence as teachers. Thus, the development of both teacher and learner autonomy through a learner-centred methodology, delivered via e-learning, constitutes a major goal of the projects. Before going on to describe some of the design features of the materials, I explore the findings of the needs analysis.

Findings from the needs analysis Research findings: learner and teacher autonomy in China A needs analysis was required to explore the “target situation demands, wants, lacks and learning needs” (Hutchinson & Waters 1987) of the potential course participants. In addition, we aimed to uncover teachers’ beliefs about teaching and language learning, and the use of ICT, as

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well as their attitudes towards teacher and learner autonomy, their current professional roles and the constraints of their learning and teaching contexts. Our needs analysis made use of a variety of instruments: questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. Subjects were drawn from a pool of potential course participants from tertiary institutes and middle schools throughout China. Additional data were provided by a survey of distance learning in China conducted by our project partners at BFSU (e.g. Wang 2004). The findings in this chapter relate principally to a set of in-depth interviews with 11 Chinese tertiary teachers of English, 15 middle school teachers of English, and 5 Chinese teacher trainers (some of whom were interviewed three times). All of the interviews, conducted in English by members of the UK project team, were audio- and/or video-recorded, and permission was granted by the interviewees to include relevant parts of the transcripts and recordings in the materials to be developed, as well as to use the findings for research dissemination. The transcripts were analysed and themes categorised using NVIVO.1 The in-depth interviews, as well as other information (documentary evidence, teaching observations, etc.) gathered from visits to Beijing, provided an interesting insight into current beliefs about and attitudes towards learner and teacher autonomy in the target population of potential course participants. To a large extent, it appears that the concept of learner autonomy is linked strongly with the enthusiasm for and growth in new technologies for learning in China. This point was further supported by Professor Gu Yueguo, director of the Beiwai Institute of Online Education at BFSU, in a talk at an e-tutor training event in China in 2005, which was observed by the UoN project team: Students are getting more independent because there are more resources for learning — not just the teacher. (Gu 2005)

This growth in interest and use of new technologies in learning in China can be seen, therefore, to have contributed to both the development of and demand for greater learner independence. Attitudes of Chinese teachers of English towards learner autonomy The research undertaken by the academic team showed that both tertiary and middle school teachers in China perceived a need for autonomy in their own learners, as seen in the following interview excerpt:

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Do you see teacher and learner autonomy as a good thing? Surely it’s an important thing because learning cannot be taught all the time in the classroom. So, that’s limited time and what you can have is just four years of college/university studies in China and the rest of the time you have to learn yourself. So, being a good autonomous learner will contribute to your own development, for example, to your own career and to the whole being. So, that’s good. (University Teacher 3, Beijing)

They were concerned about the need for lifelong learning and felt that they had a role to play in its development, for example: First of all, I think I teach, but I can only give them some. Otherwise, they should be in charge of their own learning. They should be responsible for their own learning, so, first of all, the teacher should make their students know how to be a good learner. (Middle School Teacher 1, Beijing)

At the same time, the teachers we interviewed generally felt that their students were not very independent, blaming their previous education experience for this: They would like to be more … to act like an audience, to listen to you more, and they want to receive knowledge, because this is the way they have been working — ever since they came to school, like, starting from primary school, secondary school and to university. They are accustomed to that. They want to be more receptive, to receive knowledge rather than to be involved themselves. (University Teacher 1, Shanghai)

In general, we found a broadly pragmatic view of learner autonomy which seems to relate strongly to independent learning with new technologies. Support for autonomy relates mainly to providing opportunities for students to practise limited self-direction, particularly with the new technology. We found little evidence of explicit learner training and reflection on learning processes. Study skills/strategies are mentioned, but, in practice, such strategies seem to be mainly related to helping the learners learn with the new technology. There is talk of individual differences (IDs) in learners, but with school teachers teaching classes of between 40 and 70 pupils, it is difficult to see how learner IDs would be one of a typical teacher’s daily concerns.

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Surveys carried out by our academic partners at BFSU into students’ and tutors’ experiences of online learning provided us with further useful data. One theme from the teacher trainers related to the students’ sense of loss and bewilderment when faced with learning without teacher or classroom support, and the need for adequate support systems to make up for this. According to Wang (2004), in the period from 1999 to 2004, 68 higher education institutions in China were approved by the Ministry of Education to carry out the piloting of computer-based distance education. By the end of 2002, 140 programmes in 10 disciplines had a total enrolment of 1,373,000 students. A national survey on tertiary-level web-based English education in China was conducted in early 2004 by Wang to investigate the systems of learner support and tutor support. Data were collected from institutional decision-makers, tutors and learners from eight participating institutions which had met the criterion of having run web-based distance education for over one year. Wang’s findings showed that 91.4% of the tutors perceived the students’ greatest problem as ‘lacking qualities for autonomous learners’, and 88.6% of the tutors agreed that the students lacked ‘English language learning strategies’. The learners felt that their ‘heavy learning load’ was their biggest obstacle to learning successfully (54.6%), but in second and third place, respectively, came ‘lacking autonomous learning strategies’ (34.7%) and ‘inability of using resources effectively’ (34.3%). In addition, Wang discovered that 67% of the learners preferred to participate in face-to-face tutorials, and 26% preferred to listen to or watch live lectures. Finally, her research showed that technical support was not viewed by the students as very important (presumably, they felt they were familiar enough with the new technologies). This important research provided the project team with useful insights. Views of English teachers in China on teacher autonomy In terms of teacher autonomy, we came across differing views from interviewees — that teacher autonomy is related to professional development, or that it is related to freedom to act on one’s own initiative in teaching. In terms of the former, it seems that teachers expect this to be more the responsibility of their superiors than of themselves. We also discovered that the latter form of teacher autonomy is not at all common, mainly because teachers are generally required to adhere to a syllabus and teaching materials, and to teach towards examinations:

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I can’t choose learning materials. I can’t choose the way of testing. I can’t choose how many hours I can teach students writing or spoken … all those things are designed by the leader of our group. She or he will design a syllabus, the timetable. We will teach students according to that. (University Teacher 2, Harbin)

Some teachers resort to creative means to get around the constraints imposed on them: Everything is just there so you have to follow, but the only freedom you can get is just in your class. Maybe you can try a different method ... but inspectors and the leaders and supervisors in our school, and the headmasters, they will sit in and then after class you have to go to them and ask for advice. You know, in my school, none of the leaders are English majors — they know nothing about English, so they just ask you to follow the style of other subjects. So, I think sometimes it’s funny. Also they check our lesson plan from time to time, so I’ve got two sets of lesson plans — one for them and one for myself. (Middle School Teacher 1, Beijing)

Generally, there was support for the concept of teacher autonomy and its importance with regard to developing learner autonomy: I: T:

That’s the learner side — what about teacher autonomy? It’s closely linked to student autonomy, so, if you are an autonomous teacher, you will influence your students. That’s the obvious fact. And also teacher autonomy will contribute to the development of yourself. For that’s a good thing and these two autonomies combined will contribute to the whole education. (University Teacher 3, Beijing)

In practice, however, we uncovered a great deal of frustration, both from university and middle school teachers, about the constraints on their autonomy that they faced. The greatest of these seemed to be the examination-oriented syllabus and lack of time for non-examinationrelated activities in class: I: T:

What is your feeling about the constraints that operate on you? It frustrates me, I think … because I have to teach so many classes and different types of classes. So, I could not be very concentrated on designing specific … the time is very limited. And the resources are very limited and you must finish the things you are supposed

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to do ... but at the same time, they [students] must pass the exam. They must get a high score. So students really care about whether they get 90+, so that’s something you must consider. If you ask a student to do a lot of things outside of the textbook, you have worries the students won’t keep doing this all the time because they think you are ignoring the textbook. We have to learn this textbook. We have to be familiar with it. So, they are distracted. So, should they trust you or should they trust the textbook? (University Teacher 4, Beijing)

To summarise, from our needs analysis we found that the teaching contexts of the potential participants shared the following characteristics: • They provide relative lack of freedom for teachers as professionals, but the teachers have a desire to be more flexible and innovative, and to use more learner-centred methodologies. • There is a dominating culture of examination-oriented teaching and goals. • The students are unused to taking responsibility for their learning and are mostly instrumentally motivated by the need to pass examinations. • The classes tend to be rather large (40 to 70 students), so student IDs go unrecognised. • Among the teachers, there is a relative lack of experience of using new technologies for learning and teaching, but a desire to do so. • The teachers perceive a need for greater learner and teacher autonomy. • The teachers are not familiar with ways of promoting greater autonomy in their learners. • The teachers feel disempowered to some extent as professionals in their contexts; they are generally able to exert control over their teaching only with regard to methodology and, to some extent, by introducing supplementary materials once the syllabus has been completed. In addition to the above constraints, the project team needed to take account of the fact that the new materials we were to develop would contribute to university-awarded degrees, and so university regulations and quality control procedures had to be adhered to in terms of course design, assessment and evaluation. So, in developing the new materials, the project team had to consider the following two questions:

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Given the desire of our Chinese partners to reform teacher education, how could we develop materials that would take account of the participants’ degrees of teacher autonomy? Given the constraints imposed by our universities’ quality assurance procedures and regulations for course design and implementation, how could we devise materials which would achieve an appropriate balance between directive intervention and the promotion of autonomy?

Approach to design When working on e-learning materials, it is necessary for the initial conceptualisation and design to be carried out by a team consisting not only of the subject specialists (applied linguists, in this case), but also technicians, e-learning designers, flash designers, and so on. Before we could make any decisions about how the materials would work or look, it was necessary to find out whether our ideas were workable in terms of the functionality of the applications and technical platforms being used. Our pedagogical ideas would, in turn, be informed by our more technically-minded colleagues, and so we found that a team approach to design, using different types of expertise, was essential. In addition, the materials for the BFSU project included modules designed to enable the participants to explore themselves as people, as learners and teachers, and this area of content was provided by colleagues from the Centre for the Study of Human Relations. Our team, therefore, consisted of TESOL experts from the UK2 and China,3 human relations experts,4 technical experts5 and media designers.6

Theoretical concepts Such a team approach to design requires a good deal of time for discussion, establishing norms and agreeing on action. In particular, it was vital that every member of the project, both in China and the UK, had a collective understanding and acceptance of underlying theoretical and pedagogical concepts, including those relating to teacher and learner autonomy. In addition to the findings from the needs analysis in China, it was necessary to explore critically the literature and theory relating to teacher and learner autonomy.

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Teacher autonomy Teacher autonomy — largely a Western concept — has been generally referred to as “teachers’ control over their own teaching” (Smith 2000: 89). Little (1995: 179) describes teachers with autonomy as: having a strong sense of personal responsibility for their teaching, exercising via continuous reflection and analysis the highest possible degree of affective and cognitive control of the teaching process, and exploring the freedom that this confers.

McGrath (2000) has added to this definition the notion of ‘self-directed professional development’, which may include the teacher acting as researcher, and as a reflective practitioner. It is this aspect of teacher autonomy that is of particular importance to these projects. In other words, the course developers need to consider the teachers as learners on their paths of professional and personal development. It may be argued that only through experiencing some degree of control over their professional development can teachers take informed and principled decisions about managing their own teaching context, and, in turn, help their own learners develop a measure of autonomy (see, for example, Estradas 2007). Thus, the materials in development needed to consider the teacher as a learner. Learner autonomy One way of enabling teachers to develop greater autonomy themselves is to allow them to experience a carefully scaffolded programme which provides opportunities for developing the skills and knowledge required to enable them to develop the capacity for autonomy as learners. The definition of learner autonomy which has underpinned the development of the project materials is the so-called ‘Bergen definition’ offered by Dam: Learner autonomy is characterized by a readiness to take charge of one’s own learning in the service of one’s needs and purposes. This entails a capacity and willingness to act independently and in cooperation with others, as a socially responsible person. (Dam 1995: 1)

This definition seems most relevant because it contains a number of important points. Firstly, it recognises that autonomy is a construct of capacity (Holec 1981). In other words, learner autonomy consists of the ability to make informed decisions about one’s own learning; being

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able to do so requires a good deal of specific knowledge about oneself as a learner, the learning context, the subject matter to be learnt and learning processes. This may be termed ‘metacognitive knowledge’, or knowledge about learning. It also involves conscious awareness of this knowledge and conscious reflection on learning. For example, without a conscious awareness of strategy use, developed through reflection and experimentation, learners will not be able to transfer learning knowhow to other learning situations (Wenden 1987), or to transcend the classroom (Little 1996; Cotterall, this volume). Our needs analysis found that teachers and learners in the Chinese context generally had little encouragement to reflect on their learning. Informed decision-making requires the use of a range of metacognitive strategies. Metacognitive strategies, also referred to as ‘self-management strategies’ (Wenden 1991) or ‘indirect strategies’ (Oxford 1990), involve reflection on learning: planning learning and setting goals, self-assessment and monitoring of progress, evaluating learning activities and exploiting learning resources. Again, our needs analysis indicated that, in Chinese classrooms, it was generally the teacher, rather than the learner, who made such decisions about the classroom learning. Another significant point raised by the Bergen definition is the importance of willingness, or readiness, to act autonomously. A learner may have acquired a good deal of metacognitive knowledge (i.e. capacity for autonomous learning), but not always feel like taking responsibility. The willingness to take control varies from time to time and task to task, depending on a range of variables, including psychological (e.g. depression, irritation), physiological (e.g. headaches) and contextual factors (e.g. too much noise, not enough resources) which can influence learners at any time. To summarise, learner autonomy is a construct of capacity which is operationalised when willingness is present. Our research showed that, among the Chinese teachers, there was a general acceptance of the need for greater learner autonomy and lifelong learning, and a readiness to promote learner autonomy in the classroom — up to a point — but that the constraints they faced as teachers prevented them from doing so in any systematic or sustained manner. Also embedded in the Bergen definition is the notion of social learning and social responsibility. This reflects recent acknowledgement by researchers and practitioners in the field of the importance of sociocultural theory (or social development theory), in that learner

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autonomy does not only relate to the individual learning in isolation. Sociocultural theory locates all human activity in a particular historical, cultural and institutional context. It states that human behaviours cannot be understood by focusing on the individual in isolation or by considering the individual only in face-to-face interactions with social agents such as parents or teachers. Social interaction, therefore, needs to be located within the prevailing political, cultural and historical contexts (Vygotsky 1978; Renshaw 1992: 21). The concepts most closely associated with the sociocultural theory of learning — such as scaffolding, reciprocal teaching and collaborative learning — highlight the social basis of learning and the interactive processes that promote development (Renshaw 1992). It was clear from our research that the teachers we talked to generally had a good understanding of their cultural and political context and how this affected their approach to teaching and learning. It was also clear that they wanted to find ways of dealing with some of the constraints that they faced. Intervention The interactive processes mentioned above need, then, to be promoted in any materials aimed at developing greater learner or teacher autonomy. Indeed, the concept of autonomy adopted by the project team assumes the need for some kind of intervention in order to encourage the development of greater autonomy. It has been argued that the capacity for making informed decisions about one’s own learning is not necessarily innate — or, at least, seems to be schooled out of learners through the more traditional aspects of education which place them in a subordinate position in the classroom (Holec 1981; Little 1996). Our needs analysis indicated that the latter was the case with many of the English teachers who were to be the target users of the materials.

Pedagogic principles In response to what we learned from the needs analysis research and a consideration of the theory of autonomy, we were able to agree on the following pedagogic principles. Firstly, it was decided that metacognitive knowledge and strategies should be developed; in addition to the general requirement of psychological and methodological preparation for autonomy, and practice in self-direction

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(as recommended by Dickinson & Carver [1980]), it was felt that these were perhaps the most significant aspects of autonomy that needed to be supported by the project materials. As mentioned earlier, metacognitive knowledge needs to include the following: • Learner factors: Participants explore themselves as learners on the programmes, e.g. their past learning experiences, beliefs about and attitudes towards learning, their learning preferences and styles, personalities, and affective and physiological needs as learners. • Contextual factors: Participants explore their learning contexts and the constraints that hinder the promotion of learner-centred methodology, autonomy and the use of ICT — for example, student attitudes and preferences, large classes, examinations, time constraints — and consider appropriate ways of dealing with these. • The subject matter: In these projects, the participants explore the theory and practice of learner-centred language teaching methodologies, the promotion of greater learner autonomy, and the use of new technologies in language learning and teaching. • The learning process: Participants learn to reflect critically on their learning and teaching, develop awareness of suitable learning and professional development strategies (e.g. metacognitive, cognitive and socioaffective strategies) (O’Malley & Chamot 1990), experiment with new ideas and practices, and evaluate these. Metacognitive strategies are regarded as crucial to all learning. These are strategies which involve thinking or reflecting on learning and, typically, they are the very things that teachers do for learners, instead of encouraging their development in the learners. Participants need to develop the ability to use the following in service of their own learning if they wish to promote the independence of their learners: • planning learning • self-assessment • short-term goal-setting • monitoring progress • organising learning and exploiting resources • activity evaluation

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In keeping with the sociocultural, constructivist model of autonomy adopted by the team, we also agreed that the following principles needed to be built into the materials: • respect for individual differences • focus on individual development • whole-person development • personalisation of learning • collaborative learning • development of a learning community • explicitness of purpose and methodology In addition to the above principles, when designing our project materials we needed to be aware of the context in which our teachers operate, their needs and the constraints they face. Given such factors, it would be wholly inappropriate to simply expect the participants to already have the capacity or readiness to become more autonomous. It was clear that the materials needed to provide substantial support and scaffolding for the development of greater teacher and learner responsibility.

Design features of the materials The exemplar materials developed for both projects involve blended learning. In other words, although the course materials were primarily to be computer-based with online elements, including video, audio and flash animation, the trainee-teachers would also have access to support print materials, and have opportunities for face-to-face group tutorials with specially trained tutors in their local study context. I now describe some of the major design features of the materials in development and explain how they relate to the theoretical and pedagogic principles already outlined. The following features contribute to supporting and developing autonomy: • rich media — to provide a compelling and experiential environment which motivates learning through interaction; • clear signposting and simple navigation — to provide explicitness of purpose and aid scaffolding of learning; and • student tools — to support individualised learning, including: – a student workspace, to provide an individualised repository

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of the individual participant’s work, reflection, tasks, assessment results and learning progress, with a: — notebook for personal note-taking; — reflective journal for recording personal reflections on tasks, professional practice and aspects of the course; and — bibliography to provide learning resources and store participants’ own selected items; a bulletin board for posting outcomes, suggestions and materials for all participants to view; discussion groups to provide opportunities for sharing and interaction, and to develop a learning community.

