Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education: Inquiry and Innovation

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Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education Inquiry and Innovation

Edited by

Andrew Barfield and Stephen H. Brown

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education

10.1057/9780230596443 - Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education, Edited by Andy Barfield and Steve Brown



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Inquiry and Innovation Edited by

Andrew Barfield Chuo University, Japan

and

Stephen H. Brown Konan Women’s University, Japan



Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education

Selection and editorial matter © Andrew Barﬁeld and Stephen H. Brown 2007 Chapters © their authors 2007

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–0–230–00173–2 hardback ISBN 10: 0–230–00173–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Preface

vii

Notes on the Contributors

xii

Acknowledgements 1

xvii

Introduction: Reconstructing Learner and Teacher Autonomy in Language Education David Little

Part One: Teacher and Learner Education 2

Teacher Development through Inquiry: Getting Started Flávia Vieira

3

The Role of Autobiography in Fostering Learning and Reflective Thinking Leena Karlsson and Felicity Kjisik

4

Tensions in Policy and Practice in Self-directed Learning Akara Akaranithi and Suriyan Panlay

5

On Democracy and Learner Autonomy in Initial Teacher Education: Guerrilla Warfare? Maria Alfredo Moreira

6

Responding to Resistance Peter Brown, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda

7

Commentary on Part One: Necessary Contradictions … and Beyond Elsa Auerbach

Part Two: Classroom Practice 8

9

1

13 15

30 43

56 71

84

93

Nurturing Language Learner Autonomy through Caring Pedagogic Practice Huijuan Shao and Zongjie Wu Active Learnership in Continuous Self- and Peer-evaluation Teija Natri

95 108

v



Contents

10

Seeking Autonomy in a Lecture Course Hugh Nicoll

120

11

Uses of Adversity: Moving beyond L2 Learning Crises Rebecca L. Oxford, Yaru Meng, Zhou Yalun, Jiyeun Sung and Rashi Jain

131

12

Telling Tales of Transformation Mike Nix

143

13

Commentary on Part Two: Narrative, Struggle, Reflection and Autonomy Michael Carroll and Sara Cotterall

156

Part Three: Self-access Learning and Teacher Collaboration

165

14

Developing Student Support in Self-access Centres Pornapit Darasawang, Wareesiri Singhasiri and Sonthida Keyuravong

167

15

Support Structures for Self-access Learning Sarah Toogood and Richard Pemberton

180

16

Shifting Sands: Supporting Teachers in Facilitating Independent Learning Jean T. Young, Christoph A. Hafner and Dean W. Fisher

196

17

Developing Teacher Autonomy through Teamwork Judith Kennedy and Annamaria Pinter

209

18

Commentary on Part Three: Teachers, Transitions and Time: Learning for Educational Change 222 Alan S. Mackenzie

19

Conclusion: Autonomy/Agency through Socio-cultural Lenses Kelleen Toohey

231

References

243

Index

254



vi Contents

Moving back and forth between practice and theory, this volume of papers is an international exploration of current developments of autonomy in action in a variety of contexts in several countries (China, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Portugal, Thailand, the UK and the USA), with commentary by colleagues in the field in Canada, Ireland, Japan, Thailand and the USA. The core of this book is divided into three sets of research chapters: • Part One: Teacher and learner education (Chapters 2–6) • Part Two: Classroom practice (Chapters 8–12) • Part Three: Self-access learning and teacher collaboration (Chapters 14–17). Three commentary chapters respond to questions arising in the practitioner-driven research chapters (Part One: Elsa Auerbach, Chapter 7), (Part Two: Michael Carroll and Sara Cotterall, Chapter 13) and (Part Three: Alan Mackenzie, Chapter 18), with David Little (Introduction, Chapter 1) and Kelleen Toohey (Conclusion, Chapter 19) providing opening and closing critical overviews to the whole volume. In organizing Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education: Inquiry and Innovation in this way, our goal has been to create opportunities for different collaborative inquiries into the development of autonomy. Despite the ostensive division into three parts focusing on persons, practices and resources, many recurrent issues are threaded across the whole volume. David Little highlights some of these in the first chapter, set against a grounded historical view of the development of autonomy in language education; our interest here, as editors looking back at the whole book, concerns other recurrent questions emerging from the extended two-year process of collaborative production which the research chapter authors were involved in – questions of voice and multivocality, co-construction of knowledge, dialogic inquiry and participation. We would like to explore these issues briefly in the rest of the preface. From the start of this whole project, from working with colleagues in language education (at work, on publications and conferences, and in local and international professional development networks), we were vii



Preface

particularly interested in the question of voice, or the need to hear and respect the voices of all participants in different learning/teaching/ research processes. This had, for example, been a central part of our involvement in Autonomy You Ask! (Barfield and Nix, 2003), which pointed to new possibilities in group-based inquiry into autonomy. We share a social constructivist view of education: we understand that knowledge is not something static, but rather a dynamic and fluid process constructed by individuals and groups in particular social worlds. For such (co-)construction of knowledge to be effective, there must at least be space for individual learners’ voices to be heard – and, as we move from classroom to research, that space may open towards the voices of different teacher-learners and teacher-researchers, too. For us, it was only ‘natural’, then, that the quest for multivocality should become one of the enduring challenges in the process of producing Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education (RALE). We were intent on bringing together a group of teacher-researchers working in diverse settings, and we were concerned that the group should include not only colleagues whose work was already internationally known in the field of autonomy, but also others whose work would bring new perspectives and interests into the enterprise. At the outset, a few persons knew many people in the group, some knew just a few, yet nobody knew everybody. Ideally, although we would have all liked to have met face-to-face, that was plainly not possible, so we needed to have some measure of agreement on the direction of our journey. As a group, we initially sought to depart from the single-voiced authoritative views of language education that much conventional academic writing thrives on, but we had no clear idea where that might lead to in practice. What appears certain in retrospect is that the authors of RALE confronted fundamental questions of voice, audience and power in their subsequent engagement with their research. Much of that confrontation very much mirrors the realities of engaging with issues of autonomy in the classroom, for nothing may be further from the everyday uncertainties, successes and challenges of researching, learning and teaching autonomy than blind adherence to singular monopolistic authority. Yet, over time we have come to understand that if we were simply to see multivocality itself as the sole defining characteristic of more critical autonomy in language education, our understanding would risk being limited to a superficial manifestation of co-participation. Much more is to be learned, we believe, from questioning the interplay of resources, persons and practices in the co-construction of knowledge that this book has involved over a considerable period of time.



viii Preface

One of the challenges of the constructivist position we have taken with RALE is to find ways to engage in research practices and processes which allow for diverse perspectives, as well as for constructive dialogue between the multiple voices which emerge. Part of our editorial task in all this was to facilitate an environment which enabled dialogues to happen between chapters as well as within them. From September 2004 to May 2006, the authors of the research chapters were in virtual and faceto-face coordinated discussion of their projects. They were twinned locally in the same country with each other, so that they could discuss and develop their research in face-to-face collaboration. Each project was also paired internationally with a second one in a different country, so that geographically distant projects could engage in virtual collaboration, too. One example is how Flávia Vieira (Chapter 2, Portugal) worked with Maria Alfredo Moreira (Chapter 5, Portugal) and also with Hugh Nicoll (Chapter 10, Japan); Moreira with Vieira, and with Peter Brown, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda (UK); and Nicoll with Vieira, as well as with Mike Nix (Chapter 12, Japan). The authors of all the research chapters had access to an interactive website – where reports of research-inprogress and draft chapters were uploaded – and to a listserve, which people could use for further communication and discussion with the wider group. As the focus shifted from researching to writing, authors were also asked to respond to the early drafts of their geographically distant partner project. We hoped that access to these varied local and international resources would enhance interaction and critical reflection, which we trusted would follow through in unexpected ways into the written accounts that were created. Perhaps the major effects of that interaction are in fact invisible, in the private reactions and reflections it promotes, which certainly had some impact on how we (re-)conceptualized our experience and (re-)wrote our texts. To a certain extent then, collaboration and voice can take ‘unvoiced forms’ that are perhaps as important as, or even more important than ‘voiced forms’. (Flavia Vieira, web-based discussion of the completed research chapters) A connected challenge has concerned the kinds of genre which might best capture those dialogic practices and processes. How can such exploratory research be represented in its final published form? Do dialogic (and narrative) inquiry necessarily entail dialogic and narrative forms of representation? How can the local and particular be appropriately contextualized so they can be of wider relevance and interest,



Preface ix

x Preface

We have also been personally enriched in the process of conducting this study by exploring how to write and explain our research. We started out with a formal style in which as researchers we viewed things from the outside and followed a certain formulaic pattern in our writing. We have tried to move from this to talking to the reader in person where we have been challenged to include the voices of different people in our study … (Pornapit Darasawang, Wareesiri Singhasiri and Sonthida Keyuravong, Chapter 14) Letting go of the conventional in writing about autonomy in language education reveals shifts not only in identity construction for the teacher-researcher, but also in the otherwise hidden interdependence of agency between those involved. Complicated as this may seem, it was, as we look back now, about finding a process which enabled us all to go beyond participation as just ‘working together’, towards a more fully collaborative and responsive participation; a process where co-(re)constructing autonomy could take place between authors and different readers of their chapters within, as well as outside the group, in the wider community that this publication is intended for. Responsive participation in this network of shared interpretative practice was, we believe, central for different authors in questioning individual, initially idealized and conventional understandings of learner and teacher autonomy, and becoming open to more complex and contradictory multivoiced reconstructions of autonomy in language education. The multivocalic nature of RALE is, then, to a great extent the result of a protracted commitment by those involved to engage in face-to-face and written discussion of their work with others, open it out to questioning at different points, respond to the work-inprogress of others, and, lastly, to display this shared agency in the final drafts of their chapters. It is, in other words, the outcome of particular collaborative practices that this group of teacher-researchers created and engaged in – and from this has come the back-and-forthness between practice and theory that runs through the work presented here. The researcher … should not act as THE voice for the research participants. Instead, she can look for genres that are less distanced from the



without being homogenized into universalizing positions of generalized theory? It is impossible to answer these questions conclusively, but there is in this volume a rich diversity in the ways that different authors have grappled with these issues.

classrooms in which we teach and in which our students learn, and which can ultimately narrow the gap between educational settings and life. I feel that we have produced a collection of new stories which, we can hope, will resonate with the readers and their stories. (Leena Karlsson, web-based discussion of the completed research chapters) We would like to close this preface by thanking each and every author of Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education: Inquiry and Innovation for what they have achieved, both collectively and individually. Our particular thanks are due to Hugh Nicoll for establishing and maintaining the listserve and interactive website; to Mike Nix for insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this preface; and to Matthew Apple, Aifeng Huang, Etsuko Shimo and Danjun Ying for making important contributions to this project in its early stages. Finally, on a brief personal note, Andy would like to say ceizu tinbade to Tin Tin and Moe Min, as well as hvalissimo to Ana; and Steve would like to say arigatou to Mamiko for her constant support. ANDREW BARFIELD, Chuo University, Japan STEPHEN H. BROWN, Konan Women’s University, Japan September 2006 All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to the education of children in refugee camps in Thailand.



Preface xi

Akara Akaranithi is lecturer at the Language Institute, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Elsa Auerbach is professor in the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts/Boston, USA. Her publications include Making Meaning, Making Change: Participatory Curriculum Development for Adult ESL/Literacy (1992), From the Community – to the Community: a Guidebook for Participatory Literacy Training (1996), Community Partnerships (2002, ed.), Problem-Posing at Work: English for Action (2005, co-authored with N. Wallerstein) and Problem-Posing at Work: Popular Educator’s Guide (2005, co-authored with N. Wallerstein). Andrew Barfield is professor in the Faculty of Law, Chuo University, Japan. His publications include Autonomy You Ask! (2003, co-edited with M. Nix). Peter Brown is senior teaching fellow at the Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick, UK. Stephen H. Brown is professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Letters, Konan Women’s University, Japan. Michael Carroll is associate professor in the Faculty of Letters, St Andrews University, Japan. His publications include Journal Writing (2001, co-edited with J. Burton). Sara Cotterall is associate professor at Akita International University, Japan. Her publications include Learner Autonomy in Language Learning: Defining the Field and Effecting Change (1999, co-edited with D. Crabbe), Learner Strategies: a Guide for Teachers (2004, co-authored with H. Reinders) and Independent Language Learning: What’s It All About? (2006, co-authored with G. Murray). Pornapit Darasawang is lecturer in the Department of Language Studies, School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand. xii