Rich media Rich media have been described as “innovative media that create an immersive environment and deeper experience online” and which must provide self-navigation and interactivity (Sunday Times 2004). The materials cover the subject matter of the courses via a blend of rich media: video recordings, audio recordings, flash animation and interactive tasks. Examples of work in progress can be seen in Figures 10.1 and 10.2 below:

Figure 10.1

BNU ‘Teaching Grammar’ unit: preview of grammar teaching problems

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Figure 10.2 BNU ‘Teaching Grammar’ unit: posters on classroom wall

Participants embarking on a methodology unit in the BNU materials for middle school teachers enter into a virtual classroom on screen. The classroom is equipped with a blackboard and a notice board, and the walls are decorated with colourful posters. This was considered a useful image as it starts from a familiar teaching context, but highlights the ways in which teachers can exercise autonomy to personalise the classroom and draw learners’ attention to new ways of learning. The screen then zooms to the blackboard at the front of the classroom. For the unit on ‘Teaching grammar’, for example, the blackboard has chalked on it: ‘Teaching Grammar!’, and, when the participants click on the board, chalked comments on grammar (e.g. ‘Grammar is Boring!’) will appear in order to provide a preview of the ‘grammar teaching problems’ the unit deals with (see Figure 10.1). By clicking on the arrows on either side of the blackboard, the participants can move around the classroom and see posters and noticeboards. The colourful poster visuals in Figure 10.2 relate to each of the sections of the grammar unit, and clicking on any of these leads to a preview of that section. The participants are also able to click on the classroom noticeboard (not shown here) to see documents which describe explicitly the aims, content and assessment requirements for the unit in question.

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In Figure 10.3, we can see a screen for the ‘Teaching Grammar’ unit that appears when a poster is clicked on. Here, the participants are presented with the ‘talking heads’ of six Chinese teachers we interviewed about the problems they have when teaching grammar. The participants click on each head to listen to the video clip (in the larger screen to the left), which is generally three to five seconds in duration. They have the freedom to listen in any order and for as many times as they wish. (In this case, the problems are summarised under each talking head, but in longer video extracts in the materials, participants have the choice of just listening, or listening and following a transcript or a summary.) The participants are then asked to ‘drag and drop’ (i.e. click on and move) the various heads to place them in rank order according to how important each problem is for them, personally, in their own teaching context. This ranked order is recorded on a database and when the participant moves to the next screen (or returns to it at any time in the future), the ‘talking heads’ reappear in the selected order. In this ranked screen, the participants can click on the ‘talking heads’ once more to hear their suggested solutions for the problems they presented, and this then leads the participants into a

Figure 10.3 BNU ‘Teaching Grammar’ unit: teachers talking about grammar

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range of further tasks, from which they may select, related to, for example, how to use grammar games in order to make grammar teaching less boring. In this way, the trainee teachers have been enabled to set their own agenda for working through the module. Suggested activities for each of the six problems and solutions are explained and demonstrated, and then provided in a downloadable, printable form (with teachers’ notes) so that the participants can select from them an activity to take into the classroom and try out. An important part of developing autonomy is the opportunity to reflect and experiment. The participants then record their reflections on the activity in their reflective journals in the student workspace, and can compare experiences and share feedback with other members of their local study group via the discussion group and in tutorials. Reflecting and sharing of learning experiences is an important part of developing metacognition and, thus, for developing autonomy. The trainee teachers have the opportunity to experience the relevance of these activities in the context of their own learning, so that they are better placed to encourage their learners to do the same. The use of rich media has enabled the materials to provide the flexibility which allows for personalisation of learning, practice in selfdirection, and opportunities for reflection and experimentation. These materials were piloted in Beijing during March and April 2005 when 12 participants, all secondary school English teachers, volunteered to complete five weeks of online learning using materials from the projects (McGrath, Sinclair & Chen 2007). Findings from the piloting of the materials indicated that the idea of ‘choice’ through rich media was not always appreciated by the piloters (McGrath, Sinclair & Chen 2007). Some participants mentioned that they liked the idea of choice: I normally browse first and pick up the things that interest me and learn these first. Sometimes I would browse first and learn in details. (Participant 5) I like to be given choices. I can learn what I’m interested first so that I feel very free. (Participant 6)

However, some found there was too much choice! I think this course gives us too much freedom and too much space. I feel that I can’t grasp too much in my hand. I want to have something

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solid, something that is practical and effective to my teaching. (Participant 4)

Another piloter resolved this dilemma by first studying all the materials in the order they were presented so as not to miss any information. I won’t select things to learn for the first time because I don’t want to miss anything. I’ll probably choose things to look at from the second time. (Participant 4)

The above quotes demonstrate the diversity of opinion held by the piloters, which is to be expected and respected. However, they also underline the lack of familiarity with choice in learning. Several participants, for example, mentioned that they tended to be passive in learning and needed some pressure from outside to push them to learn: I’m a very passive person. I need pressure to force me to learn. I’m accustomed to being forced to learn. (Participant 6) I want to be guided by experts. I can try things out and I have my own thoughts but I do need them to offer me feedback so that I feel relieved. I’m not an active person who takes initiatives to do things if not asked to. (Participant 7)

These comments underline, perhaps, the importance of clear structures and scaffolding for such participants, at least during the earlier stages of the course.

Clear signposting and simple navigation The use of multimedia and rich media produced a complex set of materials and it was the team’s aim to provide navigation and labelling systems which were clearly marked and explained. While this should be standard for any e-learning materials, it is sadly not the case in practice, and much e-learning that the team explored was either linear and lock-step in design, so that navigation and signposting was minimal, or, in more complex designs, rather confusing to the user. Examples of the navigation buttons and icons can be seen in the figures provided above. Major functions are presented horizontally across the top of the screen, and participants have access to courses and units by clicking on a vertical menu on the left of the screen. The aim was to present a web-

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like environment for learning. The seahorse ‘help’ icon turns into a question mark when clicked and provides useful information on the different functions of the navigation tools. The clarity of the navigation and signposting provides explicitness for the participants, and the opportunity to move around the materials in a non-linear fashion, in accordance with their own needs and interests, thus supporting learner autonomy again by presenting diversity and choice.

The student tools The student tools provide a rich variety of opportunities for the participants to pursue and organise their own learning. The student workspace provides the facility for the individual participants to store any interaction with their computers that they wish to keep on a database. They can access items whenever they wish, modify them if they are so inclined, copy them into another file, or send them to someone else. It is the major tool for developing metacognitive knowledge and strategies, for assessment and evaluation. It has several components: space for note-taking (the notebook); for directed and personal reflection (the reflective journal); and a repository for learning resources (the bibliography), including those provided by the tutors and those selected and stored by the participants. There are also pedagogic tools for communication: the bulletin board for posting tutor announcements and learner products, and the discussion group for professional exchange, sharing of experience, opinions, and so on. Since its development, the workspace has attracted international attention from educators and developers of e-learning, as it is not simply a means of managing learning. The workspace is also the record kept of individual participants’ work by the database that lies behind the system. This enables tutors to keep track of participants’ progress, which is a feature of other data-based systems. However, with regard to the support of autonomy, it also provides a personalised learning experience. When individuals log on, the system remembers them, the route through the materials they have taken, the choices they have made in relation to interactive tasks, their contributions to the bulletin board and discussion groups, and how far they have progressed in the course. Significantly, these interactions can be reviewed by the participant at any time, and provide the basis for further reflection and, thus, metacognitive development.

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Figure 10.4 below shows an example of the workspace in use:

Figure 10.4 BNU ‘Teaching Grammar’ unit: student workspace — Personal Archive

When the student enters the workspace during a session, it opens up in their Personal Archive. Here, grouped within separate units, they will see their files of interaction, which they can then send to their peers or tutors for assessment. Participants are also able to access their portfolio of submitted tasks (POST) for assessment by the tutor, and see files sent by their peers (Peer View). During the piloting of the materials, the opportunities afforded by the tools and the workspace for reflection seemed to provide some quite striking evidence of effects on participants’ thinking and practice: the teachers were clearly encouraged to think about what they learned. One of the participants said: “Unlike traditional teaching, I can’t stop thinking about it because it’s not a 45-minute lesson. I have to think about it all month” (Participant 6). Other participants realised that learning online made them think harder because they could not simply choose not to listen, as they might in a classroom. As Participant 1 commented: I feel this is really demanding. It is more complicated than studying in a classroom where you might choose not to listen or think. However, learning online makes people think more and learn to study on your own.

Participants’ written reflections revealed that their beliefs had also been challenged by activities which involved them in experimenting with

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new kinds of activities, recording their lessons and reflecting on the experience, for example: I’ve recorded two of my lessons and I feel they were so interesting. Students really communicated in my class! I want to record another one to see whether it’s better. (Participant 8)

Some of the participants began to think critically about their practice by exploring and comparing what they had been doing in the past, and then thought of ways to make use of new ideas. Thus, reflection led to an impetus for teacher autonomy: When I was learning the unit about grammar, I thought about my own way of teaching. I want to summarize my teaching methods first and try some of the methods introduced here. (Participant 5) When I finished some of the tasks, I wanted to compare my thoughts with the course writers and I would copy their explanations if there is any difference. After I learned the example of “the usage of some and any”, I asked myself whether I could use similar methods in teaching other words. (Participant 1)

Discussion groups The team believed that synchronous discussion groups would be too restrictive for the participants’ preferred study schedules. (However, participants can make use of synchronous messenger services, if they wish.) Participants have access to asynchronous bulletin boards where they are encouraged by the course tasks to share ideas, experiences and reflection with other members of their study group. They have the opportunity to set up discussion groups for selected participants, so that they can work collaboratively in small or larger groups, as desired. All contributions are automatically recorded in the workspace, and participants are able to download any parts of the discussions they want to keep. Tutors have access to these public discussion groups, but the participants are responsible for running them. During the piloting, participants were asked to post their reflections on a video-recorded lesson which exemplified learner-centred approaches to teaching. This provoked 15 postings where participants shared their conceptualisations of learner-centredness, comments on

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the lesson, concerns about classroom practice and suggestions. Figure 10.5 provides an example:

Do you feel you learned anything from watching the lesson and answering the questions? If so, what? How far were your own views similar to those of Dr McGrath? Do you agree with everything he said? Do you think you will make any changes to your own teaching as a result of this activity? •

I really feel I did learn a lot from this part. 1. To be a natural teacher. 2. To respect and cherish Ss’ work. 3. To try to give every student proper opportunities to present himself in class.

•

I agree with Dr. McGrath totally. What he said made me know more clearly what to do and how to do in the future.

*

I will make some changes to improve my teaching and encourage my Ss from now. But recently, a problem is troubling me: I’m trying to take more group work in class. But my Ss sit individually and it’s impossible to move the desks and chairs before every class. And don’t want to change a place, either. What should I do? Figure 10.5 BNU Discussion Board activity on ‘learner-centred teaching’

Through participating in the discussion task, the piloters had started to find their own voices and to articulate their metacognitive awareness.

Conclusion The development of e-learning materials for teacher education has required the Sino-UK team to consider a broad range of factors; not only have we had to clarify our theoretical concepts and philosophy with respect to language teaching and learning, teacher education, and learner and teacher autonomy, but we have also had to work within the constraints of the cultural, political and teaching contexts of the teacher-participants and overcome some of the limitations of the technical platform used. This has involved an immense amount of crosscultural collaboration and awareness. There has been much crossfertilisation of ideas among the various experts within the team, providing a steep learning curve for all (see Spencer-Oatey 2007 for further discussion). Most important, the team has had to put into

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practice its philosophy on learner autonomy and embed this in the elearning materials developed. This has led to the employment of rich media, where interaction with the technology encourages the participants to reflect and develop metacognitive knowledge. It has also led to the development of new tools (see Caley 2007 for further details), such as the student workspace, which provide the technical functionality necessary for the support of learner autonomy within an interactive learning environment. Clearly, some of the challenges I faced as a coursebook writer attempting to integrate learner autonomy into my materials remain a challenge for e-learning. The learners’ (in this case, teachers of English) unfamiliarity with the concept of autonomy, and the lack of teacher and learner control in the learning context still exist. However, we did find a readiness to engage with the unfamiliar, both in terms of autonomy and the use of new technology, which is encouraging. Although one needs to be cautious about the results from the piloting of the exemplar materials, feedback has demonstrated that the approaches we have taken appear to result in active participation in the learning by the participants, and an engagement with choice and self-direction which enabled them to create their own pathways through the materials, according to their own needs and preferences. The tools developed, particularly the student workspace, provide not simply learning management, but also opportunities for participants to organise and regulate their own learning. In addition, the materials appear to have encouraged a more critical awareness of the teachers’ own roles, opinions and professional practice, as well as a willingness to experiment with new ideas and techniques, which bodes well for the development of greater teacher autonomy.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Dr. Kevin Caley for his input on the student workspace and Chen Zehang for collecting some of the data quoted.

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11 Defending stories and sharing one: Towards a narrative understanding of teacher autonomy Naoko Aoki, with Hiroaki Kobayashi

Introduction There has been a growing sense of need among second language teachers and researchers to focus on the learner as a social being (Norton Pierce 1995; Norton 2000; Pavlenko & Lantolf 2000; Toohey 2000; Pavlenko et al. 2001; Pavlenko 2002; Block 2003; Johnson 2004; Pavlenko & Blackledge 2004). Underlying these authors’ work is an awareness that both education and research have long neglected the learner’s agency, which at once shapes and is shaped by society, and have reduced the learner to a passive being whose processes and outcomes of learning are (solely) determined by a limited number of variables. In order to remedy this shortcoming, the authors above almost unanimously call for more qualitative research — a trend which can also be observed among learner autonomy practitioners and researchers. There is a growing body of literature that tells of the experiences of learners through stories (Benson & Lor 1998; Benson 2002a; Benson & Nunan 2002, 2005; Benson, Chik & Lim 2003; Skier & Vye 2003; Hyland 2004; Chik 2007; Murray & Kojima 2007). These first-person accounts of learners’ experiences are most likely the only way for researchers to access learners’ inner worlds and histories in order to discover how they perceive the social world surrounding them and how they have acted upon it outside the physical and temporal boundaries of a language classroom or self-access centre. Indeed, these studies have revealed that learner autonomy develops in many different ways for many varied reasons and over a very long period of time, and this

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information is vital to our understanding of how learners learn so that we as teachers can learn more about how best to support them. The same argument should apply to studying teacher autonomy.1 Studies of teachers in general education have shown that teachers’ attitudes and commitment to the profession change over the whole course of their careers (Huberman 1993; Kelchtermans 1993; Kelchtermans & Vandenberghe 1994) and their teaching is influenced by many factors outside the immediate context of teacher education, such as early educational experiences (Lortie 1975), family background (Knowles 1992; Raymond, Butt & Townsend 1992), later personal experiences (Connelly & Clandinin 1988) and the social context of their work (Goodson 1991, 1992; Butt et al. 1992). To understand why a certain teacher is a committed learner autonomy practitioner and why another resists the idea, for example, we need to listen to stories teachers tell about their own experiences and try to understand them in the context of their histories. One way to do that is through studying and writing life stories. I have shared some teacher life stories elsewhere (Aoki 2003; Aoki, with Hamakawa 2003; Aoki, with Yagi 2006), but more teacher life stories would further help us understand how different individuals develop their teacher autonomy over time. They would also inform the practice of teacher educators as they try to support the development of teacher autonomy in their students. In the first part of this chapter, I will define what a story is, explain how I write life stories, and discuss issues surrounding story-based research; and in the second half, I will share a life story of one of my ex-students and my reflection on the story.

Story-based research What is a story? In my understanding, a story is two or more human actions or events put together in a cause-effect relationship. I will elaborate on this definition with a variation of Bruner’s (1986) example. The teacher explained a grammar point. A student yawned.

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This is not a story. It is only a description of two separate actions. It becomes a story when they are connected in a cause-effect relationship. The following example is a bare minimum, but it is still a story. The teacher explained a grammar point. Then out of boredom a student yawned.

In the traditional positivist research paradigm, which aims to find universal laws, a cause-effect relationship is established by mathematical description and logical argument. For example, a traditional researcher who wants to claim that teachers’ grammar point explanations induce students’ yawns might categorise classroom activities into, say, grammar point explanations, teacher-fronted drills and pair work, and then count the number of students’ yawns in each category. Next, he or she would compare these figures statistically to see whether students actually yawn significantly more often during grammar point explanations. The validity of the researcher’s claim would be judged by whether the statistical procedure was appropriate and the interpretation of the results of the statistical analysis was logical. In a story, on the other hand, a cause-effect relationship is based on verisimilitude (Bruner 1986), or likelihood (Polkinghorne 1988). Whether you believe the yawning story or not depends on whether you find the cause-effect relationship between the grammar point explanation and the yawning likely. Polkinghorne (ibid.: 2) writes that “The emergence of human beings from life in general to reflective consciousness and language is a threshold change that has brought about a unique level of reality that I will call ‘the order of meaning’”. A story or narrative2 is what we use to give meaning to everyday actions and events. It provides us with “a framework for understanding the past events in one’s life and planning future actions” (ibid.: 11). Bruner (1986) calls the mode of knowing in traditional research ‘paradigmatic’ and the story mode of knowing ‘narrative’.

How I write life stories The term ‘life story’ refers to different things for different researchers (e.g. Linde 1993; McAdams 1993; Mishler 1999; Goodley et al. 2004). What I mean by a life story is a chronologically ordered chain of significant actions and events in a person’s life leading to the present. It is written by a researcher based on in-depth interviews with that

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person to understand how she or he has become who she or he is. I normally focus on a specific aspect of the participant’s life — teaching, for example — but the interviews and the finished story cover other aspects as well if the participant and myself agree that they are relevant. As I interview participants and analyse transcripts, I take an approach called ‘explanatory narrative research’ (Polkinghorne 1988) or ‘narrative analysis’ (Polkinghorne 1995). This approach aims to “construct a narrative account explaining ‘why’ a situation or event involving human actions has happened” (Polkinghorne 1988: 161). With a research question on why something happened, a researcher gathers data which tell about events prior to the one in question and configures them into an “emplotted narrative” (Polkinghorne 1995: 14). Finished reports of narrative analysis are “retrodictive rather than predictive” (Polkinghorne 1988: 171) because they do not predict, as traditional research does, that the same thing will happen whenever the same initial conditions are repeated, but rather “locate the decision points at which a different action could have produced a different ending” (ibid.: 171). In doing a piece of life story research, then, I start with the present and go back in time to look for likely answers to the question, ‘What caused this person to think, act, or feel like this?’ For example, I ask a teacher why she became interested in learner autonomy and she says that it was because her colleagues were talking about it. Then I would wonder why her colleagues’ talk interested her when it might not interest others and I ask questions to explore that puzzle with her. A chain of puzzles often leads an interview to a very distant past such as childhood experiences. The process is somewhat like detective work, to borrow Polkinghorne’s (ibid.) metaphor. I write a life story in the reverse order, beginning with the past and ending with the present.