Notes on the Contributors

Notes on the Contributors xiii

Christoph A. Hafner is tutor in the English Language Centre at the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Rashi Jain is a doctoral student in second language education and culture, University of Maryland, USA. Leena Karlsson is lecturer at Helsinki University Language Centre, Finland. Her publications include From Here to Autonomy. A Helsinki University Language Centre Autonomous Project (1997, co-authored with F. Kjisik and J. Nordlund) and All Together Now. Papers from the 7th Nordic Conference and Workshop on Autonomous Language Learning, Helsinki, September 2000 (2001, co-edited with F. Kjisik and J. Nordlund). Judith Kennedy is associate professor at the Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick, UK. Sonthida Keyuravong is senior lecturer in the Department of Language Studies, School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand. Felicity Kjisik is lecturer at Helsinki University Language Centre, Finland. Her publications include From Here to Autonomy. A Helsinki University Language Centre Autonomous Project (1997, co-authored with L. Karlsson and J. Nordlund) and All Together Now. Papers from the 7th Nordic Conference and Workshop on Autonomous Language Learning, Helsinki, September 2000 (2001, co-edited with L. Karlsson and J. Nordlund). David Little is associate professor of Applied Linguistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His publications include Learner Autonomy 1: Definitions, Issues and Problems (1991, reprinted 1995, 1999), European Language Portfolio: Guide for Teachers and Teacher Trainers (2001, co-authored with R. Perclová), Towards Greater Autonomy in the Foreign Language Classroom (2002, co-authored with J. Ridley and E. Ushioda) and Learner Autonomy in the Foreign Language Classroom: Teacher, Learner, Curriculum and Assessment (2003, co-edited with J. Ridley and E. Ushioda). Alan S. Mackenzie is head of Professional ELT Development, British Council Bangkok, Thailand. His publications include Content in



Dean W. Fisher is tutor in the English Language Centre at the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

xiv Notes on the Contributors

Yaru Meng is lecturer in the School of International Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. Her publications include Simulated Tests for Band Six (2002, co-authored with P. Tian). Maria Alfredo Moreira is assistant professor in the Institute of Education and Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal. Her publications include Para além dos testes – a avaliação processual na aula de Inglês (1993, co-authored with F. Vieira), A investigação-acção na formação reflexiva do professor-estagiário de Inglês (2001), A investigação-acção em supervisão no ensino do inglês: processos de (co-)construção do conhecimento profissional (2004) and No caleidoscópio da supervisão: imagens da formação e da pedagogia (2006, co-authored with F. Vieira, I. Barbosa, M. Paiva and I. Fernandes). Teija Natri is senior lecturer at Jyväskylä University Language Centre, Finland. Hugh Nicoll is professor in the Department of Intercultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Miyazaki Municipal University, Japan. Mike Nix is associate professor in the Faculty of Law, Chuo University, Japan. His publications include Autonomy You Ask! (2003, co-edited with A. Barfield). Rebecca L. Oxford is professor in the College of Education and head of the Second Language Education and Culture Program, University of Maryland, USA. Her publications include Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know (1990), Tapestry (1992, co-edited with R. Scarcella) and Language Learning Strategies around the World: Crosscultural Perspectives (1996, ed.). Suriyan Panlay is assistant professor at the Language Institute, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Richard Pemberton is associate professor in the School of Education, Nottingham University, UK. His publications include Studies in Lexis (1993, co-edited with E. Tsang), Taking Control: Autonomy in Language



Language Education: Looking at the Future (2001, ed.), Developing Autonomy (2002, co-edited with E. McCafferty) and Curriculum Innovation, Evaluation and Testing (2003, co-edited with T. Newfields).

Notes on the Contributors xv

Annamaria Pinter is associate professor at the Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick, UK. Her publications include Teaching Young Language Learners (2006). Huijuan Shao is lecturer in the Department of College English Teaching, College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Normal University, China. Wareesiri Singhasiri is lecturer in the Department of Language Studies, School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand. Richard Smith is associate professor at the Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick, UK. His publications include Learner Autonomy across Cultures: Language Education Perspectives (2003, co-edited with D. Palfreyman). Jiyeun Sung is a doctoral student in second language education and culture, University of Maryland, USA. Sarah Toogood is instructor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Language Centre, Hong Kong. Her publications include Learner Autonomy 7: Challenges to Research and Practice (2002, co-edited with P. Benson). Kelleen Toohey is professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her publications include Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice (2000) and Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (2004, co-edited with B. Norton). Ema Ushioda is associate professor at the Centre for English Language Teacher Education, University of Warwick, UK. Her publications include Institution-Wide Language Programmes: a Research-and-Development Approach to their Design, Implementation and Evaluation (1992, co-authored with D. Little), Learner Autonomy 5: the Role of Motivation (1996), Towards Greater Learner Autonomy in the Foreign Language Classroom (2002, co-authored with D. Little and J. Ridley), and Learner Autonomy in the Foreign Language Classroom: Teacher, Learner, Curriculum and Assessment (2003, co-edited with D. Little and J. Ridley).



Learning (1996, co-edited with E.S.L. Li, W.W.F. Or and H.D. Pierson) and Spoken Word Recognition in a Second Language (2004).

Flávia Vieira is associate professor in the Institute of Education and Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal. Her publications include Supervisão: uma prática reflexiva de formação de professors (1993), Para além dos testes – práticas de avaliação na aula de Inglês (1993, coauthored with M.A. Moreira), Autonomia na aprendizagem da língua estrangeira – uma intervenção pedagógica em contexto escolar (1998) and No caleidoscópio da supervisão: imagens da formação e da pedagogia (2006, coauthored with M.A. Moreira, I. Barbosa, M. Paiva and I.S. Fernandes). Zongjie Wu is professor in the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, China. His publications include Teachers’ Knowing in Curriculum Change: a Critical Discourse Study of Language Teaching (2005), Curriculum and Language Teacher Development (2005, co-authored with A. Huang and Z. Zheng) and Cultural Diversity of Discourses: Facilitate Coexistence and Harmony (2005, co-edited with F. Fang and W. Zhao). Zhou Yalun is a doctoral student in second language education and culture, University of Maryland, USA. Jean T. Young is manager of the English Language Centre, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.



xvi Notes on the Contributors

The cover photo is reproduced with permission courtesy of Ana Barfield © 2006. Figure 18.1 is reproduced from D. Williams (1999). Human responses to change. Futures 31/6: 609–16, © 1999, with permission from Elsevier.

xvii



Acknowledgements




Introduction: Reconstructing Learner and Teacher Autonomy in Language Education David Little

Introduction Attempts to achieve large-scale pedagogical innovation are depressingly prone to failure. A new theoretical concept stimulates the development of novel approaches; these are implemented by a small group of pioneers whose enthusiasm creates a band-wagon effect; as a result the theoretical concept is simplified and the pedagogical approaches are diluted; and what seemed at first to promise so much gradually disappears in the mainstream, to be followed in due course by another innovation – which will probably meet the same fate. The communicative turn that seemed set to revolutionize language education in the 1970s and ’80s, at least in Europe, provides a good example of this phenomenon. A new approach to the description of language use and the definition of learning objectives (the functionalnotional specifications pioneered by the Council of Europe: van Ek 1975; Coste et al. 1976; Baldegger et al. 1980) coincided with two strong desires on the part of national educational systems: to extend the reach of foreign language teaching, and in doing so to ensure that learners could make at least some communicative use of the languages they learnt. For a few years, those who embraced communicative language teaching were bold and energetic pioneers. They elaborated new curricula, experimented with new pedagogical techniques, and developed new learning materials; sometimes they devised new forms of assessment. The strong resistance they often encountered heightened their sense of adventure as it strengthened their resolve. With time more and more curricula came to specify communicative goals, textbooks were sold on the basis of their communicative claims, and the heat went out of the revolution. By the mid 1980s it was no longer daring to be a communicative language 1



1

teacher: the whole language teaching world had become communicative – except, of course, that it hadn’t. In the process of absorption, the term ‘communicative’ had been largely emptied of its original content and in most language classrooms things went on much as before. The key insights of the communicative pioneers are as valid now as they were thirty years ago: if we want learners to develop communicative proficiency in an L2 our curricula should say what we want them to be able to do in that language; and they will achieve communicative proficiency to the extent that spontaneous language use plays a central role in the teaching–learning process. Yet communicative language teaching is seen by many as a fashion that has had its day, and those who use the term ‘postcommunicative’ presumably judge that it was an experiment that failed. The concept of learner autonomy entered the language teaching debate at the end of the 1970s, only a few years after the communicative revolution had been launched. Thanks partly to the variety of contexts in which it was pursued, it quickly assumed a variety of meanings and emphases, at the same time becoming a common curriculum goal; and, like the communicative approach, it did not escape dilution. For many language teachers these days ‘communicative’ simply means making sure that the target language is heard in the classroom; it doesn’t necessarily imply that learners use the language spontaneously to communicate their own meanings. Similarly, learner autonomy is often understood to entail nothing more than allowing learners choice – not necessarily an open choice, but the opportunity to select from two or three alternatives offered by the teacher. But whereas the armies of the communicative revolution seem to have dispersed, the much smaller forces that have explored and promoted learner autonomy in theory and practice remain strong, determined and surprisingly coherent. There are no doubt a number of reasons why this should be so, but one seems to me particularly significant. The communicative revolution appeared to move straightforwardly from theory to practice; concern with learner autonomy on the other hand has mostly shuttled back and forth between practice and theory. Communicative theorists were by no means all practitioners; by contrast, learner autonomy theory has mostly been developed by practitioners of one kind or another – teachers working in classrooms, teacher educators, those responsible for designing and evaluating self-access language learning systems, educational researchers charged with implementing innovation. Theoretical perspectives on learner autonomy have thus been continually tested and refined as they have been brought up against the hard realities of language learning and language teaching.



2 Introduction

This tendency is present in the contributions to this book, all of which focus on a practical issue in a particular context, and it explains why the first word in the title of the book is ‘reconstructing’ rather than simply ‘constructing’. By applying our present understanding of learner autonomy to the practical challenges of specific educational contexts, we make it possible to enlarge and sometimes modify that understanding. In this way we gradually refine (or reconstruct) our theory even as we refine (or reconstruct) our pedagogical practice. My purpose in what follows is to illustrate this back-and-forthness between practice and theory with reference to my own experience over almost thirty years in three quite distinct domains: self-access language learning, classroom teaching, and a European project designed to promote learner autonomy on a continental scale. In doing so, I shall anticipate some of the dominant themes in the rest of the book: the role of interaction and interdependence in the empowerment of learners (and teachers); the need to negotiate and construct learner autonomy afresh in each new programme of learning; the unique individuality of each learning (and teaching) process; the ultimate goal of discovering and validating personal authenticity.

Self-access language learning: an early experiment In 1978 my university opened a new Arts and Social Sciences Building that was equipped with the latest language laboratory facilities. For about fifteen years regular language laboratory classes had been part of the language teaching provided by the modern language departments. These classes were set to continue, but the university also expected that the new installations would be exploited in new ways. It was my responsibility to meet this expectation. I was already familiar with the concept of the self-instructional language laboratory, so an obvious course of action was to establish a large library of audio cassettes – listening materials, pronunciation practice, structure drills – and advertise its availability to the student population at large. I fondly imagined that students of languages, and perhaps of other subjects too, would gratefully crowd our facilities; but of course they didn’t. I was neither the first nor the last to discover that the capacity for self-directed learning is not widespread among university students. Wondering how to address this problem, I was quickly led to the concept of learner autonomy via the short report that Henri Holec had just written for the Council of Europe (Holec, 1981). Holec’s report offers a definition of learner autonomy that remains foundational: ‘the ability to take charge of one’s own learning’ (Holec,



David Little 3

1981: 3). Inspired by contemporary theories in adult education, this definition coincides with the perceived need to ‘develop the individual’s freedom by developing those abilities which will enable him to act more responsibly in running the affairs of the society in which he lives’ (Holec, 1981: 1). According to this view adult education ‘becomes an instrument for arousing an increasing sense of awareness and liberation in man, and, in some cases, an instrument for changing the environment itself. From the idea of man “product of his society”, one moves to the idea of man “producer of his society” ’ (Janne, 1977: 15; Holec, 1981: 3). In other words, as presented by Holec, the concept of learner autonomy has political roots and political implications. But it also has implications for the way in which learning takes place and the kind of knowledge that is acquired. If the learner himself determines the objectives and content of learning, ‘objective, universal knowledge is … replaced by subjective, individual knowledge’: ‘the learner is no longer faced with an “independent” reality that escapes him, to which he cannot but give way, but with a reality which he himself constructs and dominates’ (Holec, 1981: 21). Note that Holec’s use of the verb ‘construct’ refers to explicit rather than implicit processes, learner initiative and control rather than the unconscious and involuntary workings of cognition. Yet his formulation invites us to ask whether there may be a link between learner autonomy and constructivist theories of learning. In the conclusion to his report, Holec envisaged two kinds of future educational situation. One would be self-directed and would presuppose learner autonomy. It would provide ‘a large and assorted body of informants of all kinds, both human and technical, and … a technological infrastructure capable of temporarily making up for deficiencies in individual technological means’ (Holec, 1981: 25). The other situation would be ‘that of learners who are not yet autonomous but are involved in the process of acquiring the ability to assume responsibility for their learning’ (Holec, 1981: 25). These situations are reflected in the two dominant functions of self-access language learning centres, to provide self-instructional courses and to support traditional teacher-led programmes. I encouraged our language departments to exploit our new language laboratories in the latter way, and secured a research grant that enabled me to set up a small-scale experiment in self-instructional language learning modelled on the procedures developed by CRAPEL (Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues, Université de Nancy II) and described in Holec’s report (Holec, 1981: 30–2). Our