Issues surrounding story-based research I work more or less in the constructivist paradigm (Lincoln & Guba 1985, 2000; Guba & Lincoln 1994). I do not think any research can be value-free. Even traditional research that claims to be objective and neutral is actually a result of political and/or value-laden decisions. (Think about who gets funding and why, for example.) Rather than trying to be neutral, constructivists ask themselves whose values their research represents and what good it does to whom. I also take the position that there is no single objective reality out there waiting to be

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discovered by research. Realities are what we co-construct in our interactions. Therefore a story lived, a story told to me at one particular point in time, a story told to me at another time or told to someone else may all be different. A research text is also a construction. It may or may not correspond with the reality co-constructed in an interview — so I take two measures to give my writing trustworthiness.3 One is to make clear in my writing who I am in relationship to my research participants and what my experience and ideological stance are in terms of my research topic so that readers can see for themselves where biases might be.4 The other measure is to involve research participants in the process of analysis. In interviews I explicitly ask questions related to my narrative analysis puzzles and invite the participant to explore them with me. I also show my draft story to the participants and ask whether there is anything that they do not agree with or they think should be included. I revise the story according to the participant’s feedback.5 Of course, there is a practical problem of keeping a story to a length that fits into the space I have been given by publishers or editors. I often have to choose one or two episodes from among those I find equally significant. What I present in my writing is therefore only part of the outcome of my joint effort with a research participant to make sense of her or his life. With all these reservations, then, what is the point in writing stories? What can they do that other types of research text cannot do? I think there are at least three unique merits in stories. Firstly, a story is a natural form of representing our knowledge. Many people never talk in the paradigmatic mode, but it would be very difficult to find someone who never tells stories. Particularly relevant to our concern is the widely shared view that teachers’ professional knowledge is storied (Elbaz 1991; Clandinin & Connelly 1995; Jalongo & Isenberg 1995). Writings by, for and about teachers are likely to represent teachers’ professional knowledge better if they are written in the narrative mode. Secondly, as Carter (1993: 6) observes, a story “captures in a special fashion the richness and the nuances of meaning in human affairs”. To explain what this means, here is another version of the yawning story. It was a lesson immediately after lunch. The teacher had been explaining a fine distinction in usage of the particles wa and ga6 to a class of elementary students of Japanese for about ten minutes. The heating was on and, with 20 students packed in a small room, the place felt a bit stuffy. Wang, a self-funded student from China, had lost track of the teacher’s talk. He had had to work all night in his

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part-time job the previous night. He felt very tired. He didn’t see why he should be in the classroom. He yawned.7

Here the cause-effect relationship between the teacher’s explanation and the student’s yawning is not as straightforward as in the original version of this story. Wang might not have yawned if it had been a morning class, the teacher had kept his explanation short, someone had opened the window for a while, Wang had not been tired, or he had stopped the teacher and told him that he did not understand. Every detail is a possible candidate for the cause or one of the causes of Wang’s yawn. The richness and the nuances of meaning or the complexities of realities can be very well expressed in a story form. The third merit is that, because stories capture the richness and the nuances of meaning, they can offer a vicarious experience to readers (Lincoln 1989). Even if you have never been a student of a Japanese language school in Japan you can live the experience through Wang’s story and learn from it. Some may question whether this learning leads to generalised knowledge. In the paradigmatic mode of knowing, knowledge is thought to develop by adding new generalised propositions. In this mode, generalisation does not allow any exceptions. (A generalised proposition is not a good one if there are exceptions.) If patterns are found, every case must fall into one and only one pattern. Our knowledge in the narrative mode, on the other hand, develops by accumulating individual cases. Polkinghorne (1995: 11) argues that “The cumulative effect of narrative reasoning is a collection of individual cases in which thought moves from case to case” and that “the understanding of the new action can draw upon previous understanding while being open to the specific and unique elements that make the new episode different from all that have gone before”. In the narrative mode of knowing, generalisability is not an issue. We become wiser as we tell more stories to each other.

Hiroaki’s story Background Hiroaki was one of the first nine Japanese university students I had ever taught. Of these nine, he is the only one who has always pursued a teaching career since graduation. In the spring of 2003 we happened

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to meet at a research meeting and took rather a long train journey home together. During this journey, our conversation was mostly about recollections of and reflections on our shared experiences. I was amazed to find out how mature and confident a teacher Hiroaki had become. I wondered what contributions, if any, I might have made to his growth and suggested that I would like to write about him, and he accepted the proposal. The research interview did not happen until the following spring, though, because we live several hundred kilometres away from each other and lead busy lives. The following story is based on the interview in spring 2004, 11 years after he finished his undergraduate study, my field notes on the conversation on the train one year prior to the interview, my writing, both published (Aoki 2001, 2002) and private, and other artefacts, including a couple of dozen photos Hiroaki chose from his private album to talk about in the interview.8 In this story there are three distinctive voices, represented by different typefaces: Hiroaki telling his own story in the interview; Naoko as a researcher telling what she has understood from Hiroaki’s telling of his story; and Naoko as a teacher educator telling her own story. These three voices are represented with different typefaces. Hiroaki and I have agreed that this story satisfactorily represents our shared experience during the two years of Hiroaki’s pre-service teacher education and his experience before and after those years.

The story Hiroaki’s mother often tells him that he was quiet as a child, but would insist when he wanted to do something. He says his core personality is shy and reserved. At school he was an easy student for teachers. He would diligently do whatever the teachers told him to, although he was not entirely uncritical of them. Hiroaki wanted to be a cultured man, although he doesn’t know how he came to think like that. He didn’t want to be a specialist who didn’t know anything outside his field — he wanted to be someone who is knowledgeable about everything. Hiroaki took an interest in JSL when he watched a television programme about people learning Japanese in Japan. In the programme, one learner talked about the difficulty of learning polite forms of the language. This learner had asked his teacher why he had to learn it and the teacher simply

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said “because it is important” and didn’t explain why it was so. This learner commented that people in his country would be delighted if a foreigner spoke their language even if she or he didn’t use polite forms. He said the Japanese attitude made him sad. Hiroaki thought what this learner was saying was reasonable. At the same time, though, he felt that learning polite forms of the language was not totally unnecessary, but he wasn’t able to explain why. The puzzle stayed with him, although he never intended to be a JSL teacher. Hiroaki chose a national university which had just started new programmes in its School of Education. One of the new programmes was in Japanese language and culture and it also offered JSL-related courses. Unlike other pre-service JSL teacher education programmes, the curriculum seemed to be interdisciplinary and leave quite a lot of room for students’ choice. Hiroaki thought it was a perfect match for him. He started his undergraduate study in 1989. Once on campus, however, he found out that the programme was full of problems.

The new programmes were the brainchild of the Ministry of Education for Schools of Education of national universities to cope with the decreasing demand for primary and secondary school teachers. The Ministry’s rationale was that those programmes would at once reduce the number of graduates qualified for primary and secondary education and produce educators in a wider context to meet the needs of the changing society. So far so good, but what they didn’t see, or intentionally ignored, was the consequences of their assumption that the current teaching staff should be able to teach these new programmes. In the case of Hiroaki’s university, only three new teaching positions were allocated to the 12 new programmes which accepted 120 students yearly. As a result, students in the new programmes had to share most courses with ones in the existing primary and secondary teacher preparation programmes. Hiroaki remembers a course in his second year at the university, entitled ‘Basics of JSL Education’. It was supposed to be one of the first courses on the specialist topic for the students in his programme, but it turned out to be an introductory course for teaching Japanese as a mother tongue for wouldbe primary and secondary teachers. In the first class meeting, the teacher talked about children’s literature. This shocked Hiroaki and the other students in the same programme. They went to the teacher right after the class and asked if he was going to deal with JSL later, to which the teacher replied: “I’m sorry I’ve never taught JSL. I couldn’t possibly do that”.9

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As the first batch of students in the programme, Hiroaki and his classmates developed what he calls ‘a pioneer spirit’. They felt that their university education would be a total mess unless they took action. The shared sense of crisis made them unite. They went to the teacher in charge of the programme to complain. Together with the students in the other programmes, they sent a petition to the faculty. Hiroaki cynically says that the School created such critically active students. In trying to reduce the students’ mounting frustration, the teacher in charge of Hiroaki’s programme told the students that they were going to have a specialist teacher in the third year. No one knew who the specialist teacher was going to be, but their expectations rose high. Around the same time, the shy reserved young man was going through a personal transformation. His development was supported by one of his classmates. Hiroaki said: Hiroaki: She may not remember, but she gave me my first part-time job. [...] I didn’t have a job in my freshman year. I just took it easy and only wondered what I might like to do. Then one day Tamami said to me, “You don’t have any part-time job, do you? Take the one I’m doing now. I’ll quit and make a space for you”. I had the job till I graduated. Naoko: Ah, the one where you tutored kids over the phone? Hiroaki: Yeah. [...] It was also Tamami who invited me to the club. I didn’t belong to any clubs and other people were joining too. So [I joined]. [...] Starting the part-time job and joining the club both changed my life. I made more friends through these activities. I’m not sure if she knew I was reserved, but she pushed me to act. She gave me opportunities. So I’m very grateful to her. [...] I can talk about my experience of the part-time job and the club now because she encouraged me. So I think her influence has been great.

I arrived on campus in 1991 as one of the three teachers hired exclusively for the new programmes. I was warmly welcomed by a wellformed group of students who seemed to be very close to each other. No one seemed to be left out. If I said something to one of them, everyone knew it by the next morning. They collaborated very well in whatever they did. They were extremely eager to learn and seemed to believe whatever I said. Hiroaki says that he and his friends were probably thrilled at the prospect that they were finally going to do something worthwhile and enjoyable after the disappointing courses in the second year.

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I had taught JSL in a variety of contexts over a period of 10 years and was fairly confident that I wasn’t bad at teaching the language. I had facilitated workshops for in-service teachers. But I had never worked with Japanese undergraduate students nor had I gone through any long-term JSL pre-service teacher education programme. I started teaching after a short part-time teacher training course which I didn’t like very much. My role model as a teacher had been the teachers I learned English from. My learning about teaching had occurred on the job, in reading, at conferences and workshops, and in conversations with non-Japanese-speaking friends. So I didn’t have any experience to fall back on in teaching these nine Japanese undergraduates. I had to start with figuring out what I tacitly knew about teaching and breaking it down into possibly presentable chunks. I had no idea what I could sensibly expect them to learn and how best I could approach the task of teaching them. During the two years I worked with these nine students, my work was a trial-and-error-based exploration in collaboration with the students — not that I thought that was a pedagogically feasible approach. I needed their help to function as a teacher. I was probably vague in my talk with them. The students interpreted my suggestions in their own way, gladly organised their learning on their own and often produced totally unexpected results. Hiroaki comments on the language learning activities we tried in class: What I found interesting about JSL was the difference from traditional English classrooms where students sit at a desk and a teacher stands in front. It came as a shock to me that you could move around in the classroom and that activities some people might regard as playing were actually meaningful activities. I had a sense of freedom. Like anything was possible. We could do anything as long as it led to learning. You didn’t have to be bound by a set format of a lesson.

The students’ help for me extended beyond our classroom. I was new to the programme, new to the campus, and new to the city. They took me under their wing and helped me settle in. I spent quite a lot of time with them outside the classroom and learned how competent they were in life. They were confident and reliable staff in their part-time jobs. They were able to manage their daily lives much better than I could. And they were always full of ideas on how to enjoy life. I think they were aware that they were more competent than I was in some aspects of our lives. Not many months after I first met him, Hiroaki came to my office and instructed me to clean up the mess I’d created on my desk. Such was our relationship.

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It didn’t take too long before I became aware of the problems of the new programmes. I quickly decided to stand by the students. Their struggle against the defective curriculum became mine too. By then the faculty had become fully aware of the students’ dissatisfaction. Many teachers were sympathetic towards the students and they seemed to think that my voice should be heard because I was speaking on behalf of those unhappy students. Limited resources, however, did not allow the institution to solve the problem in any systematic way. Sometimes we won, and sometimes we lost, in our rather disruptive effort to improve the situation. I remember that in the guidance session at the beginning of his fourth year, Hiroaki spoke out that he did not understand why they had to take a course on Chinese classical literature. The course had probably been made compulsory as a courtesy to the teacher of Chinese classical literature when the faculty wrote the curriculum. Its relevance to the students’ interest was indeed questionable. I was amazed at Hiroaki’s bluntness. Looking back on the incident, he says this: [I suppressed myself at high school, but] I gradually came to want to express myself. Or rather there was an environment which made it possible. I happened to have very good classmates. They treated me very nicely in the club and on other occasions. This helped build my confidence. Well, that’s a bit too much to say, but I probably felt we should say what’s wrong was wrong. As we often told you, we were frustrated. We were angry with the university. We felt it had deceived us. Then we were told we had to take that course in our final year. I wasn’t able to contain myself any more. Perhaps I didn’t believe students had to do whatever teachers told them to any more. What had to be said had to be said. I probably felt that I was a student and paid tuition [so I had the right]. [...] I’m not sure if I’d have dared to take the action if my classmates had been reluctant to object. But they were the kind of people who would join in. So it was just a matter of who would start talking after all. I think everyone shared a feeling that we were not going to stay quiet.

The experience had a great influence on Hiroaki’s thinking as a teacher. He says: I went and complained to teachers when I was a student. So when I hear my students grumble I tell them to go and talk to the dean instead of grumbling. There’s no point in complaining to administrative staff. Go and see the dean or the department head. If you don’t want to go alone, invite others to join you. If you go in a group of 10 or 20, they’ll lose their nerve. I’ve got the conviction that students are entitled to do that.

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In our beloved curriculum, teaching practice was scheduled in the fourth year. Of course, nothing had previously been arranged. So I asked overseas postgraduate students in the school to come to extra classes for teaching practice. I told the student teachers about the procedure of course design and off they went. Hiroaki reflects on the experience: We did needs analysis and stuff like that, didn’t we? Honestly I didn’t know what we were doing. The research wasn’t really my task. That might have been why. I only had a very strong overall impression that teaching was hard work but extremely enjoyable. No one dumped their job on someone else’s shoulders. Everyone was enthusiastically involved. The memory of that good feeling has always been a source of positive energy for me.

As I said, I did not know what was involved in learning to teach. So I took a very laissez-faire approach in planning lessons. But Hiroaki did not think this was a problem. Neither does he now. Naoko: I didn’t teach you how to structure a lesson, did I? Hiroaki: We didn’t know either. But that was good. We’d never used any textbooks. We’d never learned how a standard Japanese lesson would go. [...] So we hadn’t formed any image of what a Japanese lesson might be like. That enabled us to teach without being bound by anything. If you have such an image or form you would worry whether your plan is good or bad according to the norm.

The students’ teaching was not necessarily superb. I didn’t want to be judgmental, but I had quite a few uneasy moments when I had to try very hard not to think their class was a total disaster. I confessed this to Hiroaki in our interview, but he said he had not been aware of my feeling then. The biggest learning for Hiroaki in the teaching practice seems to have been about observing and discussing teaching rather than teaching itself. He comments: Hiroaki: What I remember best is you told us to be a wall when we went to sit in on Japanese classes. My image of classroom observation was a lot of people coming in as if they were someone of importance ... Naoko: and looking into your notebook without asking you ...

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Hiroaki: Yeah, that sort of thing. But, as you told us, I remembered we had been very nervous when such people came in. I thought you were right in asking what right we had to be so rude. I realised I’d forgotten how people would feel about being observed when my social status had changed and I was going to observe classes. I learned we had to think about the influence of our presence over a lesson. Another thing is you told us not to say something was good or bad in our after-class meetings. I had never consciously looked at things without value judgement. I tended to think what I saw was good or bad. As you said, if we say someone should have done this or that, our discussion would get emotional and it wouldn’t go anywhere because we couldn’t draw a conclusion [on] what was right on the spot. But we had that tendency. I saw a danger there. In many cases we are aware of what has gone wrong in our own teaching. Having it pointed out by someone would make your blood boil. Well, you’d actually be hurt. I learned there were ways to express our opinions without hurting anyone. I’ve been trying to see teaching in a non-judgemental way since then. I think it was in the teaching practice that I consciously learned to see things without value judgement.

The students jointly put together a nearly 200-page report of their experience. I show the report to my students. I tell them what we did in our teaching practice. Talking about our teaching practice is a lot of fun for me. The way I talk gets them interested. So I show them the report so that they can read it for themselves. [...] That report is very important for me. I sometimes, perhaps once a year, have a look at it and remember what we did then. [...] For me the teaching practice was very helpful. So I try to reflect on my experience to understand what a teaching practice means for would-be teachers. I wouldn’t know otherwise.

In the fourth year of their study, Japanese undergraduates go jobhunting. Hiroaki’s classmates, even the ones who had been most enthusiastic about teaching, decided to take company jobs because teaching JSL was not as secure or well-paid as the company jobs available. One student, whom Hiroaki was particularly close to, had to give up an overseas teaching post offered by Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers because his family was strongly opposed to his career plan. This incident had a strong impact on Hiroaki. He was active and ahead of me. I wasn’t so active. It was a bit of a shock for me to know that the happy-go-lucky man had actually thought out his career and put his plan into action. But seeing him end up giving up the

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opportunity left me vexed. [...] I don’t remember exactly what made me decide to be a JSL teacher. I probably didn’t have any specific reason. I was indecisive and thought about other options too, but the experience of people who were close to me played a part. I had a kind of self-imposed sense of mission that I had to do it if no one else was going to do it so that our enthusiasm wouldn’t feel unreal. [...] By elimination I was the only one that was left. I had no particular career I wanted to pursue. I didn’t dislike the idea of being a JSL teacher. My family wouldn’t object. So I thought I’d give it a try. My father probably wanted me to take a job, but he’s not the type who would directly tell us what he thinks. He keeps up appearances with his children. So my mother would tell us what he says to her. But my mother has always been supportive of our education. She didn’t tell me to go to graduate school, but she had no objection at all. When I told her that I wanted to be a JSL teacher and I needed a postgraduate degree for that, she said something like “OK, go if you want.” [...] In my family my plan to go to grad school didn’t come out of blue. It was something they could have predicted. So it wasn’t difficult for me to talk to my parents. I might have chosen a company job if I had anticipated strong disapproval.