4 Introduction

self-instructional programme in German for students of engineering ran from 1982 to 1984. The programme was extra-curricular and participation was voluntary. The core learning materials were the various components of the BBC German Kit (Sprankling 1979), a self-instructional package in print and audio derived from the BBC’s television and radio course Kontakte. In addition, we provided pedagogical and authentic materials relevant to the different branches of engineering. Following CRAPEL’s example, we set up an advisory service designed to help students to determine their objectives, define contents and progressions, select methods and techniques, monitor progress, and evaluate outcomes (cf. Holec, 1981: 3). We also organized occasional meetings between our students and native speakers of German (mostly visiting students from German universities). Of the 106 students who originally enrolled, nine completed the two-year programme; and in the final assessment all of them showed that they had learned a lot of German and were able to put it to some communicative use (Little and Grant, 1984, 1986). But several large questions remained at least partly unanswered. To what extent had our engineering students become autonomous learners in Holec’s sense, and not merely assiduous users of the BBC German Kit and the other pedagogical materials we made available to them? Had they shown themselves able to ‘construct and control’ their own knowledge? Were their regular sessions with the adviser really any different from individual tutorials? And given the ineluctably dialogic nature of oral communication, to what extent is it possible to develop spontaneous oral proficiency by working on one’s own in a language laboratory? At this point our research funding ran out. Fortunately my next encounter with learner autonomy quickly began to suggest answers to my questions.

Learner autonomy in the language classroom: from practice to theory At the end of the 1970s a small group of second and third-level language teachers began to meet regularly under the auspices of Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann (Linguistics Institute of Ireland) in order to discuss the implications of the communicative approach for language teaching in Ireland. Using the categories of the Council of Europe’s Threshold Level (van Ek, 1975), we drafted an outline syllabus for second-level schools and set about developing communicative learning materials. In 1983 we published Salut!, a French course for the first



David Little 5

three years of secondary schooling. Such was its commercial success that over the next few years we could afford to invite language teaching specialists from many different countries to come to Dublin and share their experience and expertise with our project group. In 1984 Leni Dam spent a day telling us how she developed learner autonomy in her English classes in a middle school not far from Copenhagen. She showed us learner journals, classroom posters, and a video of her learners working together in small groups. Three things made an immediate impression: her learners’ fluency in English, the fact that they chose rather traditional learning activities, and the collaborative dynamic of the classroom. By Dam’s account (see also Dam, 1995) her learners were willing to learn because she made them share responsibility for setting targets, selecting activities and materials, and evaluating outcomes. Their communicative proficiency developed spontaneously because from the first she required them to use English as the medium of their learning, including the reflective processes of target setting and evaluation. In this way the content of their learning was fully implicated in the development of their autonomy, the scope of which was partly determined by what they could do in English. The fact that they chose traditional-seeming activities (especially translation, which was under a dark cloud in the 1980s) clearly didn’t matter as long as they engaged with them fully – and communicatively. The powerful collaborative ethos of Dam’s classroom showed that learner autonomy was more than a capacity for individual self-instruction: each learner’s developing ability to take charge of her own learning enabled her to contribute more effectively to the collective learning effort of the project group or class. Dam drew much of her inspiration from Douglas Barnes’s seminal book From Communication to Curriculum (1976), which distinguishes between ‘school knowledge’ and ‘action knowledge’ (the knowledge we acquire informally and often unconsciously by virtue of being alive and involved in our environment). For Barnes the key educational challenge was to find ways of bringing learners’ action knowledge into fruitful interaction with school knowledge, and his response was based on a constructivist understanding of learning derived from the work of Piaget and Bruner and George Kelly’s (1963) psychology of personal constructs (Barnes, 1976: 22–4). As we have seen, for Holec knowledge is constructed by the learner’s conscious initiatives (1981: 21). For Barnes and his mentors on the other hand, the notion of knowledge construction refers not to the learner’s conscious intentions and initiatives but to largely unconscious cognitive processes. According to this



6 Introduction

view, all learning is a matter of ‘creative construction’, necessarily shaped and constrained by what the learner already knows. From this it follows that all learning is necessarily autonomous in the sense that it is ultimately proof against external intervention and control, and pedagogy’s task is to find a classroom dynamic that responds appropriately to this fact. Holec’s definition of learner autonomy remains valid, but its justification now rests on the argument that when learners take charge of their own learning they develop a motivational and metacognitive orientation that facilitates the (internal, unconscious) construction of knowledge. If we promote learner autonomy simply as a way of organizing learning, it becomes a ‘method’ that can be abandoned if it is judged not to work; we thus expose it to the fate that befell communicative language teaching. But if we believe in learner autonomy because it represents the very essence of good (efficient and effective) learning, we have no alternative but to persist in our search for teaching approaches that enable learners to develop the capacity to assume responsibility for their own learning, even as they develop proficiency in their target language. These considerations gradually led me to the conclusion that success in language teaching is governed by three principles (Little, 1999, 2001a). The principle of learner involvement entails that learners are brought to engage with their learning and take responsibility for key decisions; the principle of learner reflection entails that they are taught to think critically about the process and content of their learning; and the principle of appropriate target language use entails that the target language is the chief medium of teaching and learning – because language use plays a key role in language learning, autonomy in language learning and autonomy in language use are two sides of the same coin, the scope of each constraining the other. This view had two consequences. First, it meant that self-access and distance language learning based entirely on the use of technology could not promise a great deal until the advent of computer-mediated communication made it possible to build learning programmes on new forms of reciprocal communication. This happened, of course, with the advent of e-mail and the Internet (see, for example, Little and Brammerts, 1996; Schwienhorst, 1998; Little, 2001b; O’Rourke, 2002) and with the development of more powerfully interactive systems (Toogood and Pemberton, this volume). Secondly, it required an approach to teacher education that would give intending teachers the experience of being an autonomous learner and enable them to apply the same reflective processes to their teaching as autonomous learners apply to their learn-



David Little 7

ing (Little, 1995). There have been some highly encouraging initiatives in this domain, notably by Flavia Vieira (1999a, this volume) and Leni Dam (2003). But still the question remains, shall we ever be able to develop learner and teacher autonomy as mass phenomena? Recent work by the Council of Europe suggests that a positive answer to this question may not be entirely out of the question.