Hiroaki’s sense of mission probably wasn’t just of his own making. When I e-mailed the other ex-students to ask if I could show their photo at a conference everyone replied “Yes”, especially if my talk was going to be about Hiroaki. One of them said Hiroaki was in a sense their representative. Hiroaki talks of Tamami again: Ever since I decided to go to graduate school she has always sent me encouraging words in her greeting cards. “I think it’s good you are going to be a JSL teacher. Good luck” and a lot of other things. She did two teaching practices, JSL and secondary education, but she didn’t go into teaching, did she? She took a company job. She wanted to be a teacher, but I guess the situation she was in didn’t allow her to. I’m not sure if I can say I’m living out her dream, but she might have been feeling it would be a pity if everyone ended up choosing a non-teaching career when we had put so much into learning to teach. Anyway she’s always been encouraging.

After graduation, Hiroaki went to graduate school at another university. He was determined to succeed in making his living by teaching because going to school was his own choice. He wanted to teach as he studied, but with no teaching experience getting a job was not easy. Towards the end of the second year of his study, a doctoral student introduced Hiroaki to the language school he taught for and Hiroaki finally managed to get a parttime job.

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I was too worried to think about what kind of teacher I wanted to be. I wanted a proper career. I’d done volunteer work, but I wasn’t sure if I was able to teach in a school. I don’t remember how I taught in my first lesson. It was a very small room. When I went in three people were there. I was introduced to them and started the class. I was so nervous. It was like I didn’t know what to do. We had to wear a tie at the school. So I was wearing a shirt and a tie. I felt it was a job that was going to be evaluated. I’d lose it if I screwed it up. That was the source of my nervousness.

Fortunately Hiroaki shared the class with a very supportive experienced teacher. She told me I could teach in the way I liked. But that does not mean she turned me away helpless. [...] She showed me handouts she’d made. I was surprised how much she was putting into her work. I wondered if we had to do that much. Noriko is the type of teacher who wouldn’t mind taking time in lesson preparation. She’d say, “I don’t want to stop half way. I don’t think it’s right. I want to do my job well”. She was also the kind who would make use of anything helpful even if it was not a JSL textbook. So I followed her example and started making handouts. She’d give me her handouts, saying “I made this for my class, but didn’t have the time for it. Use it for review if you like. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. Only if you have time and you think it fits in your lesson plan”. I’m still grateful to her for not telling me to do this or that. She would say: “I think you should do what you think is good. You don’t have to feel any constraints. You don’t have to ask for my opinion. Do whatever you think is good for your students”. She was never sarcastic. Really. [...] So I didn’t have to worry about teaching unnecessarily. I didn’t have to worry whether I could present new items properly. I felt she would cover me if I failed. [...] I think it was a decisive factor that I didn’t have too much pressure about teaching in a school in my first job.

This experience has become another reference point for Hiroaki. I was allowed to teach in my own way in the very first stage of my career. That was probably a critical incident in my professional career. As in the teaching practice, I taught without following any method or procedure. So when I am asked what to do now I tend to answer whatever will do. I don’t think a certain procedure is right and everything else isn’t. There’s nothing you’ve always got to teach or no order you’ve always got to follow. All you have to do is to think in each case.

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Hiroaki’s anxiety started disappearing when he was given more classes to teach after a few months. He felt the institution positively evaluated him, which made him happy. He taught evening classes and very short intensive courses. He enjoyed his students’ company and tried to make their time in his classroom enjoyable. Students did not make any dramatic progress, but that was not an issue for him or for the institution. His perception changed, however, about a year later. This Spanish couple worked for a Japanese company. They studied Japanese with us intensively for three months, then went on to the company’s training programme. When they came for the first time all they were able to do in Japanese was to exchange greetings. After three months, though, they were able to communicate with administrative staff with elementary grammar. So everyone knew how much progress they had made. Teaching them made me feel I was of some use to their language acquisition. Seeing their progress and feeling I was involved in the process was a great experience. [...] I had been enjoying teaching, but realising I was being helpful boosted my confidence. I was also relieved because I had been afraid I might be sacked if I was unpopular.

Hiroaki’s confidence was also reinforced when the doctoral student who had introduced him to the school relayed a comment by administrative staff that Hiroaki was popular among students. He had wanted to do a job that was worth the money he was paid. The recognition by the administration meant a lot to him. He felt he could be hopeful about his future financial independence.10

My reflections So what contributions did I make to Hiroaki’s growth? As a teacher, Hiroaki has a very positive attitude towards learner autonomy, which he attributes to his experience in the pre-service teacher education, but I have to be modest about my contribution. His learner autonomy during the years of pre-service teacher education was largely a result of factors beyond my control. It was a collective autonomy of Hiroaki and his classmates that developed in response to the defective programme which they happened to find themselves in. It was supported by the faculty’s sympathy, although limited resources did not allow the institution to solve the problem in any systematic way. For Hiroaki personally, this collective autonomy was also a part of his developing personal autonomy that was supported by his parents and friends, most

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notably Tamami. I had been made an icon of hope for the students, as it were, by the head of the programme even before I arrived on campus. The students welcomed me with high expectations. On top of this, I was a novice teacher educator and this was in the days before I got involved in the field of second language learner autonomy and started consciously trying to support learner autonomy development in student teachers. Whatever support I was able to offer was not planned. My decision to stand by the students did not come from any kind of theory. It came from my propensity not to put up with social injustice and my desire to live up to the students’ expectations. In a similar vein, I took a laissez-faire approach in teaching those students how to teach because I had no idea how to do it. Looking back, I now understand it was a choice. I wanted to be honest and I didn’t want to be authoritarian. But at that time it seemed to me that I had no choice but letting go. I did introduce them to a variety of alternative ways of teaching languages in my methodology classes, which Hiroaki says gave him a sense of freedom, but I never knew what impact they might have on the students. I probably wanted them to understand me as a language teacher by sharing what had been formative for me. In a nutshell, then, I unwittingly supported the students’ learner autonomy by listening to them, engaging in advocacy on their behalf, challenging their conceptions of what a language classroom was and leaving room for them to take responsibility for and enjoy their learning. Hiroaki is now a fairly autonomous teacher in the sense that he thinks no one method fits all and teachers need to think for themselves in each case. Hiroaki says that this thinking originated in his early experiences of teaching, teaching practice with me, and team teaching with an experienced teacher, Noriko, in his first job. Hiroaki’s learner autonomy that developed in pre-service teacher education did transfer to his later practice as Little (1995) argues. However, Hiroaki’s developing confidence as a teacher was supported by Noriko and many other people, administrative staff, learners and the doctoral student. Considering his initial anxiety about how he would be evaluated, the impact of the pre-service teacher education on Hiroaki’s beliefs about teaching could have been undermined without those supportive people. The time teachers spend in a teacher education programme is only a tiny portion of their history of professional and personal development. A teacher educator can only be, at best, one of many people who support a teacher’s development. These themes are what I repeatedly encounter in teacher life stories. What I have found particularly unique in Hiroaki’s

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story, however, is his revelation that his choice to be a teacher was a legacy of the collective autonomy of himself and his classmates. He wished to live out his friends’ dreams, and this wish, together with his determination to succeed in making his living by teaching, seems to have been a major source of motivation that carried him through his novice years. There appears to be a fundamental reversal of cause and effect in this story. Whereas in many learner stories, learners have some real-life purpose in learning a language and they take the initiative in their learning to achieve the goal (Benson 2002a; Benson, Chik & Lim 2003), Hiroaki sought out opportunities to put his learning to real-life use in order to keep his and his classmates’ experience of learner autonomy real in the future stories of their lives. I am still trying to digest this discovery, but it will certainly affect the way I try to understand my current pre-service students’ motivation to learn to teach and to become a teacher. The two years I spent with Hiroaki and his friends have become a reference point for me too. Because of this experience I believe in the value of learner autonomy and see it is possible in Japanese classrooms (Aoki 1994). In other words, the autonomous student teachers helped the teacher educator’s positive attitude towards learner autonomy to develop. This is another reversal of what is normally discussed in learner autonomy literature. From the stories I have heard from my research participants in the past (Aoki 2003), I suspect that this is a more prevalent phenomenon than we find in published literature.

Final words In this paper, I claimed the need for collecting teacher life stories in order to understand teacher autonomy better, argued for the benefits of and discussed issues relating to constructivist story-based research, and shared a life story of one of my ex-students. The story I told showed, among other things, that I was only one of many people who have supported Hiroaki’s personal and professional development leading to teacher autonomy and that he and his classmates left a strong impact on my development as a learner autonomy practitioner. Development of teacher autonomy can indeed be a very complex process. The results of this teacher life-story research imply that teacher educators may need a holistic approach and a long-term perspective that go beyond the time-frame of teacher education programmes.

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12 Autonomy and control in curriculum development: ‘Are you teaching what we all agreed?’ Mike Nix and Andy Barfield

Perhaps, then, the most significant insight for us is that, in its most fundamental form, the curriculum is the working relationships between the people party to it. The quality of the curriculum is very much the quality of the critically engaged dialogues around it — with adjunct faculty, administrators, students, full-time colleagues, and between ourselves. It is also the forms of discourse in which the development of that curriculum is textualised, in messages, information packs, and guidelines, as well as in face-to-face exchanges (cf. Palfreyman 2003). Finally, the quality of the curriculum is also embedded in recognition of the political and economic relationships that structure the interactions between all the people involved. (From the 2004 draft of this chapter1)

Introduction The purpose of curriculum development is usually to achieve greater coordination and integration between people, resources and practices. Even when such reforms are not explicitly directed at the promotion of learner autonomy, many challenging issues about autonomy and control at the curricular level are still raised: Who takes control? Who maintains control? In whose interests? And why is control of these different people, resources and practices being attempted here and now? For whose benefit? For several years we have been involved in developing an academic literacy-focused English curriculum in the Law Faculty at Chuo University in Japan, where we have tried to secure the

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participation of colleagues in the English Department, other members of the Law Faculty, administrative staff and students, in its design and implementation. In particular, we have been concerned with including our part-time English teachers — who teach about 75% of all the English classes but previously had almost no input into curriculum decisionmaking — in a sustained process of collaborative curriculum and teacher development. In 2004, in an earlier version of this chapter, we argued that the ‘liberal-humanist’ approach to curriculum development that we had adopted had helped (and would continue to) foster the development of interdependent autonomy among teachers. It also implied an interdependence between teacher autonomy and learner autonomy (Little 1995, 2001b; Barfield et al. 2002; Vieira & Marques 2002; Vieira 2007) in that we assumed that the very diversity of approaches to teaching and learning that we and our colleagues shared would become, through continued dialogue and collaboration, a resource for common learner, teacher and curriculum development. Yet we faced an enduring paradox: in order to encourage a curriculum development process that might ultimately promote autonomy for both students and teachers, we decided to disavow learner autonomy as an explicitly mandated aim of the curriculum. Rather, we saw a critical engagement with academic literacy by teachers and students as the appropriate vehicle for promoting teacher and learner autonomy across the curriculum. Now, in 2007, we can point to tangible benefits from this liberalhumanist approach, such as a vibrant sense of involvement for many part-time teachers in the curriculum development process. However, we have also been witness to new strains and tensions emerging, as different, even conflicting, views of academic literacy, learning and teaching have come to light. We have become more and more aware of how pressure to talk about teaching can actually produce groundswells of insecurity and resistance. Understanding the contradictions and limitations of the liberal-humanist approach has therefore become an important part of sustaining the participatory and democratic quality of the curriculum development process. In this chapter, we rethink the value of cooperative development (Edge 1992, 2002) and open dialogue (Fenwick 2001: 83–4) approaches to curriculum development, and we explore what a critique of liberal-humanism implies for a situated reinterpretation of teacher and learner autonomy.

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The economic and institutional context From an economic (and educational) perspective, the Faculty of Law at Chuo University is not unusual in its use of part-time academic staff.2 The faculty has a total of 6,100 students in its four-year undergraduate programme, and 442 teaching staff altogether. Fully 327 teachers are employed on a part-time basis. Roughly the same proportions apply for the whole of the English programme, with 63 part-time teachers and 19 full-time staff under the remit of the English Department (see Table 12.1 for details).

Table 12.1

The institutional context

Taught-in-English section of the curriculum (focus on academic literacy) • 80+ classes (e.g. ‘Introduction to Communication Skills’, ‘Basic Discussion Skills’, ‘Improving Academic Essay Writing’, ‘Global Development Issues’) • 4 full-time English Department members • 23 part-time teachers Taught-in-Japanese section of the curriculum (focus on grammatical and lexical knowledge) • 150 reading courses (translation into Japanese) • 16 full-time English Department members • 40 part-time teachers The Law Faculty has: • 3 divisions (Law, Politics, and International Law & Business) • 4 language departments (Chinese, English, French, and German) • 20 administrative staff • 115 full-time law, politics and international law teaching staff • 327 part-time law, politics and international law and foreign language teaching staff • 1400+ students in each year of the 4-year undergraduate programme Students from each division: • take English courses together • have different graduation requirements for English courses

Some part-time teachers have permanent full-time positions at other universities and teach at Chuo Law Faculty one day a week. Those without full-time positions typically work at five or more different universities in the Tokyo area. They usually have three or four classes at any one university on a particular day, often teaching five, sometimes six, days a week, with teaching loads of over 20 ninety-minute classes, several different sets of institutional practices and resources, and

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interaction with literally hundreds of different learners. All this has many consequences for how teachers construct their own autonomy and commit to collaborative curriculum development in any one institution. The institutional dependence on large numbers of part-time teaching staff means that any attempt to achieve curriculum development that doesn’t involve part-time staff is unlikely to be sustainable (cf. Carroll & Head 2003). Responding to the 2004 draft of this chapter, Yoko Morimoto, from Meiji University in Tokyo, elaborated this point: Just as at Chuo, Meiji University — and, I believe, most medium to large-sized universities in Japan — relies much much more on parttime teachers than full-timers for English language education … Curriculum reform is usually handled by a handful of full-time faculty members without any consultations with part-timers. This noninvolvement of ‘the actual main players’ limits not only the implementation of any new changes, but can also lead to uncooperativeness and indifference from parties not ‘invited in’. These parties include not only the teachers, but also learners and administrative staff. I have personally seen many situations where people become hostile toward the ‘reformers’ and/or the ‘new curriculum’ itself, and even worse, leave …

How best then to invite part-time teachers, and other parties, into the process, and sustain their involvement in it?

Focusing on academic literacy rather than learner autonomy Institutionally, within the English Department in 2002, there was a very slow start to discussions of academic literacy. Among the full-time teachers of the reading classes, there was a majority view that students needed basic grammar consolidation rather than academic literacy and that word-by-word translation in reading classes was the appropriate way to achieve this. Yet from 2002 onwards, through weekend retreats with part-time staff responsible for taught-in-English courses, we had a growing sense that academic literacy could be the common focus of a university English programme, even if each person’s individual understanding of the concept differed. Academic literacy as a fundamental research and presentation or writing process in which students can engage critically with issues that interest them started to

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become a vague but shared space for agreement around an alternative idea of what curriculum development could be. It could be “bought into” (cf. Mackenzie 2007) by many different parties, particularly the dispersed network of part-time teachers who were responsible for most of the curriculum in action. This initially hazy view of academic literacy became more specific as discussions continued over the next two years. As Figure 12.1 shows, the evolving construction of academic literacy for taught-in-English classes had now come to include an explicit dimension of fluency (“using English comfortably and confidently”) that was related to a critical engagement with content through English (“engaging critically with social, political, legal and global topics”). Both these dimensions were constant features in new documents (such as generic course descriptions at different levels of proficiency, a new teacher information pack, and orientations to new students) and may bear some resemblance to a weaker form of an autonomy-oriented process syllabus (Benson 2001: 165) where learners engage with real-world research in project work. These features were given (and received) much more public prominence than the single explicit dimension of learner autonomy that is articulated (“understanding and directing their own learning”). Academic literacy, we believed, drove autonomy, not vice versa, and a focus on academic literacy would over time lead into the promotion of learner autonomy.

The overall aim of the curriculum is the development of ACADEMIC LITERACY IN ENGLISH. What do we mean by helping students to develop their academic literacy? We see this as including: • using English comfortably and effectively • engaging critically with social, political, legal and global topics • expressing ideas in appropriate genres • understanding and directing their own learning Why do we think this is important? • The Law Faculty is now emphasising academic literacy as an educational aim across the curriculum. • A focus on academic literacy connects our classes with the students’ majors and helps further integrate our teaching into the Faculty as a whole. • Students can bring their own academic interests and knowledge into our classes and develop those through English. Figure 12.1 Extract from the Teachers’ Information Pack, April 2004

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The focus on academic literacy rather than autonomy helped make the emerging curriculum more acceptable not just for part-time teachers, but also for other faculty members and administrators. Academic literacy was becoming the common currency within the wider faculty outside the English Department, with the introduction in April 2004 of first-year law and politics seminars specifically focused on developing academic literacy in Japanese. The opening of a new Graduate Law School in April 2004 further suggested that such an emphasis across the curriculum was now necessary and possible. However, by aligning the taught-in-English curriculum with wider institutional changes, were we not inadvertently creating new “organizational discourses of structure and control” (Palfreyman 2003: 187) that might threaten teacher autonomy?

Liberal-humanist successes on the road to criticality … curricular development depends on a principle of critical, complex group collaboration and reflection. Reflecting critically on ourselves as well as on different groups of individuals party to the process has been challenging. This is because such critical reflection and discussion have meant appreciating the positions of others, as well as our own individual interests, and how (and why) they coincide or not. Yet, it is this real range of overlapping and contradictory individual understandings that has enriched the possibilities for seeing alternative, better ways of working and developing things further. (From the 2004 draft of this chapter)

In the early years of this collaborative curriculum development, one key site of divergent understandings was the question of whether to have communication skills classes in addition to research-based presentation and writing courses. As full-timers co-ordinating the curriculum, we were pretty much opposed to creating such classes in a curriculum focused on content-based learning and academic literacy. We were perceived as teaching the ‘best’ students in advanced and thirdyear classes, while part-time teachers mostly taught regular first- and second-year classes. From this privileged vantage point, we felt that all our students could and should be “engaging critically with social, political, legal and global topics” (as shown in Figure 12.1) and developing research, writing and presentation skills. However, many part-time teachers were telling us that a sizeable proportion of the

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students were not capable of dealing in English with ‘issues’ or ready to do research, writing and presentation work. Indeed, some of these classes were far from full. Listening more to the students,3 we began to realise that many — particularly those who had studied English mainly as translation into Japanese — were afraid of taking classes that emphasised using English actively for discussion or presentation. They felt they needed to develop their confidence and fluency before moving onto these more challenging classes. We also had the administration telling us that, for reasons of faculty politics and ‘human resources’, we had to make sure that the taught-in-English classes were as full as possible. Through all these discussions, we arrived at several important decisions together with our part-time teachers. Full-time teachers shifted to teaching more of the regular first- and second-year classes that the part-time teachers had. This experience produced a more widely shared understanding of what students are capable of. As curriculum coordinators, we came to realise that, for many of our students, the development of academic literacy in English starts with the development of communicative ability. This led to the creation of a large number of ‘Introduction to Communication Skills’ (ICS) classes at the pre-intermediate level of the curriculum. In the first year of their inclusion, these ICS classes were exclusively skills-focused. Through further discussion with part-time teachers, we agreed that an engagement with lexically simplified content would enable ICS students to move more comfortably to the intermediate level of ‘Basic Discussion Skills’ classes (which have a greater explicit focus on academic literacy). We thus decided that a common extensive reading (ER) component in all ICS courses would be a good way to do this, and, within two years or so, funding was secured for these resources from the administration. At the end of the first year of using ER libraries, ICS teachers had more or less agreed what the common ER requirement should be. Now in 2007, most teachers of ICS courses also move in the second half of the academic year to enabling students to engage with lexically simplified texts on social, political, legal and global issues that interest them. These decisions and actions over several years serve to illustrate the success of the liberal-humanist approach. It helped us promote the gradual collaborative development of the curriculum through sustained critical dialogue between all the parties to the process. We came to see the role of communicative confidence and fluency in English as a core

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aspect of academic literacy at all levels of proficiency. Collectively, we also realised more clearly how the development of academic literacy necessarily involves an engagement with appropriate content at different levels of proficiency. The ICS extensive reading component also encouraged changes in fundamental classroom dynamics and helped to bring questions of learner and teacher roles, learner choice, decisionmaking and involvement more clearly to the surface in discussions of the wider curriculum. These successes on the road to criticality could be directly related to shifts in people, resources and practices that a large group of teachers had discussed. In short, the collaboration generated new shared understandings, as the liberal-humanist model predicts. To paraphrase Holliday’s discussion of the dominant discourse of learner-centredness (Holliday 2001: 170–1), a liberal-humanist approach helped to produce a discourse of egalitarian professionalism. However, it also blinded us to how the act of talking itself — open dialogue between colleagues — might at times become potentially threatening and destabilising.

The beguiling appeal of the liberal-humanist approach Looking back, we were trying to move out of a context of a laissez-faire curriculum towards some kind of greater coordination (cf. Murphey 2003). Given the economic and institutional dependence on part-time faculty within tertiary education in Japan, it is not surprising that highly unspecified curricula not only suit many administrators, coordinators and teachers, but also favour the lethargic maintenance of the status quo. Each person is apparently free to do as they want, the administrative burden is light, and there is no need to provide or manage educational resources. For part-time teachers who work at several different institutions during the same working week, a laissez-faire form of autonomy — the freedom to teach pretty much what and how you want to, within the limits of the course title and the privacy of your own classroom — is highly convenient. The (counter-)appeal of a liberal-humanist approach is that it is founded on interdependent, reflective, cooperative development among equals where learning objectives and processes can be discussed and agreed among full-time and part-time teachers and other parties. It involves an effort to make the curriculum process participatory and inclusive: dialogue and discussion are centrally important processes.

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In other words, the liberal-humanist approach fits a discourse of reflective collaboration and lends itself to ideologies of co-ownership where principal actors can be positioned as stakeholders (Holliday 2001: 171–5) in democratically developing learning capital together. Wood and Murphey (2007) suggest, for example, that enhanced communication, consultation and negotiation can involve currently isolated teachers in communities of practice that energise individual participants and benefit institutions through enriched sharing of knowledge. In this approach, educational institutions become learning organisations, in which all teachers — full-time and part-time — are equal stakeholders in the process of curriculum design and implementation, and their diversity of approaches and knowledge are resources for development (cf. Carroll & Head 2003: 84). Certainly, as we first moved into a curriculum development process in the Law Faculty at Chuo, this kind of liberal-humanist ideal seemed to offer the best hope for more participatory and democratic curriculum design and implementation in an institution that had previously allowed part-time teachers autonomy in their own classrooms, but simultaneously excluded them from any curriculum-level decisionmaking.

Curriculum development as communication? We found it was really important to make the time and space for communication — for everyone to have the chance to contribute to the process, to share ideas, and understand other points of view. “There’s no curriculum without communication,” became a watchword for us. (From the 2004 draft of this chapter)

A key premise of a liberal-humanist approach to curriculum development is that open, equal dialogue between parties to the process can and will transcend differences and produce shared understandings. The kind of ‘open’ dialogue promoted by self-styled ‘learning organisations’ assumes the existence of Habermasian ideal speech situations (Fenwick 2001: 83–4). In these idealised interactions, equal individuals are free to assess arguments objectively, consider alternatives openly, and reflect critically on their own assumptions (Fenwick 2001: 83). For Habermas, this “communicative rationality” produces understanding and agreement and so leads to the creation of consensus

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without the use of force (Habermas 1987: 86). Interestingly, this ideal view of a reasoned, reflective individuality is very close to the classic Kantian view of autonomy as individual rationality (Lindley 1986: 14– 7). It matches a narrative of democratic modernity and finds echoes in conceptions of the ideal autonomous teacher or learner who is dialogic, interdependent and critically reflective (see, for example, Nunan 1988; Edge & Richards 1993; Freeman & Cornwell 1993; Freeman 1998; Benson, this volume, on the ‘reflexive self’). During the six years or so in which we have been developing an academic literacy-focused curriculum, we have tried to make time and space for communication in a number of ways, such as teacher retreats and one-to-one consultations between full-time and part-time teachers, and by just trying to talk more with part-time teachers, day to day, either in face-to-face or email communication. Teacher retreats are, for example, in-service development workshops held on weekends, away from the university, where full-time and part-time teachers can talk and learn from each other and develop a community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991). They include poster presentations and discussions on curriculum-wide issues, such as evaluation, and on the general direction that the curriculum should be moving in. In organising the retreats, we have often made a conscious effort to create ‘speech situations’ that encourage the equal, active involvement of part-time teachers (brainstorming with them issues to focus on in the workshops, sometimes standing back from discussions at the retreats, or just acting as note-takers). In the 2004 version of this chapter, we stated: “… this kind of communication, collaboration, and negotiation has been crucial to the curriculum development process, because it is here all those different interests and viewpoints can get woven together — or not”. That final ‘not’ points to a number of doubts we have about how truly ‘equal’ the dialogue may be. We need to remember that the economic terms of participation are unequal. Part-time teachers are not paid for this kind of curriculum and professional development work and, with heavier teaching loads than full-time teachers, often need weekends to prepare classes or just recover from work. Some part-time teachers have taken time off and lost pay from weekend jobs to attend retreats, and so they have effectively paid to participate. This is one reason, no doubt, why only about two-thirds of the part-time teachers regularly attend the retreats, but it leaves a substantial number unengaged in collaborative curriculum development.

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Reluctance to attend retreats may also be to do with the politics of communication and curriculum development. As Fenwick puts it: “Simplistic understandings of workplace dialogue also ignore power asymmetries as these configure the communication process …” (Fenwick 2001: 84). The broad terms of participation at retreats are set by fulltime teachers who have ultimate control over what gets onto the agenda for the day’s small-group discussions. Another issue concerns the uses that can be made of ‘open’ dialogue. What we have called ‘critically engaged dialogues’ about the curriculum may be fed into processes of curriculum innovation and renewal, but they may also be used by fulltime teachers — who have the power to decide which and how many classes are offered to part-time teachers — as evidence of part-time teachers not following the curriculum guidelines sufficiently closely. Some of the teachers who don’t attend retreats may have substantial differences in what they see as the ‘mainstream’ views of curriculum, academic literacy and autonomy at Chuo. They may well feel that explaining their points of view would only lead to more explicit disagreements, expose them to criticism, or perhaps even put their teaching positions at risk. The potential for communication to become a tool of teacher evaluation as well as curriculum development is even clearer in the consultations between full-time and part-time teachers in the second semester. These have replaced a second-semester retreat and allow us to continue discussions from the now annual retreat in the first semester. The consultations have an explicit dual purpose: for each part-time teacher to engage in collaborative reflection and development with a full-time teacher, and for the full-time teacher to monitor the part-time teacher’s work and offer advice and suggestions. While many teachers have said these consultations have been useful to them for generating new ways of thinking about their teaching, they can also be the catalyst for latent differences in beliefs and practices to become very manifest indeed — and they may actually produce a breakdown in communication if teachers feel what they reveal will be used against them and are uncomfortable about being asked to talk specifically about the organisation of their classes. Such breakdowns in communication have helped us to recognise that the economic and political discrepancies between part-time and full-time teachers undercut the notion of equal, dialogic participation (and, to some extent, interdependent autonomy) in the curriculum development process. We have become aware that encouraging

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communication does not always produce the ideal liberal-humanistic outcomes of greater shared understanding and deeper involvement. Sometimes, there may be the effect of what Foucault (1984: 17) has called an “incitement to discourse”. Our concern to create spaces for communication about curriculum development with part-time teachers could be seen as “an institutional incitement to speak about [curriculum] and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear [curriculum] spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (Foucault 1984: 18). As Foucault (1980) has also observed, one of the effects of this incitement to discourse is to make possible the surveillance and disciplining of those who speak.

Collaborative curriculum development: Reflection or surveillance? We argued in 2004 that a liberal-humanist approach to curriculum development involves processes of critical individual and collaborative reflection. Such reflection helps participants to get a better understanding of different interpretations and practices — their own and others’ — as a step towards generating new collective understandings on which the common curriculum can be based. The same processes of critical, collaborative reflection also contribute to the development of interdependent forms of teacher autonomy and professional development. Collaborative curriculum development thus rests on the kinds of assumptions common in ‘learning organisations’ about the value of the “continuously learning individual” (Fenwick 2001: 83; Benson, this volume) who seeks to clarify and develop his or her own understandings and practices through rational dialogue and reflection. The liberal-humanist approach to curriculum development, in effect, requires teachers to reveal what they do in their classrooms, and to open their practice up to the gaze of other teachers involved in the process, as well as, potentially, to the watchful eye of other parts of the institution. Collaborative reflection may be seen, then, as functioning panoptically. In Foucault’s analysis, the Panopticon was the organising architectural arrangement for prisons, hospitals and schools, developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, in which all parts of the institution — every cell in a prison, for example — could be observed at once from a central tower (Foucault 1991). The Panopticon addresses the “problem

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of visibility” by “exercising an ‘all-seeing’ power” that illuminates the dark spaces of the institution (Foucault 1980: 152). Similarly, collaborative curriculum development threatens to subject every teacher’s practices to its observant control and shine a spotlight into every classroom. Critical reflection and open dialogue may become particularly problematic when discussion of teaching practices leads to exploration of beliefs about teaching and learning. As Fenwick notes, To disclose one’s opinions, and particularly to disclose for the purpose of critical scrutiny one’s belief systems and values, is to surrender the last private space of personal meaning to the public space of workplace control. The demand for such disclosure could be construed as an exercise of surveillance and disciplinary regulation constituting gross violation of an individual’s rights. (Fenwick 2001: 83)

Where teachers fear that this surveillance may lead to disciplinary measures — such as being given fewer classes or moved to classes they don’t want — the effect can be a kind of colonisation by the institution of teachers’ spaces for autonomy. Another way to put this is that when collaborative reflection is encouraged in conditions of unequal power, this can result in an oppressive, limiting sense of the ‘right way’ to teach, as much as in an understanding of different ways of developing academic literacy. This sense of a required way to teach — a single panoptical perspective from which to view the whole curriculum — may gain further authority from the force of documentation that accompanies the development of the curriculum through dialogue.

Documenting the curriculum: Coherence or normalisation? We saw the creation of a clear, simple ‘curriculum on paper’ as a precondition for collaborative curriculum development. This was particularly crucial for the involvement of part-time teachers. The curriculum on paper is a widely expected and publicly represented realisation of curriculum, and creating documentation of this kind is often regarded as the goal of the curriculum development process (particularly in laissez-faire and authoritarian models of curriculum development). In 2004, we presented an alternative liberal-humanist interpretation of the curriculum on paper, saying it might better be seen as a limited but necessary starting point — the frame around which

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the critical processes of collaboration, dialogue, and developing learner and teacher autonomy can be initially situated. … the “curriculum on paper” should be as clear and simple as possible. Precisely because the institutional and interpersonal web of curriculum development is so complex, clarity in the documented curriculum, as a common reference point of discussions, is essential if everyone involved is to be able to understand what it is we are talking about when we discuss ‘the curriculum’. (From the 2004 draft of this chapter)

It became obvious that everyone — full-timers and part-timers — wanted to reduce the number of different courses, clarify the differences between levels and courses, have more specific objectives, and document all this clearly on paper. The feeling at early retreats seemed to be: ‘Once we have clear objectives on paper, we can talk together about ways to help students achieve those’. This led us as a group to agree on trying to identify possible development pathways for particular courses on listening and speaking or writing, specify minimum course exit objectives for each course and level, document these in course information sheets and include these, along with other information on the English programme, in a Teachers’ Information Pack. The new curriculum was, then, normalised through documentation. An example follows of the kind of specification that resulted from this normalisation. Figure 12.2 shows the minimum course objectives for an intermediate-level ‘Basic Discussion Skills’ (BDS) course. We have chosen this course because there are currently 17 BDS courses with 24 students in each course. This makes it the pivotal connection between pre-intermediate and advanced classes in the listening and speaking part of the curriculum. The middle row in Figure 12.2 shows the central processes that we see informing the development of academic literacy in students’ engagement with researching social, legal and political issues through English. Below this central row are the general minimum abilities that students completing the pre-intermediate ‘Introduction to Communication Skills’ would be expected to have developed before taking a BDS course; and above the central row are the more detailed minimum exit abilities and skills that students might usefully develop over 26 ninety-minute BDS classes in one academic year. It is also good to understand that students would generally be expected to complete between one and two hours of outside-class research and note-taking a week in either 13-week semester.

Figure 12.2 Minimum course exit objectives for an intermediate-level ‘Basic Discussion Skills’ course

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We have found that the development of learner autonomy can become strongly embedded within an academic literacy focus when teachers see the importance of allowing spaces for students to develop their control of both process and content in interaction with other students. The following reflection by one BDS teacher highlights the multiple connections that can be made: Have students keep a portfolio of representative pieces of work they’ve done throughout the cycle e.g. notes, daily reflections, useful vocabulary/collocations, research goals, posters. Reflections would be clearly divided into two parts: reflections about research content (What was interesting? What do you want to know more about?) and research & discussion process (Were your notes helpful to use for speaking? Could you explain your research easily? What could you do to make it easier to explain in English? etc.) … At the review session students could look at their own work as a whole and then share it with a partner. They could discuss what they thought and then write a comment about their partner’s work. Students could then read the comments and write their final reflection. (Teacher reflection after a course-based BDS discussion at the 2007 retreat)

This teacher understands the central importance of metacognitive reflection for her students in developing their academic literacy. She sees this arising out of reviewing past research through English in collaboration with other students, where they co-build and explain their knowledge to each other, as well as develop portfolios of their work for a particular cycle of work and set goals for the next. However, not all teachers are apt to make such similar ‘learner-autonomy-fostering’ interpretations of what is possible.