The European Language Portfolio: learner autonomy on a continental scale? The European Language Portfolio (ELP) has three obligatory components: a language passport, a language biography, and a dossier. The language passport summarizes the owner’s linguistic identity and her experience of learning and using L2s; it also allows her periodically to record her self-assessment of overall L2 proficiency. The language biography accompanies 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 on learning styles, strategies and intercultural experience. Sometimes this reflection is a matter of filling in a form or recording one’s thoughts under a series of headings; sometimes it is entirely open. The dossier is where the owner collects evidence of her L2 proficiency and intercultural experience; it may also be used to store work in progress. Instead of developing a single version of the ELP, the Council of Europe has defined its key features in a series of Principles and Guidelines (Council of Europe, 2000a; version with explanatory notes, Council of Europe, 2004, <www.coe.int/portfolio>) and established a Validation Committee to accredit ELPs that conform to the Principles and Guidelines (for further information on the ELP, see Little, 2002). The Council of Europe intends that the ELP should serve complementary pedagogical and reporting functions. On the one hand, it is designed to make the language learning process more transparent to learners and to foster the development of learner autonomy; on the other hand, it cumulatively provides concrete evidence of the owner’s L2 proficiency and intercultural experience. Both functions make use of the common proficiency levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe, 2001; for more information, see Little, 2006). The so-called self-assessment grid (Council of Europe, 2001: 26–7) provides the overall scale against which communicative proficiency is recorded in the language passport, while the



8 Introduction

CEFR’s illustrative scales yield checklists of ‘I can’ descriptors that support goal setting and self-assessment in the language biography. Since 1999 I have been involved in the design and implementation of five ELPs, for secondary language learners, university students, learners of English as a second language in Irish primary and post-primary schools, and adult refugees learning the language of their host community. In each case the ELP clearly supports the development of learner autonomy when it is assigned a central role in the teaching–learning process (see, for example, Ushioda and Ridley, 2002; Little and Lazenby Simpson, 2004a, 2004b; Sisamakis, 2006; Little, 2007). This is hardly surprising, given that the ELP is explicitly designed to facilitate the planning, monitoring and evaluation of learning. Less expected perhaps is the impact the ELP can have on teachers, especially in settings where it is central to the teaching–learning process. One such setting is Integrate Ireland Language and Training (IILT; <www.iilt.ie>), which is funded by the Irish government to provide intensive English language courses for adults with refugee status. The development of learner autonomy is one of IILT’s key goals, for three reasons. First, in addition to attending classes for twenty hours per week, we require our students to do ten hours of self-access learning and homework; secondly, we want to give them language learning skills that they can apply to the continuing development of their English after they leave IILT; and thirdly, we believe that autonomous learners are motivated, focused and successful learners. Accordingly all IILT’s courses are based on an analysis of students’ communicative needs, where ‘communicative’ includes the social, cultural and political dimensions and implications of language use. As individual needs are negotiated and clarified, group needs begin to emerge. Some of these are relevant to the class as a whole – for example, all students seeking employment need to know how to interpret their pay slip; while others are more satisfactorily dealt with by dividing the class into sub-groups – for example, not all students need to focus on the same domain of employment. This approach means that there can be no pre-established learning goals, no single set of learning materials (certainly no textbooks), and no fixed pedagogical procedures. Instead, students and teachers use the Milestone ELP (<www.eu-milestone.de>) as their basic resource, to identify learning targets, guide the choice of learning materials and activities, reflect on language learning and language use, and capture learning progress. Because each learner’s ELP provides a detailed record of his or her learning progress, teachers have been challenged to think about their teaching in relation to individual



David Little 9

learning processes and trajectories; and because we have created a framework in which teachers are expected to exchange ideas and materials and help one another to solve problems of teaching and learning, the ELP has also turned out to be a significant catalyst in the development of teacher autonomy as a matter of institutional culture (for more detailed discussion and examples, see Little, 2007).

Reconstructing autonomy Over the past thirty years my understanding of learner autonomy as a theoretical construct has developed and (I hope) matured under the impact of practical experience and reflection on that experience. To begin with, I assumed that learner autonomy was a synonym for self-instruction, but a two-year experiment left major questions unanswered. Reflection on the success of Leni Dam’s learners quickly led me to the view that learner autonomy is a great deal more than selfinstruction. It also suggested that the inescapably dialogic nature of language and learning demands a theory of autonomy that includes teachers as well as learners and stimulates new approaches to teacher development. In the last few years, with the introduction of the ELP on a large scale, we have acquired a tool that has shown itself to be capable of supporting the development of learner but also teacher autonomy on a large scale (by the summer of 2006 some 80 models had been validated for use in 25 countries and four international networks; for details visit <www.coe.int/portfolio>). This is not to say, of course, that wherever we find the ELP we also find autonomous learners and teachers. On the contrary, it is all too likely that unless the introduction of the ELP is appropriately embedded, it will sink without trace. Nevertheless, its very existence has brought the idea of learner autonomy into the European mainstream with a vengeance, while at the same time arousing a great deal of interest and a certain amount of imitation outside Europe. It is thus not entirely fanciful to see the ELP as a stimulus to further practitioner-driven reconstruction of autonomy in language education. The parts of this book draw us into the three areas of practice and research on which the successful implementation of learner autonomy depends – learner and teacher development, classroom practice, and the development of self-access materials and systems; and they do so with inspiring variety and richness. Every contribution assumes Holec’s original definition of learner autonomy, ‘the ability to take charge of one’s own learning’. At the same time, in one way or another, every



10 Introduction

contribution acknowledges two further fundamentals: the essential role played by interactive processes in the development of learner autonomy, and the fact that at every turn the pursuit of autonomy in language learning may carry us beyond the immediate purpose and context of learning. This is a measure of the degree of unity in diversity that research in autonomy in language education has achieved; and it is perhaps all the more remarkable given the extent of its international reach. For one whose first encounter with learner autonomy occurred in relation to self-access learning, it is oddly comforting to be reminded (in the contributions by Akaranithi and Panlay; Darasawang, Singhasiri and Keyuravong; Young, Hafner and Fisher; Toogood and Pemberton) that self-access systems in Asia face the same challenges now as self-access systems in Europe did thirty years ago. But it is also comforting to recognize the amount of progress that has been made in the intervening years. Since it was first introduced to the world of language learning and teaching, the concept of learner autonomy has been associated with Western democratic traditions. This connection is alive and well in Maria Alfredo Moreira’s chapter: ‘democratic transformation in the classroom is achieved through a shared struggle to promote students’ autonomy as learners, and, in the process, increase the democratic nature of the teaching and learning process’. Views of this kind have sometimes provoked the argument that learner autonomy is inappropriate to non-Western educational systems. But to this there have always been two responses: first, learner autonomy is appropriate to any educational system that seeks to promote critical thinking and reflective learning (witness the chapters by Hugh Nicoll and Huijuan Shao and Zongjie Wu); and secondly, it is a matter of self-interest for societies to develop the learning skills of their citizens – as Akara Akaranithi and Suriyan Panlay remind us in their chapter, ‘to keep up, we cannot wait for someone to tell us what to do’. I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that work on learner autonomy has been characterized by a shuttling back and forth between practice and theory. If this process is to continue, the reconstructions offered here should sow the seeds of further reconstructions. I conclude by mentioning three recurrent features of this book that seem to me to herald important work in the future. The first has to do with self-assessment. In the literature on learner autonomy there is a general assumption that evaluation is the pivot on which learner autonomy turns (Dam, 1995: 49). In one form or another, this assumption is present in every chapter, though only one (by Teija Natri) is