Curriculum and incommensurability: Different figured worlds of academic literacy In 2004, we acknowledged that teachers understood academic literacy to mean many different things, but we took this diversity of interpretations as a characteristic of the early stages of participation in a group-based curriculum development process. Now, three years later, and in a post-structuralist frame of analysis, things look rather different, as we see the emergence of fissures within the collective interpretation of academic literacy on which our common, integrated curriculum

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depends. Here is a brief example. Many teachers focus on developing students’ confidence and fluency for research, discussion and presentation work, as well as for communication, through repeated cycles of engagement with academic content (cf. Nix 2007 for a discussion of how such academic literacy through English may develop). They encourage learners to follow their interests, reflect on their learning and using of English, set goals for themselves, and consider different ways to improve how they can build their knowledge of the world for themselves and with their peers. In stark contrast, other teachers tend to see skills as coming ahead of content. For these teachers, developing academic literacy is much more a question of practising discrete research, discussion and presentation skills before engaging with content. The curriculum development process has brought to light a range of overlapping, conflicting and even incommensurable interpretations of that ‘fundamental research and presentation or writing process’ which are available to teachers when they talk about academic literacy. Does academic literacy pivot on a set of skills4 — for research, discussion, presenting and writing — which students need to practise? Or should we think of it as the mastery of certain genres and discursive conventions that students would be expected to use if they studied abroad at a university in an English-speaking country? Student choice of topics and their ability to self-direct research on issues of interest may be seen as central. Alternatively, teachers may emphasise students’ making connections between English classes and areas of study within their majors taught in Japanese. It has also become clear that differences in interpretation of academic literacy are more than ‘simple’ differences in methodology or pedagogic approach that might be integrated into a coherent curriculum framework through dialogue and reflection. They have proved more intractable than that. Take the example of giving presentations, a key aspect of academic literacy, which has been a topic for discussion on many occasions at retreats. These discussions have certainly led to some recognition and clarification of different types of presentation, such as presentation to the whole class or a small group, as part of the cyclical process of knowledge construction or as a final product. However, it is not clear that this has led to any significant curriculum-wide coherence or changes in the practices of most individual teachers. As full-time teachers, we have invested in a notion of academic literacy as the coconstruction of knowledge by students about issues of interest to them. This has led us to suggest to some part-time teachers that they

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experiment with presentation formats. In particular, we have encouraged teachers to see presentation as a stage in the research process in which students explain their knowledge informally to each other, giving simultaneous pair or small-group poster presentations, rather than presenting, one-by-one, to the whole class. Several teachers have responded that such decentralised arrangements would produce a cacophony in class and that they wouldn’t be able to direct what was going on within each group or pair. In the same vein, teachers have said that things might get out of control and that they wouldn’t be able to monitor and evaluate each individual student’s presentation and performance adequately: they would, in effect, lose a panoptic view of their own learners. Following Kelleen Toohey’s sociocultural approach (Toohey 2007), we have come to see these divergences as aspects of the different figured worlds of academic literacy of our teachers, in which issues of identity and access to resources, as well as practices, are at stake. When teachers have their students present one-by-one to the whole class, it is likely to be because they see presentations as practising certain formal academic skills rather than as part of a process of engaging with academic content. This means they probably want to monitor the development of students’ skills and evaluate the presentation as a final product, positioning themselves as experts and their students as novices. They are also likely to adopt the role of trainer, introducing the skills that students ‘need’ to present well, and then directing them in rehearsal of those. In this training process, teachers will often control the content of presentations. They have students practise with easier ‘topics’ until they are ‘ready’ for more demanding, academic content, thus denying them access to the resource of issues that are real, and really interesting, to them. Here, students become positioned as learners of academic literacy in English who will be able to use it at a later date (later in the course, or maybe for later study abroad). When teachers have their students present simultaneously, and more informally, to small groups of other students, it is usually because they understand academic literacy as a process of engagement with content and the practice of presenting as an integral part of the process in which students research, and co-construct through dialogue, their own understanding in English. Teachers, here, have the role of facilitating processes of student engagement, dialogue and interaction, and it is the students who are active participants in, and co-constructors of, these processes. The salience of the roles of expert and novice, trainer

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and trainee is reduced. Students have more opportunity and responsibility for self-evaluation and reflection, and teachers are less able to evaluate each student’s performance. Students are allowed access to the research resources of their own choice and therefore to engage with real issues as well as authentic texts and language. They use English to learn, in the here and now, about the social, political, legal and global issues that interest them — and to develop their academic literacy further. Clearly, in these quite distinct figured worlds of academic literacy, a number of issues are at stake — including teachers’ and students’ roles, the relationships between them, their participation in and control over processes of learning and using English, and their control over and engagement with content. Here, in these questions of relationships and roles, power and control, we see the return of the disavowed issue of learner autonomy. The return of autonomy indicates that relationships of power and control are inescapable, though often somewhat neglected, aspects of figured worlds, and brings a stronger political dimension to the sociocultural analysis of them. In the last few years, we have come to recognise how resistant teachers’ figured worlds are to change and assimilation through processes of dialogue and reflection. Recognising the incommensurability and intractability of these different figured worlds of academic literacy, we have begun to play down coherence and integration as the overriding goals for the curriculum development process. Instead, we have recently become more concerned with creating spaces within the curriculum for divergent, or incompatible, approaches to developing academic literacy. One example is the re-figuring of a set of 12 or so elective classes for students who want to do extra English. Whereas for required classes, in the main section of the curriculum, there is an emphasis on developing academic literacy through engagement with content in project cycles, we have recently focused these elective classes on specific skills, such as speech and presentation skills or basic business skills. There has also been an individualisation of the electives to allow teachers to develop and teach courses in ways they feel comfortable with, but that do not fit easily into the ‘common’ content-based objectives of the main curriculum. Another aspect of the change in our approach is not expecting the curriculum and professional development processes to ‘re-make’ teachers, and their figured worlds, particularly those teachers who have been teaching in the Law Faculty at Chuo from long before the current curriculum development process

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began. We now devote much greater effort to recruiting new teachers whose figured worlds of academic literacy already much more closely coincide with those that we see as informing the curriculum. In creating spaces in the curriculum for incommensurability and individualisation, we have accepted that impinging on teachers’ sense of their own autonomy and expertise creates strains and tensions that threaten to destabilise any sense of coordinated curriculum development. Thus, the curriculum involves both the points of connection and coincidence of figured worlds and the divergences and fissures between them. The role of the curriculum on paper has changed in all this. We no longer see it so much as the record of coordination and integration through negotiation and dialogue, an idealised representation on paper of a coherence that may not quite exist in practice. It is now becoming much more a way to order and classify the actual diversity of identities, practices and resources that really are the curriculum.

On questions of power and autonomy … What does this extended reflection on the curriculum development process suggest about the nature of autonomy at the curricular level? We began by disavowing learner autonomy as the explicitly mandated central goal of the curriculum because, in our context, it seemed too divisive. Instead, we saw academic literacy as a frame for encouraging a kind of interdependent autonomy among teachers based on dialogue, collaboration and reflection around curriculum development. We hoped that this collaborative exploration of an academic literacy-focused curriculum would lead us, over time, to a collective appreciation of the value of learner autonomy as a goal for students. We thus saw the development of interdependent autonomy for teachers as pointing in the long run to the fostering of learner autonomy. In fact, attitudes to learner autonomy have remained divided. The divisions have become, if anything, more explicit as the curriculum development process has made more salient teachers’ different figured worlds of academic literacy, and the beliefs about teacher and learner roles that these worlds encode. We recognised that, especially for part-time teachers, the isolated freedom-from-control type of autonomy of the laissez-faire curriculum was important; efforts to impose curriculum-level change that took the space for private autonomy away without offering anything in return

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were doomed to failure. From this recognition, we believed the liberalhumanist approach to curriculum development was the way to give part-time teachers a stake in the curriculum process and the chance to participate in the co-construction of an interdependent autonomy among teachers. A major appeal of the liberal-humanist approach was that it promised to democratise the curriculum development process. It assumed equality between the individuals involved in a process of open and rational dialogue. And it pivoted on the understanding and appreciation of alternatives, collaboration and critical reflection — in short, all the qualities of the rational autonomous individual. In opening up spaces for communication and negotiation in the curriculum development process, however, we have realised the inadequacies, within the liberal-humanist model, of the central “notion of an autonomous, individual self” (cf. Toohey 2007: 240). The association of autonomy with a liberal-humanist model of the individual as a free and equal, rational subject is an attractive ideal, but it is inadequate for explaining the dynamics of dialogue and negotiation in situations of unequal power and economic reward. Such situations constitute a central part of the local context in educational institutions with large numbers of part-time teachers working with a curriculum coordinated by full-time teachers. In such circumstances, normalisation, surveillance and discipline permeate the micro-networks of working relationships as much as dialogue, reflection and collaboration do; and in response, part-time teachers may reconstruct their own isolated spaces of autonomy as resistance to, even defence against, panoptic power. Despite our intentions as full-time teachers to avoid the direct exercise of power over part-time teachers in the co-development of a curriculum, the process has made manifest the manifold networks of micro-power relations. In trying to avoid the exercise of a power that emanates from a central authority and seeks to control all around it, we have created a curriculum development process in which power resides in “a moreor-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations” (Foucault 1980: 198). In the end, despite disavowing learner autonomy as the overarching aim, we have come to understand that issues of curriculum, learning and teaching involve not only questions of people, resources and practices, but also the exercise of power and control over, as well as between, them. The struggle for a collective, situated development of autonomy must necessarily recognise such unequal relations of power, but these cannot ever be completely transcended. Even when transformed, they inevitably emerge in new clusters. Thus,

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the project of collaborative autonomy must always engage with questions of power.

Acknowledgements This chapter is an artefact, tidied up from the many conversations, discussions and arguments that the two of us have had together, as well as with our full-time and part-time colleagues, students and administrative staff who have been involved in the curriculum development process over several years. In particular, we would like to thank Steve Brown, Andy Martin, Richard Pemberton, Mary Jo Pichette, Robert Russell, Sarah Toogood, Zorana Vasiljevió and Stacey Vye for their critical and constructive feedback and comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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13 Autonomy: Under whose control? Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda

Il y a autant d’autonomies que d’omelettes et de morales: omelette aux confitures, morale religieuse; omelette aux fines herbes, morale aristocratique; omelette au lard, morale commerciale; omelette soufflée, morale radicale ou indépendante, etc. L’Autonomie, pas plus que la Liberté, la Justice, n’est un principe éternel, toujours identique à lui-même; mais un phénomène historique variable suivant les milieux où il se manifeste. (Lafargue 1881) There are as many autonomies as there are omelettes or types of morality: jam omelette, religious morality; omelette with herbs, aristocratic morality; bacon omelette, commercial morality; omelette soufflée, radical or independent morality, etc. Autonomy, no more than Freedom or Justice, is not an eternal principle, always identical unto itself, but a historical phenomenon, variable according to the contexts in which it arises. (Our translation)

We would like to begin this commentary/response by declaring a personal interest — we each, separately, know all the authors of the preceding chapters, many of them as friends, colleagues and/or collaborators. Briefly, here is how: Richard: As a teacher in Japan throughout the 1990s, I met Naoko Aoki at a JALT (Japan Association for Language Teaching) conference and we agreed to set up the JALT Learner Development Special Interest Group together in 1993. Then we both attended the 1994 ‘Autonomy in Language Learning’ conference in Hong Kong and that’s where I first came into contact with Phil Benson, Leni Dam, Edith Esch, David Little, Lindsay

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Miller, Philip Riley and Barbara Sinclair. I met Andy Barfield and Mike Nix slightly later, in Japan, and Terry Lamb and Sara Cotterall at separate conferences in 1996. So I’ve known, and have been reading or listening to all the authors for more than 10 years! Writing this, I realise now that the 1994 Hong Kong conference was a turning-point for me in that it solidified my commitment to the idea of ‘learner autonomy’, not just to diverse practices of ‘learner development’. Writing this also makes me recall the feeling I had — in the mid- to late 1990s — of becoming part of an international but still relatively small circle of teachers/researchers which was centring increasingly on the idea of learner autonomy. Ema: I first came into contact with David Little in 1990, when I began my postgraduate studies in applied linguistics at Trinity College, Dublin, and ended up working with him from 1993 to 2002 on various research and development projects relating to autonomy. In 1993, I attended the AILA congress in Amsterdam, where I encountered Leni Dam, Philip Riley and Edith Esch, all of whom became involved in one way or another (as consultants or contributors) in the projects we were running in Dublin. Although my ongoing PhD research actually focused on motivation, my work with David Little and these other autonomy experts brought me increasingly into the ‘autonomy fold’, so to speak, and through various autonomy-related workshops and conferences I subsequently participated in, I got to know Naoko Aoki, Sara Cotterall, Barbara Sinclair and Phil Benson. In 2002, I moved from Dublin to Warwick University, and met Terry Lamb a year later when he came to give a talk to our MA students. As for the remaining contributors (Lindsay Miller, Andy Barfield, Mike Nix), I was familiar with their work, of course, but it was only at the 2004 conference in Hong Kong and Hangzhou that I came to know them in person. Throughout this time, I have continued to develop my own research interests in language learning motivation, but since the mid-1990s my approach to this topic has been more and more firmly embedded in theories of autonomy, thanks in no small part to my encounters with these people and their work over the years. As for our ‘joint’ selves, we first met one another in 1995, at a Nordic Workshop on ‘Developing Autonomous Learning’ in Copenhagen; and since 2002 we have been close colleagues in the Centre for Applied Linguistics (formerly, Centre for English Language Teacher Education) at the University of Warwick.

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Starting with these brief professional autobiographies will, we hope, serve to: 1. give you at least some sense of who we are as separate people, and as colleagues, so that we can now speak credibly with one voice; 2. give us the right to use ‘we’ (within inverted commas) to refer to those, including the authors in this book and ourselves, who have been involved with learner autonomy for some time now, and thus: 3. include ourselves in any criticisms we may wish to make about how ‘we’ nowadays write about learner autonomy, as evidenced in this book, and thus (we hope): 4. maintain our good relations with the authors! Delving further into our personal knowledge of the authors, we estimate that almost all of them have been advocating autonomy in language learning and teaching for 15 years or so. Exceptionally, Edith Esch and Philip Riley were centrally involved in the very first explorations of the concept of learner autonomy more than 30 years ago, at CRAPEL, and then (in Esch’s case) at the University of Cambridge. Leni Dam and David Little first began to relate classroom practice and self-access, respectively, to learner autonomy in the early to mid-1980s, although Dam’s original innovations in classroom practice predated this under the name of ‘differentiated teaching and learning’ (Little 2007; Smith 2008). It was in the early to mid-1990s, however, that the remaining authors and we ourselves first became publicly involved in discussions centring on the notion of learner autonomy. As Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood and Andy Barfield indicate in their introduction, the 2004 conference which gave rise to the present book followed on 10 years after the previous one, itself attended by most of the authors. It came at the end of a period which straddled the millennium, encompassed the ‘handover’ of Hong Kong to China and witnessed a dramatic increase in popularity of the concept of learner autonomy, in China and across the world. These facts seem to have contributed a general historical flavour to the book, a mood of looking back to evaluate how things have moved on. Accordingly, we begin our commentary by reflecting on some observable trends in the conceptualisation of learner autonomy during this 10-year period, then focus attention on ways in which autonomy may need to be localised — both conceptually and pedagogically — as social practice. We conclude, on this basis, with some reflections on the current state of professional discourse on learner autonomy.

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Conceptual trends The social side of autonomy The first shift in focus we would like to highlight concerns the move to a more socially situated, relational view of learner autonomy which several of the authors (Aoki, Esch, Riley) themselves point out as a salient change. From this perspective, autonomy is now seen to develop out of interaction with others; it benefits from interdependence, and classrooms and teachers are no longer peripheral but at the centre-stage of practical concern. Viewed historically and with due regard to place, this shift seems very significant — as Richard Pemberton points out in the introduction to this book, it marks the culmination of a process which saw tertiary institutions in Hong Kong first welcome self-access as a practical measure (at the beginning of the 1990s), then come to autonomy as a way of theorising it (the 1994 conference was part of this shift), and now in these papers from the 2004 conference there is a much diminished focus on self-access learning itself — Esch is the only author here who refers to self-access centres, and her contribution is one of the most strongly critical of the notion that ‘allowing students to learn on their own’ is the same thing as learner autonomy. We shall return to some of the practical concomitants of this shift to a less individualistic, more social view of autonomy in the second half of the chapter. One further aspect we would note here, though, is that the social turn in theoretical discourse on autonomy may have taken specialist use of the word even further away from common usage than was previously the case. This becomes particularly salient in relation to the next two themes — the mainstreaming and globalisation of learner autonomy, and associated ‘misunderstandings’ of the notion.

Autonomy mainstreamed and globalised Benson and Esch, in particular, highlight the explosion of interest in learner autonomy over the last 10 years. Whereas in previous decades autonomous, self-directed or independent learning may have been assumed to be an alternative to classroom learning, the emphasis has shifted to the point where learner autonomy, viewed as the capacity to take charge of one’s own learning, is increasingly being seen as a goal to be promoted within general language education throughout Europe

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and in countries elsewhere, including China. From a positive viewpoint, this development brings with it significant new opportunities, and there are reports here of some very large-scale initiatives in which advocates of autonomy have been centrally involved (Little and Sinclair, in particular, in Europe and China, respectively). Going along with the same trend, there are accounts of smaller-scale curriculum development projects (Nix and Barfield) and teacher education interventions (Dam, Miller) which also show how new opportunities are being taken up to promote learner autonomy in a greater range of settings worldwide, specifically — in these cases — classroom settings. Back in 1994, learner autonomy could legitimately still be considered a minority interest, but this is now far from being the case. Whatever the wider social forces which have facilitated the ascent of the notion into mainstream professional discourse (discussed in Benson’s chapter), there is ample evidence that advocates of autonomy (‘we’) have themselves (‘ourselves’) been involved in its spread and have not just been bystanders. Indeed, the role, in particular, of Hong Kong–based teachers/researchers in adopting the notion of autonomy and then propagating it further in the 1990s deserves to be better recognised. The locally published collection of papers from the 1994 conference (Pemberton et al. 1996) was followed up with influential books by Hong Kong authors for the international publisher Longman — Benson and Voller (1997) and Benson (2001) — which placed learner autonomy centrally on the map as a mainstream language teaching and learning concept. Influence from Hong Kong after 1997 has presumably also been a major factor in the upsurge in interest in learner autonomy within mainland China, as seen in the large number of papers by Chinese participants at the 2004 conference, a selection of which have been published in Fan & Pang (2005). This Chinese language publication also shows that the concept of learner autonomy has already left its moorings in ‘Western expert’ discourse and has begun to be appropriated by Chinese teachers and researchers. In sum, those (‘we’) who have been writing and speaking about learner autonomy, particularly in relatively mainstream forums, have had agency in spreading the notion and have consequently gained a wider and more diverse audience. However, a question of some importance now seems to emerge: How should ‘we’ who have discussed together and advocated autonomy for some years conceive of ‘our’ relationship with those who

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are now coming to the notion? In the present volume, Esch, and — in the context of curriculum development — Nix and Barfield come closest to problematising this relationship, with the latter authors in particular highlighting some of the issues of power which might be involved. Riley (this volume) highlights in addition the possibility of ‘discursive dissonance’ when cultures come into contact. Nevertheless, we find that self-critical considerations relating to power and cultural appropriateness are not as much in evidence overall as might have been expected, especially given the general backdrop of ‘autonomy globalised’ and the specific conference settings of post-handover Hong Kong and Hangzhou.

Autonomy misunderstood? Despite the agency ‘we’ may have had in the spread of learner autonomy as a concept, what emerges from some contributions here (especially by Benson and Esch) is a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the way it is currently being construed, or with the practices that are being associated with it. Esch, for example, considers the mainstream tendency to associate autonomy with individualism to be akin to a dilution of more radical conceptions which lie at the wellspring of the autonomy movement, within the early work of Holec and CRAPEL. An alternative interpretation, we would suggest, might run as follows: As a consequence of mainstreaming and globalisation, learner autonomy is now being discussed and interpreted by a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds who are not necessarily familiar with the work in the field over the last 30, 20, or even 10 years. From this perspective, it is perhaps not surprising, although ‘we’ might consider it regrettable, that language teaching professionals should integrate the new buzz-word term within schemata they already possess and are comfortable with, and that they should adapt but not radically depart from existing pedagogic practices. Maybe ‘we’ need to recognise that ‘learner autonomy’ as used by its principal advocates is not in any sense a ‘best’ use of the term, just a preferred one — and one which may run counter to the various everyday, folklinguistic conceptions or connotations of the term in different languages and cultures. This is particularly so with regard to the social connotations of autonomy which are currently viewed as desirable, but maybe it needs to be acknowledged that ‘we’ have always tended to use the word in a rather

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specialised, esoteric way, ever since Holec first countered conventional usage by defining it as a capacity (to take charge) rather than a situation (of freedom). Given the general rise of interest in learner autonomy these days, there may be a heightened need to explain ‘our’ conceptions clearly to new audiences, in new ways, explicitly addressing, as Esch suggests, “the complexities of sharing perspectives about autonomy”. In doing this, however, ‘we’ would surely do well to heed Esch’s advice that much depends on “our own ability to work jointly with teacherresearchers who approach the concept from different perspectives”. Thus, ‘we’ should continue to negotiate rather than simply assume understandings and should avoid apportioning responsibility solely to others for so-called ‘misunderstandings’. In sum, we suggest that becoming self-critically aware of and using wisely the power ‘we’ have gained within professional discourse must form one aspect of ‘our’ response to the current status of autonomy as a mainstreamed and globalised notion. To be true to notions of autonomy, ‘we’ might need to consider employing various media more self-critically and in a less ‘expert-centred’, more dialogic way in the future, including conference organisation, conference keynotes, curriculum development and teacher education interventions, consultancy visits, publications (such as the present volume) and commentaries like this one. In this spirit, we shall now move towards making more explicit our own assumptions regarding the nature of learner autonomy and explaining why we favour localising it conceptually as social practice.

Autonomy academised, and the need for localisation In the opening chapter, Benson reviews academic strategies which he and others have used to define ‘the’ meaning of learner autonomy, and indirectly draws attention to the way learner autonomy has come to be viewed as a topic for academic debate, research and publication over the last decade or so (see also Benson 2007a). Against a tendency towards academisation and concomitant over-privileging of ‘universalist’ theoretical perspectives, however, ‘we’ might do well to heed Riley’s warnings (this volume) that learner autonomy, if it is to be either made sense of or developed at all, needs to be conceptualised and addressed locally in particular social contexts. Riley thus highlights the need for

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ethnographies of autonomy — descriptions of autonomy and autonomyoriented practice in particular settings — as a counterbalance to overabstract perspectives. An ethnographer is one who participates in particular activities but ‘brackets’ preconceptions in an attempt to see what patterns emerge, deliberately resisting desires for control of meaning; similarly, we feel, the field of autonomy may benefit at this point from becoming more open to interpretations and practices which are beyond ‘our’ control and current ken. In this connection, a focus on encouraging the expression of learner voices has emerged strongly in autonomy research over the last few years (not least in the work of Benson himself) and is represented in this collection by Aoki and Lamb. These voices remind us insistently that the desire for actual control over learning is something concrete, something which real people value and engage in within particular contexts. Indeed, Aoki resists theory almost completely in her account, attempting to let the story of a relatively autonomous learner and teacher of Japanese as a second language speak for itself. We would argue that maintaining a focus on concrete, socially situated examples of autonomy-oriented practice (including relevant practices which are not associated with autonomy by participants themselves) may serve as an effective antidote to trends towards overabstraction of the concept and to the problems of dilution and/or lack of understanding of its so-called ‘essence’ which emerge as concerns for some of the authors in this book.

Localising autonomy as social practice Several chapters in this volume do ground their discussions of autonomy in specific contexts of practice: language teaching (for secondary-level, university or adult immigrant learners), teacher education and curriculum development. Localising autonomy in such settings, these discussions tend to support a view of autonomy as social practice. By this we mean that autonomy is not seen as an abstract set of discrete skills, attitudes or behaviours to be developed, but a historically and socially situated process that evolves and is mediated and instantiated through relations among persons-in-action in specific contexts of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991: 49–52). In our view, those of us who are teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers or in other positions of power in what Deci and Flaste (1996: 8) call “one-

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up/one-down” relationships have the primary responsibility for initiating, mediating and supporting the autonomisation process. We do this through our relations with the other key players and through the tools, resources and practices with which we engage them. Fundamentally, however, those of us charged with this responsibility should begin not by trying to change others, but (as we further explain below) by trying to understand and change our own role and practices, by engaging in dialogue with the others involved, and by promoting discourses of learning. These are, we believe, key practical concerns that emerge from several chapters in this volume.

Developing self-awareness in relation to roles and practices In his chapter, Miller suggests that much of the literature on autonomy in practice has focused on language learning outside the classroom context, since (he argues) principles of autonomy are much more difficult to implement in a controlled learning environment. While the work of people like Dam and Little (this volume) or Legenhausen (1999) would seem to counter such an argument, Dam points out at the beginning of her chapter that it is still surprisingly difficult for teachers to change their practice and to sustain this process of change — in fact she surmises that very few teachers have actually done so. Drawing on her extensive experience of conducting in-service workshops for teachers, Dam makes the significant observation that teachers who decided to focus on changing their own role in the classroom (rather than on trying to change their learners’ role) seemed on the whole more successful in their endeavours. (For more detailed discussion, see Dam 2003.) The chapters that address issues of teacher education or development (Dam, Little, Miller, Sinclair) collectively reinforce the message that raising teachers’ own awareness of their role and practices is critically important to any pedagogy for autonomy. Such awareness-raising might take place through ongoing action research and critical reflection on practice, mirroring the interactive-reflective processes of the classroom (Little); through explicit reframing of teachers’ current classroom practices so that they see how much of what they already do is related to developing students’ autonomy (Miller); or through experiential learning whereby teachers engage in planning, reflective and evaluative practices similar to those undertaken by their students (Dam, Sinclair). Of course, it is not just teachers who need to engage in this kind of critical reflection

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on roles and practices but also teacher educators and curriculum developers (Nix and Barfield) in ‘one-up/one-down’ relationships, and, as we have already highlighted in this chapter, author-commentators like ourselves and other colleagues who engage in professional discourse on autonomy.

Engaging others in dialogue For those of us in ‘one-up’ positions, developing critical awareness of our own role and practices must entail developing critical awareness of the voices and perspectives of those whose autonomy we wish to nurture. As Dam explains in her chapter, writing comments in learners’ logbooks forces the teacher “partly to enter into the thoughts of her learners” so that she can consider how best to support them. In short, the teacher “will of necessity get involved in the learners’ learning process”. While much of the discussion about learner autonomy seems to direct attention to the importance of learner involvement in the learning process, Dam’s clear and simple statement of practice here reminds us that, for such learner involvement to happen, we as teachers must involve ourselves in our learners’ learning process and enter into their thoughts. This message is firmly echoed in Lamb’s chapter on learners’ voices, and framed in Little’s analysis of the European Language Portfolio (ELP) in terms of a “Freirean teaching-learning dialogue” where teacher and learner are co-participants in the learning process. This dialogic process of authentic communication between teacher and student is also integral to Cotterall’s account of how reflective writing and feedback on reflective writing are pedagogically exploited in her context. Similarly, multi-voiced electronic communication and information exchange among course participants and tutors are facilitated through the eChina workspace described in Sinclair’s chapter. Transposing these issues to the area of curriculum development, Nix and Barfield draw an illuminating parallel between collaborative dialogue in the language classroom and processes of collaborative curriculum development entailing critically engaged dialogues with all participants involved, including students and part-time teaching staff. Relating and reflecting on their own experiences of engaging and coordinating various participant voices in the curriculum development process, they make the point that there is no curriculum without

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communication. However, they also highlight the challenge and complexity of this collaborative process, and problematise the notion of ‘equal, dialogic participation’, given the realities of unequal power relations and divergent perspectives among participants. As they conclude, “the project of collaborative autonomy must always engage with questions of power”. This closely mirrors the complexity of the teacher’s role in creating spaces for and developing students’ autonomy within a framework that he or she essentially controls. Yet, however complex and challenging it may be, the importance of enabling our students’ voices (or the voices of those in ‘one-down’ positions), and thus engaging them in what Lamb (this volume) calls “discourses of learning”, seems paramount. While face-to-face or computer-mediated dialogue may be one way of addressing this, several chapters in this volume discuss particular tools that may help to mediate the process more effectively.

Tools to promote discourses of learning Little refers to the ELP as “a tool to promote learner autonomy”, while Dam similarly discusses the use of logbooks as “a tool for developing learner autonomy”. For Cotterall, the focus is on essay cover sheets and other forms of prompted reflective writing that encourage students to develop and articulate their metacognitive knowledge. Turning our attention to teachers, Miller presents the idea of reflective lesson plans as a means of helping teachers to focus on learner processes, strategies and objectives, rather than on syllabus or language-related objectives. Tools can be technological too, as illustrated by Sinclair in the multifunctional interactive workspace used by trainee teachers to manage and evaluate their learning. In all cases, these material tools seem to support the teaching or learning process by helping to make it transparent, visible and tangible to its users, and thus enabling them to maintain control of this process. While tools differ in terms of form, design, function, and degree of structure and complexity, an essential common feature they seem to share is use of the medium of writing, either for personal planning and reflection or for communicating thoughts to others. What the chapters in this volume bring home, then, is a consistent message that the development and exercise of metacognition may be usefully mediated through writing, since through writing we are compelled to externalise

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and make explicit to ourselves (as well as to others) our own thoughts, and can make our own thoughts and thinking processes an object of reflection. Where pedagogical tools of this kind are lacking and learners are not helped to take control of their learning, and to articulate their metacognitive awareness (Sinclair) or learning gains (Cotterall) in an explicit way, we may find instead a “struggle for control” where “the discourse of resistance has precedence over the discourse of metacognition” (Lamb). In his critical analysis of how young teenagers in a northern English urban school setting perceive foreign language learning, Lamb exposes a complex system of rewards and sanctions which results in control of learner behaviour rather than learner control of the learning process. Moreover, learners who are wise to the system can exploit it so that they achieve maximum rewards for minimum effort. In essence, the focus is more on working the system than on learning for themselves. Yet it seems that many learners in this context would like to have more control and involvement in their learning in relation to selecting objectives, targets and practice activities. It is also clear that learners who have a better developed metacognitive capacity to talk about the learning process are more likely to feel in control of what they are doing and more engaged in learning. Lamb’s concluding message thus highlights the importance of getting learners to talk about learning, of listening and responding to their voices, and of encouraging the development of metacognitive discourses of learning.

Final reflections When we initially responded separately to the chapters in this book, we found ourselves constructing parallel arguments in support of a shift away from top-down, universalist perspectives on learner autonomy in professional discourse and towards a greater focus on autonomy as localised social practice (and process). In attempting to weave our thoughts together along these lines, we have found it more necessary than we had originally expected to ‘state where we stand’, both to one another and in our text. We have found (to our relief!) that we share the same basic perspective, and that the practical and research focus on autonomy as localised social practice which we have begun to make explicit coheres with several chapters in the book, reflecting the ‘social turn’ in specialised autonomy discourse and the increased

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emphasis on classroom practice which we highlighted as recent trends at the outset of this chapter. At another level, however, a sense of crisis and of “dissonance” (Riley) or of “fissure” (Nix and Barfield) rather than unity pervades parts of the book. Perhaps, if the 1994 conference marked the first stirrings of an authoritative autonomy ‘movement’ worldwide, the 2004 conference and its associated publications will come to be seen as the point when any (illusory?) unity began to fracture, revealing a myriad of perspectives on learner autonomy beyond hope of any kind of central discursive control. We have been suggesting, however, that the recent development — or increase in recognition — of diverse local perspectives on autonomy has been both inevitable and in some senses desirable. In the current context of mainstreaming and globalisation of the notion of learner autonomy, a major overall issue which emerges for us from our reading of these chapters is, then, this: How can ‘we’ better promote ‘our’ conceptions of learner autonomy and related practice, taking advantage of new opportunities which have accompanied the spread of the notion, at the same time as being selfcritical of power relations and listening more intently to learner and teacher voices in particular settings? And how can ‘we’ help to engage these voices within new discourses of learning — ones within which ‘our’ voices are heard but do not predominate?

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Notes Chapter 1 1.

Now the Japan Association for Language Teaching.

Chapter 4 1.

2.

3.

This is not to suggest that this is the only form or source of discursive dissonance, of course. The complex of attitudes and behavioural norms usually bundled together under the label ‘peer pressure’ is another. The bored tone adopted by, say, a teenage male student even as he is giving a right answer to a teacher’s question is a clear discoursal manifestation of an attempt to reconcile his group’s attitudes and values with those of the institution (cf. two further examples mentioned in the Conclusion). Available at: http://www.education.gouv.fr/bo/2006/23/MENE0601048C. htm. This is the most recent general ‘circular’ on the topic. See also: http: //www.education.gouv.fr/botexte/bo010607/MENE0101172N.htm. The recent controversial prohibition against the wearing of the Muslim veil, which seems to be an important exception to this rule, results from its being categorised by officialdom as a religious symbol and not merely as clothing. Religious symbols are forbidden in the strictly secular system of public education.

Chapter 8 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

My experience derives from courses in as well as outside Denmark for language teachers wanting to change their teaching approach towards the implementation of learner autonomy. Again my ‘evidence’ derives from my workshops with language teachers, teaching different levels of learners — schoolchildren as well as adults. We are talking about 10- to 15-year-old learners in a Danish comprehensive ‘Folkeskole’, with English levels ranging from beginning to intermediate. The data shown were collected from a mixed-ability group of 9th graders, i.e. 14- to 15-year-olds. A detailed description of the structure and contents of these workshops as they developed over the years is given in Dam 1999b.

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6.

In earlier years I used the term ‘diary’. However, the term was often misinterpreted as being something very closed and only for personal use, which was not along the lines I envisaged its being used. I therefore started using the term ‘logbook’. 7. These ‘steps’ would to a large extent be similar to the ones mentioned by the teachers in the 1993 data. However, the introduction of learners’ logs would now in most cases have first priority. 8. For examples of successful use of logbooks (diaries) at tertiary level — often written on a weekly basis — see, for instance, Yang 1998; Toogood & Pemberton 2002: 104–5; and Barfield 2003. 9. For the use of posters in the autonomous classroom, see, for example, Dam 1995: 41–2 and 1999b: 122–9. 10. I have had this class since they started learning English at the age of 10/11 where the logbook was also introduced (see Figure 8.1). 11. The learners will by this time have had approximately 560 English lessons of 45 minutes each.

Chapter 10 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

NudistVIVO is software for the analysis of qualitative data. It helps researchers to access, manage, shape and analyse detailed textual and/or multimedia data and provides a range of tools to help clarify the data, discover meanings and patterns and arrive at answers to questions. By performing manual tasks like classifying, sorting and arranging information, the software frees the researcher to devote more time to analysis and insight. UoN: Barbara Sinclair, Ian McGrath, Tricia Hedge, Ann Smith. BFSU: Gu Yueguo, Wang Tong, Cao Wen, Tang Jinlan; BNU: Wang Qiang, Zeng Tiangui, Wang Guangzhou, Chen Zehang. UoN: Carol Hall, Eric Hall, Lindsay Cooper. UoN: Gordon Joyes, Kevin Caley, Paul Distant. UoN: Luong Quang Nghi, Colleen McCants.

Chapter 11 1.

2. 3.

Following Aoki (2002), I define ‘teacher autonomy’ as the capacity, freedom and responsibility to make choices concerning one’s own teaching in the service of one’s learners’ needs and aspirations. Some theorists distinguish narrative and story whereas others use them interchangeably. I shall follow the latter approach in this paper. Trustworthiness is a criterion for evaluating constructivist qualitative research.

Notes for pp. 203–223

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4.

This is not my invention. Qualitative researchers have been aware of these issues since the crisis of representation in ethnography in the mid-1980s. Many have become reflexive and started including their own voices in their writing (Denzin & Lincoln 2000). 5. In the constructivist paradigm, consensus is one of the conditions that contribute to establishing trustworthiness. 6. This is something similar to the distinction between ‘a’ and ‘the’ in English. 7. This story is factitious. I synthesised several ‘true’ stories with a bit of my imagination. 8. The idea of using photos in the interview came from Harrison (2002). I asked Hiroaki to bring to the interview some photos of people, things or events that had been influential in his career. In the interview, Hiroaki explained these photos in a chronological order and I asked him to elaborate on them going backwards and forwards in time. 9. To do justice to this teacher, I must emphasise that he started running ‘Basics of JSL Education’ separately with relevant content a few years later. 10. Due to the space limitation, I have had to cut the story short. Hiroaki went to Korea to teach after this, came back to Japan two years later, spent a couple of years teaching part-time at several universities, and finally got a full-time position in a university.

Chapter 12 1.

2.

3.

‘After the Sheep? Exploring Threads in Developing Academic Literacy at the Curricular Level’ represents our thinking up to September 2004 (available at: http://c-faculty.chuo-u.ac.jp/~mikenix1/cd/v&v/ sheep.html). This unpublished paper includes visualisations of the curriculum development process by students, part-time colleagues, fulltime colleagues and administrative staff. It also includes critical responses from Michael Lomas, Sonthida Keyuravong and Yoko Morimoto — who attended the Hong Kong conference and who were also similarly concerned with curriculum development at their universities in Australia, Thailand and Japan, respectively. We felt that it would be useful to refer to particular insights and emerging principles from the 2004 paper in the present chapter. It is estimated that at least 25% of Japanese workers now work on a parttime or temporary basis (Nakamura 2007). Experts judge that this trend will continue to increase as employers keep the cost of wages and social benefits down by taking on more workers on limited-term contracts (Rengo 2007). Increased casualisation in tertiary education is part, then, of a powerful trend in Japanese society. We organised large-scale surveys and small-scale focus groups to understand better why students did or didn’t take certain courses and what kind of changes they thought would be appropriate.

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Note for p. 233

In late 2007, we are moving towards dropping all reference to skills in course titles to signal a much stronger emphasis on content-based rather than skills-based learning. It is likely, for example, that the ‘Basic Discussion Skills’ course will be re-named ‘Basic Research and Discussion’. The overall course objectives will probably be framed much more simply in terms of learners developing ‘comfort, confidence, control, clarity, criticality’ through engaging in the three interconnected macro processes of ‘Researching and gathering information and ideas’, ’Exchanging and explaining information and ideas’ and ‘Analysing and organising information and ideas’.