David Little 11

explicitly concerned with self-assessment. The constraints imposed by tests and examinations have long been recognized as one of the greatest systemic obstacles to the successful pursuit of language learner autonomy on a large scale. The ELP offers one way of connecting selfassessment to tests and examinations, via the common proficiency levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001). No doubt non-European contexts like those represented in this book need to find their own way of moving towards an assessment culture that explicitly values learner autonomy by accommodating self-assessment and other learner evidence alongside the results of assessment by teachers and exam boards. The second recurring feature is the use that several chapters (for example, those by Leena Karlsson and Felicity Kjisik; Rebecca Oxford, Meng Yaru, Zhou Yalun, Sung Jiyeun and Rashi Jain; Mike Nix) make of autobiographical narrative as a way of tapping into individual learners’ language learning experience as it intersects with their belief systems and self-concepts. This technique is an essential antidote to the stereotyping tendency (‘the learner’) that so much theory is prone to, including learner autonomy theory. But when learner narratives are spoken or written in the target language, we are reminded of the powerful contribution that reflective narrative can make to language learning. Research that explores such narratives should help us to understand how to help learners to derive maximum learning benefit from them. The third recurring feature has to do with the development of autonomous teachers as a precondition for the development of autonomous learners. As Flávia Vieira reminds us, if we seek merely to transmit our theoretical perspectives to teachers we betray our constructivist principles; our duty is rather to empower teachers to develop and enact their own theories. The experience reported by Peter Brown, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda warns us that this is not necessarily a straightforward and trouble-free process; on the other hand, Judith Kennedy and Annamaria Pinter show that teacher autonomy can arise spontaneously from the exploratory processes of collaborative project work. But the message from all three chapters is clear: like every other aspect of autonomy in language education treated in this book, teacher development depends on a never-ending process of reconstruction as theory is adapted to context, tested in practice, refined, and reconstructed through interaction with the wider language learning and teaching community.



12 Introduction

Part One Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Teacher and Learner Education





Teacher Development Through Inquiry: Getting Started Flávia Vieira

Putting professional experience centre-stage In education, we often confuse what is possible with what is pedagogically desirable. … Pedagogical theory has to be theory of the unique, of the particular case. (van Manen, 1990: 150) Educational theories can offer us images of the possible, but only educational experience can tell us what is desirable in a particular educational setting. I once wrote that ‘I have learned to be wary of educational discourses that are built on the margin of teachers’ and students’ experience, just as I have learned to trust discourses that are built upon the exploration and validation of ideals through collaborative inquiry with teachers, with reference to their working contexts’ (Vieira, 2003: 236). Although opportunities for such collaboration do not always exist, creating them is part of the teacher educator’s job. This chapter illustrates such an attempt in the context of postgraduate teacher education, where teacher educators often act as expert researchers who tell teachers what they should know, think and do, rather than promote their professional autonomy and empower them to become agents of pedagogical inquiry and innovation. In my experience of postgraduate teacher education, I have found that my role is not so much to convince teachers of the value of research for educational practice (they usually believe in it, sometimes too much), but rather to help them look at conventional teacher-proof research critically, and find their own voice as ‘pedagogical theorists of the unique’ by reflecting globally upon local action and acting locally upon global reflection. By ‘global reflection’ I mean reflection that is 15



2

value-laden and explicitly interrogates the purpose of school education. In my view, the idea(l) of pedagogy for autonomy provides a defensible frame of reference to instigate such reflection, especially because it entails a close relationship between teacher and learner empowerment, within a vision of school education as transformation. Although I have always been a strong advocate of school-based inquiry as a crucial step for bridging the current gap between research and teaching in the field of learner autonomy, I have to admit that my practice as a teacher educator often falls short of my espoused theories. Equally, my espoused theories sometimes lack support in experience and become somehow unreasonable. The project reported here can be seen as an example of my struggle for professional coherence and reasonability by putting professional experience centre-stage – that is, by making it the core of teacher learning rather than an occasional component of it. This shift of focus brought about changes in my role and the role of the 13 in-service EFL secondary school teachers who enrolled in the postgraduate course where the project was developed: a 60-hour course on Pedagogical Supervision in ELT that I taught in 2002–03 during the second semester, as part of a Masters Degree programme run by the Department of Methodologies of Education at my university.1 I hoped to democratize the process whereby professional knowledge is constructed, by taking the paradoxical position of exercising power to empower – that is, by creating conditions that favoured teacher autonomy. The teachers were also expected to take the same position towards their own students by exploring a pedagogy for autonomy. We defined this as any contextsensitive approach that ‘tries to facilitate an approximation of the learner to the learning process and content, in order to create conditions which increase motivation to learn, interdependent relationships, discourse power, ability to learn and to manage learning, and a critical attitude towards teaching and learning’ (Vieira, 1997a: 59). The strategy I proposed to the teachers was classroom-based inquiry through small-scale, self-determined action research experiments aimed at increasing learner autonomy, documented in individual reflective portfolios. We had been discussing the relation between reflective teaching and learner autonomy in the preceding semester, in an EFL Teaching Methodology course, and the teachers had expressed their willingness to experiment with pedagogy for autonomy. My proposal opened up that possibility and was enthusiastically accepted by the group. However, none of us was clear about how to put it into practice, how it would unfold, and where it would lead us. In van Manen’s terms, we had to find our way to build desirable experiences.



16 Teacher Development Through Inquiry: Getting Started

Writing a teaching journal was the strategy I used to document our journey, monitor its progress, enhance self-examination and theorize from experience. As for our 15 four-hour weekly sessions, they were planned according to needs and interests that emerged from school-based inquiry and became what Nunan and Lamb (2001) call ‘a low-structured environment’, where collaborative problem-solving and decision-making were constant. In order to keep track of the sessions, a document for retrospective analysis was jointly designed – ‘Travelling through the lesson’. Each week, two teachers identified the previous session’s goals, contents, strategies, outcomes, reflective principles and critical issues. My journal and the teachers’ portfolios were the data sources that I used to evaluate the approach, that is, to illuminate the value of lived experience as participants interpreted it. In previous reports of the project, three major interrelated outcomes had emerged from such evaluation: (inter)personal empowerment, pedagogical innovation towards greater learner autonomy, and the democratization of the construction of knowledge within the course (Vieira et al., 2004; Vieira, 2005, 2006).2 However, I have never focused on the issue I have chosen to deal with in this chapter: how we got started.