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Index

283

Index academic literacy 217, 220–2, 224, 232–6 and learner autonomy 218, 220–2 and teacher autonomy 218 incommensurable interpretations of 232–6 see also dissonance, discursive writing 87–106 action engagement in 38 knowledge 33, 151 research 171, 249 activity theory 43 see also sociocultural theory agency 16, 25–6, 76–7, 199, 245 AILA 242 Learner Autonomy Scientific Commission 3 alienation 151, 152 assessment 39–40, 194 see also Common European Framework of Reference for Languages; peer-assessment; self-assessment attribution 79, 81–2 see also motivation autonomous classroom 129 language learning 7, 125–6, 129, 244 language teaching 125 learner 226 teacher 226

autonomy academisation of 247–8 and academic literacy 220–2 and beliefs about languages 56 and beliefs about teaching and learning 62 and culture 52–3 and curriculum development 245 and discourse 48, 62 and discursive dissonance 54–62 and globalisation 21–6, 244 and government policy 28, 111 and independence 148 and individualism 34–8 and learning content 18, 20 and learning management 18, 20 and motivation 67–86, 148 and power relations 235 and self-access 5 and social interaction 35, 45, 46, 148–50, 151, 244 see also reciprocity and teacher development 125–31, 143–4 and teacher education 245 as a goal of national curricula 151, 244 as a set of behaviours 25 as constantly negotiated 38 as individual rationality 226 as social practice 243–4, 248, 252 as social responsibility 184, 185 as the capacity to exercise critical thinking 33

284

Index

as the capacity to take charge of one’s learning 14, 17–18, 19, 109, 184, 244, 247 associated with various forms of practice 16–17 awareness of 111 collaborative 251 collective 214 conceptions of 3–5, 9–10, 13, 15, 19, 20, 33–4, 38, 41, 42, 43, 45, 244–8, 253 see also autonomy, misconceptions about concrete practice vs abstract conceptualisation of 248 critical versions of/approaches to 41, 42–4 current interest in 13–14, 15, 26 degrees of 124 definitions of 13–15, 17–21, 24–6, 109, 147, 184–5, 247 dialogic nature of 247 differing perspectives on 245–7, 253 discourse of 10, 27, 31–3, 243 ethnographies of 52–3, 248 history of 16–17 in different social and cultural contexts 42–3, 47 in the classroom 17, 67–86, 109– 24, 125–44 individual/personal 27, 33, 34–8, 214 individualistic versions of/ approaches to 27, 34–8, 42, 246 interdependent 218, 236 lack of 25 learner 3–4, 13–26, 27–32, 33–5, 37–44, 45–6, 52–3, 62, 63, 67, 69, 71, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 90–1, 94, 103, 105–6, 109–12, 114–5, 116, 118, 123–4, 125–31, 144, 147–55, 156, 161, 163, 165, 171, 172–3, 175–6,

178–80, 181, 182, 184–5, 186–8, 192, 194, 198, 199, 214, 215, 216, 218, 221, 232, 242, 243–9, 251–3 liberal-humanist view of 37 localisation of 248, 252–3 mainstreaming of 4, 14–15, 17, 27– 32, 244–7, 253 making sense of 13–26 matrix model of 19 misconceptions about 31, 35, 246– 7 moral dimension of 34 outside the classroom 109 pedagogy for 249 personal dimensions of 27, 33, 34– 8, 110 political versions of 15, 19, 20, 110 process towards 125 professional 35–6, 41, 250 psychological versions of 15, 19, 20 readiness for 90–1, 185 researchers and 41, 42–4 socially situated view of 27, 38, 41, 244, 246–8 suppression of 25 teacher 10, 171–2, 180–1, 184, 200– 216, 218, 224, 236, 256 technical versions of 19 universalist view of 247, 252 see also agency; autonomous; control; knowledge, metacognitive; responsibility; taking charge; theories of learning; willingness beliefs 46 about language and language learning 47, 52–4, 55–7 about learner autonomy 178–9 about teacher autonomy 180–1 about teaching and learning 46, 58–62 and practice 39–41, 43 conflicting 58–62

Index

explicit vs implicit 46 folklinguistic 46, 47, 53–4, 62 of learners 29, 54 of teachers 38–41, 177–82 Benson 14, 19, 85 blended learning 188 see also e-learning change 125, 127–9, 233 classroom 128 introduction of 128–9 resistance to 35, 235 sustaining 125, 249 whole-school approach to 35–6 child-rearing practices 48–53, 150 children development of 149–50 inborn capacity of 149–50 see also child-rearing practices China 4, 7–8, 175–83, 192–3, 195–8, 245 choice 32–3, 69–70, 71, 85–6, 114, 192– 3, 194 and self-determination 71 classroom 244 autonomous 129, 256 learning 67–86, 125–44, 153–4 organisation 128 cognition distributed 34, 37, 38, 42 individual 37, 38 see also knowledge; understanding, collective collaboration 222, 224–5, 226, 230, 232, 236, 250–1 cross-cultural 197 collaborative autonomy 251 see also collective autonomy; interdependent autonomy curriculum development 217–38 dialogue 250 reflection 228–9 research 247

285

collective autonomy 214, 216 see also collaborative autonomy; interdependent autonomy understanding 228, 236 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages 156 see also European Language Portfolio communication 225–8 authentic 130 learner-learner 127 communicative approach 55–7, 62 practices (adult-child) 51–2 proficiency 153, 156, 223 communities 34, 35 learning 30, 34, 35, 38 of practice 225, 226 virtual 30–1, 36–7 see also society competence plurilingual 42 sociocultural 47–8 connectedness 148, 151 see also autonomy and social interaction; reciprocity conscious awareness 185 intention 150–1 reflection 185 constraints 181–3, 185 social 37–8 control 14, 19, 20, 26, 34, 35, 67, 78, 86, 115, 148, 152, 185, 232, 235, 248, 251–2 by learners see control by teachers 86, 234 limited 182 locus of 80–1, 82 over teachers 237 struggle for 85–6, 252 CRAPEL 3, 16, 58, 243, 246

286

Index

see also Esch; Holec; Riley critical awareness 198, 250 dialogue 223 reflection 222, 228, 249 thinking 33, 38 versions of/approaches to autonomy 41, 42–4 culture 43 and autonomy 52–3 creation of 152 exam-oriented 182 individualistic 34–8 of autonomy 34, 36 see also collaboration, cross-cultural curriculum development 217–38, 250 Dam 109, 154–5, 184, 243 Deci 71, 75–6, 147–8, 150 Denmark 50, 125–43 dialogue 84, 139, 152, 217–38, 249–51 collaborative 250 computer-mediated 251 critical 223 internal 45, 63 interpersonal 45 intrapersonal 45, 63 open 218, 224, 225–6, 227, 229 see also language, dialogic nature of; negotiation; teaching as dialogue diaries 116, 256 see also logbooks; records of learning differentiated teaching and learning 243 discourse and practice 38 and the construction of identity 46, 50–3 classroom 52 cultural 48 metacognitive 252 of autonomy 10, 27, 31–3, 243

of egalitarian professionalism 224–5 of learning 251, 253 of reflective collaboration 225 official 55, 62 professional 245, 247, 250, 252 specialised 252 theoretical 244 Western expert 245 see also dissonance, discursive; learning discourses dissonance cognitive 48 discursive 27, 31–3, 38, 45–6, 54– 63, 253, 255 see also academic literacy, incommensurable interpretations of education adult 28, 29, 157–72 anthropology/ethnography of 48–54 as transmission 151–2 primary 29, 131–5 secondary 38–41, 55–62, 67–86, 111–12, 122–3, 131–43, 178–9, 180–2 teacher 36–7, 58–62, 206–11, 215, 249 see also teacher development; teacher training tertiary 87–107, 178–82, 217–24, 229–36 educational institutions as learning organisations 225 e-learning 175–98 materials design 188–95 see also blended learning engagement 129, 198 see also involvement English as a Second/Foreign Language 55–7, 119–21, 125–44, 157–69

Index

English for Academic Purposes 87– 106, 217, 219, 220–4, 232–5 Esch 243 see also Harding-Esch European Language Portfolio 155– 73, 250–1 Milestone ELP 157–73 Swiss ELP 157 evaluation 18, 20, 84, 127–9, 134, 142– 3, 150, 152, 153, 154, 158, 161, 170, 185, 187 see also records of learning; reflection; self-assessment; self-evaluation explicit knowledge 151 ‘learning to learn’ materials 175 making learning 39–40 reflection 151 vs inexplicit beliefs 46 extensive reading 223–4 folklinguistics 46, 47, 53–4, 62 see also beliefs Foucault 228–9 France 55–62 Freire 151–2, 155, 171, 173, 250 French as a Second/Foreign Language 68 German as a Second/Foreign Language 55–7, 68 globalisation 10, 21–6, 63, 244, 253 goal setting 18, 77, 82, 115, 150, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 170, 187 see also diaries; logbooks; planning; records of learning group work 127–8 Habermas 38, 225–6 Harding-Esch 13, 28 see also Esch HASALD 5 Holec 3, 14, 17–18, 27–8, 31, 109, 184, 246, 247

287

Hong Kong 3, 4–8, 36, 111–12, 122– 3, 125, 241–2, 243, 244, 245 see also HASALD human experience individual-cognitive dimensions of 149 sociocultural dimensions of 149 identity 16, 22, 45–6, 50 and knowledge 48 construction of 46, 48 learner 16, 22, 63 personal 45–6 independence 35, 148 contrasted with autonomy 148 see also learning, independent individual 45, 237 differences 179, 182 see also self; society, member of individualism 34–8 Integrate Ireland Language and Training 157–73 interdependence 244 interdependent autonomy 218, 236 see also collaborative autonomy; collective autonomy intersubjectivity 149–50 see also social interaction and autonomy involvement 154, 218 active 129 see also engagement Ireland 157–73 JALT Learner Development SIG 3, 8, 241 Japan 3, 8–9, 204–16, 217–38 see also JALT Learner Development SIG Japanese as a Second Language 204– 16 knowledge action 33, 151

288

Index

and identity 48 construction 38 control of 152 management 46, 47, 62 see also social knowledge system metacognitive 87–106, 185, 186–7, 194 metalinguistic 152, 158 person 98 professional 203 questioning of 33 school 33, 151 social distribution of 42, 48 see also cognition, distributed social knowledge system 46, 47– 8, 62 strategy 89, 101–2 task 99–101 teacher 203 transfer see knowledge management transmission of 151–2 see also cognition; modes of knowing; understanding, collective language centres 28 dialogic nature of 150, 151 for migrants 157–73 proficiency 153 use 153–4 learner as a cog in a machine 23, 26 as a social being 199 as technology 23, 25 autonomy 3–4, 13–26, 27–32, 33– 5, 37–44, 45–6, 52–3, 62, 63, 67, 69, 71, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 90–1, 94, 103, 105–6, 109–12, 114–15, 116, 118, 123–4, 125–31, 144, 147–55, 156, 161, 163, 165, 171, 172–3, 175–6, 178–80, 181, 182, 184–5, 186–8, 192, 194, 198, 199, 214,

215, 216, 218, 221, 232, 242, 243– 9, 251–3 behaviours 252 beliefs 29, 54 control see control focus on 16–17, 22 histories see life stories ideal autonomous 226 identity 16, 22, 63 role of 16, 28–9, 76–85, 86, 127–9, 152, 153, 171, 234–5, 249 see also pedagogical relation strategies see strategies training 179 voices 67–86, 248, 250–3 see also voice -centredness 22, 35, 113–15, 224 learning and personal identity 45 communities 30, 34, 35, 38 content 18 cultures 29 discourses 29, 249, 251, 253 environment controlled 249 learner-directed 129 teacher-directed 129 experiential 249 in formal contexts 150–5 independent 5, 244 management 18, 20, 21, 25, 85, 150 see also self-management organisations 228 process 130–1, 133–4, 250–2 social mediation of 34, 35, 186 strategies see strategies styles 29 through internal dialogue 45–6 to learn 5–6, 38–9, 175–6

Index

tools 30, 40, 157, 251–2 see also tools transfer 102 see also theories of learning liberal-humanist approaches to curriculum development 218, 222–5, 228, 237 model of the individual 237 view of autonomy 37 life stories 199–216 listening 116, 119–21 Little 20, 243 logbooks 125–44, 256 daily use of 133–5 electronic 144 entries in 136–40 learner evaluations of 140–3 teacher 130–1 see also diaries; records of learning Luxembourgeois as a Second/Foreign Language 57 materials alternative 128 design 175–6, 188–95 metacognition 84, 251–2 see also knowledge, metacognitive modes of knowing narrative 201 paradigmatic 201, 204 monitoring 18, 20, 150, 153, 158, 161, 185, 187 motivation 16, 22, 29, 67–86, 148, 242 and autonomy 67–86, 148 extrinsic 72–6, 86 instrumental 182 intrinsic 71, 75–6, 148 lack of 67 see also attribution; selfdetermination; self-fulfilment; will; willingness

289

negotiation 70, 85, 149, 152, 153, 172, 225 see also dialogue; teaching as negotiation New Zealand 87–107 Norway 49–50 pedagogical relation 28, 41 tools 251–2 tradition 46 pedagogy for autonomy 249 of encouragement 59, 61–2 see also teaching peer-assessment 29, 39–40 see also assessment planning 18, 20, 84, 86, 90, 126, 150, 153, 158, 161, 185, 187 see also goal setting portfolios 232 see also diaries; European Language Portfolio; logbooks; records of learning power lack of 182 positions of 248–9 relations 226–7, 229, 235, 237–8, 251, 253 practice and beliefs 39–41, 43 autonomy as social practice 243– 4, 248, 252 autonomy associated with various forms of 16 child-rearing 48–53, 150 communicative (adult-child) 51–2 communities of 225, 226 contradictions between discourse and 38 teacher 249 vs abstract conceptualisation of autonomy 248

290

Index

reading see extensive reading reciprocity 151, 152 see also autonomy and social interaction; connectedness; dialogue; social interaction and autonomy records of learning 154, 155–73 see also diaries; logbooks; portfolios reflection 20, 45, 83, 86, 94, 97, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155–73, 185, 192, 194, 195–6, 222–37, 249, 252 collaborative 228–9 critical 20, 222, 228, 249 metacognitive 232 self- 128 reflective lesson planning 117–24 teaching 118 writing 250 research action 171, 249 collaborative 247 constructivist approaches to 202– 3, 257 see also theories of learning, constructivist ethnographic 43, 48, 58, 68, 248 generalisability of 204 into autonomy 41, 42–4 likelihood of 201 positivist 201 reflexive approaches to 257 story-based 199–216 trustworthiness of 203, 257 validity of 201 see also modes of knowing resistance 32, 84, 218 to change 220 responsibility 18, 20, 23–6, 34, 38, 76, 82, 83, 84, 115, 152, 170, 179, 185 discourses on 23 of teachers and researchers 33 social 184, 185

Riley

5, 242, 243

scaffolding 186, 188, 193 Scandinavia 49–50 self 23, 43 and socialisation 43 as a reflexive project 22–3 construction of 63 multilingual 23 technologisation of 23 -access centres 4–7, 111, 244 -access language learning 3–7, 112, 244 -assessment 29, 39–40, 74, 155–73, 185, 187 see also assessment -centredness 35 -determination 71, 75–6 see also motivation -directed learning 3, 14, 244 -evaluation 83, 136 see also evaluation -expression 52–3 -fulfilment 34, 148 -improvement 23 -management 83 see also learning management -mastery 34 -reflection 128 see also reflection -regulation 42, 87 -reliance 35 social constraints 37 distribution of knowledge 48 see also cognition, distributed distribution of language 48 interaction and autonomy 35, 45, 46, 148–50, 151, 244 see also intersubjectivity knowledge system 46, 47–8, 62 mediation of learning 34, 35, 186 practice of autonomy 243–4, 248, 252

Index

responsibility 184, 185 theory of learning 36, 37, 41 see also sociocultural theory society knowledge-creating 35 member of 45, 49 see also communities sociocultural competence 47–8 theory 29, 38, 149–50, 185–6, 234 see also activity theory; social theory of learning; Vygotsky Spain 126 Spanish as a Second/Foreign Language 55–7 strategies 89, 90, 91, 93, 116–17, 179, 180, 185, 186–7, 194 awareness of 89, 116 cognitive 116 metacognitive 116, 185 see also evaluation; knowledge, metacognitive; monitoring; planning self-management 185 socio-affective 116 Sweden 126 taking charge 14, 17–18, 31, 244 see also autonomy as the capacity to take charge of one’s learning; control; Holec; responsibility task awareness 114 creation 115 intervention 115 involvement 114 knowledge 99–101 modification 115 transcendence 115 teacher as adviser 29–30 autonomy 10, 171–2, 180–1, 184, 200–216, 218, 224, 236

291

and learner autonomy 181, 184, 218, 236 as control over teaching 184 as self-directed professional development 184 definitions of 184, 256 laissez-faire form of 224, 236 see also autonomy, professional beliefs 38–41, 177–82 development 125–31, 143–4, 171– 2, 175–98, 218, 226, 249 see also curriculum development; teacher education education 36–7, 58–62, 206–11, 215, 249 see also teacher development; teacher training educator 215, 250 feedback 75, 139 histories see life stories ideal autonomous 226 knowledge as storied 203 plans 125–7 practices 249 role of 28–9, 59–62, 71, 76–85, 114– 15, 120–1, 125, 127–9, 142, 152, 153, 155, 171, 198, 234–5, 244, 249 see also pedagogical relation training 125–31, 144, 175, 177 see also teacher education teaching as dialogue 152 as negotiation 152 as transmission of knowledge 151–2 process 251 reflective 118 see also pedagogy technology 178, 179, 182 and independent learning 179 and supporting autonomy 30–1, 188

292

Index

attitudes towards 178 see also blended learning; e-learning theories of learning cognitivist 29 constructivist 37, 188 see also research, constructivist approaches to innatist 29 social 36, 37, 41 sociocultural 29, 38, 42, 43, 149– 50, 185–6, 188 tools for developing autonomy 40, 125–44, 172, 198, 251 for developing metacognitive knowledge 194–7, 251 for e-learning 177, 188–9, 194–7, 198 for learning 30, 40, 157, 251–2 see also diaries; European Language Portfolio; learning tools; logbooks; materials; reflective lesson planning; portfolios; technology UK 36–7, 38–41, 58–61, 67–86 understanding collective 228, 236 see also cognition, distributed voice 241–53 see also learner voices Vygotsky 45, 63, 149–50, 186 will 71 see also self-determination; willingness willingness 77, 150, 185 see also motivation; will writing 87–106, 251–2