Initiating inquiry: uncertainty, decision-making and empowerment On getting started Having already undertaken a global evaluation of the project helped me put things in perspective and understand the decisive role of initial stages, when everything seemed quite uncertain. Actually, this is the image we get from the teachers’ final reflections on how teacher development within the course began:3 To make this desired journey, I hit the road, did not think of anything else, what would become of me, departed without knowing whether I would be able to arrive at the chosen destiny, left everything behind and went far away, where I found everything so different, but at the same time somehow familiar, where I found different ways to see life, never thought before. (Portfolio, IC) One day the opportunity came up to travel around the world of discovery. No one knew what to visit, or what transportation to use, there was just a restless little star pushing me into the unknown. I was not alone. We were 13. (Portfolio, CL)



Flávia Vieira 17

When planning this chapter, I suddenly found myself reflecting on the fact that reports on teacher education experiments (including my own) usually fail to report on how stories of teacher development begin, thus perhaps silencing issues related to how innovation brings about uncertainty and how uncertainty is coped with. Why this is so, I do not know. Does it have to do with preferred modes of inquiry and dissemination in academic settings? Are we still too conditioned by instrumental rationality that favours effectivenessoriented, outcome-driven reasoning? Do we lack the opportunity to examine our experience at different times and from different angles? Contributing this chapter gave me an opportunity to ‘re-search’ my experience for new insights about how uncertainty regarding teacher inquiry determined initial decision-making for course development, and how decisions affected teacher empowerment. In going through the initial steps of the project, I hope to clarify the role of teacher educators and teachers as co-constructors of desirable experiences. Specifically, I will focus on how the reflective portfolio was conceptualized and how school inquiry was initiated. Conceptualizing the reflective portfolio: deciding to let teachers decide One of the tenets of reflective teacher education is teacher participation in curriculum choices. When I first proposed the project to the teachers in the first session of the second semester, I felt I had already made too many decisions for them, although these integrated their concerns for pedagogical innovation and were open to discussion. One of those decisions was to propose the construction of a reflective portfolio, which seemed to be an appropriate tool for instigating and documenting professional reflection on/for action: reflective writing has a particular power to distance ourselves from lived experience and reunite us with it, ‘drawing us more closely to living relations and situations of the lifeworld, turning thought to more tactful praxis, and concretizing and subjectifying our deepened understanding in practical action’ (van Manen, 1990: 129). I was very unsure about what the portfolios should look like and I did not want to impose a structure, although I sensed that some structure would give us a sense of direction. So I had made one more decision: to let the teachers decide on an overall plan for portfolio development, hoping that this would set a democratic basis for building a framework of reference for action and reflection.




The plan was designed in the second session, which was conducted independently by the teachers. They were supposed to make a proposal (supported by home readings on teaching portfolios) that included the portfolio aims, structure, quality criteria, assessment procedures, and uses. They sent their joint proposal to me by e-mail, and we discussed it in the session that followed. I was surprised with the high quality of their work and told them so. Only minor changes were made. I could tell they were proud, but also surprised with how they had managed to accomplish what seemed to be a complex task, without my assistance. The two teachers who reconstructed that session wrote the following notes: Interesting and lively debate. Although the teacher was not present, we worked in a very committed and fruitful way. Above all, we strengthened our friendship and learned a lot about portfolios and the potential value of a course portfolio. Negotiation and autonomy were fully accomplished: the students made decisions that are crucial for course development. (Travelling through the lesson, AM and LV, 27 February 2003) One of the teachers, AG, talked to me about this experience during the break, and we later discussed it in class: ‘I think this way of working is contagious!’ She [AG] meant my/our way of working [which they knew quite well from the preceding semester] and contrasted this situation with what happens in school meetings, where the lack of interest and the rush to finish are constant. ‘I think it has to do with leadership’, she said. I just smiled. I knew what she meant. Back in class … I decided to ask the group about the factors that had motivated them to participate in the previous session, where they had been preparing their proposal for the portfolio. I started listing their answers on the blackboard: ‘responsibility’, ‘decision-making’, ‘time management’, ‘task management’, ‘willingness to work in a group’, ‘need to share (different readings)’, ‘challenge’, ‘support to task development’ … We reflected a little about these motivating factors and how they are often absent from lessons. (Journal, 6 March 2003) This episode illustrates how opportunities for choice can instigate motivational involvement and personal and collective commitment. AG’s remark on leadership also points out the paradoxical role of the teacher educator as the one who can decide that teachers can decide. However, teacher-led decision-making does not necessarily lead to an



Flávia Vieira 19


1. Developing a critical mind

3. Stimulating reflection on one’s professional development 4. Promoting the personal construction of knowledge 5. Founding the processes of reflection for/in/on action 6. Documenting professional development processes 7. Fostering self-regulation 8. Valuing the uniqueness of professional development paths Figure 2.1

Portfolio aims

empowering experience. This may seem rather obvious, but it alerts us to the ideological, value-laden nature of choice. The teachers’ choices in their plan for portfolio development were empowering because they were informed by a view of teacher development which emphasizes (self-)awareness, criticality, self-knowledge, collaboration, and actionorientedness. The portfolio aims (see Figure 2.1) and quality criteria (see Figure 2.2) they proposed show that they espoused a constructivist perspective on teacher inquiry which has emancipatory potential. This perspective was clearly influenced by our previous work, in the first semester, about the value of reflective teaching and teacher education. To a large extent then, the teachers’ choices reflected the ideological underpinnings of my own convictions as a teacher educator. Whether this is primarily a sign of liberation or subjugation is hard to tell, and here lies one of the most crucial dilemmas of reflective teacher education: how can teacher educators foster a democratic learning environment and still be in charge of it? In retrospect, one thing seems to be certain: the fact that teachers had the opportunity to decide in advance what direction they would follow enhanced their commitment to subsequent classroom inquiry. Having agreed on an initial blueprint for action and reflection proved to be a crucial step towards an intersubjective understanding of what we were trying to accomplish, why and for



2. Developing collaboration, dialogue and reflection

Flávia Vieira 21

Objectives Contextualization (justification and context-appropriateness), Clarity,

personal theories and practices)

Themes, strategies and materials Consistency with objectives, Situational relevance, Innovation/originality/newness, Articulation between theory and practice,

Inquiry-orientedness (understanding and transforming personal theories and practices)

Information collected from experiments Diversification of sources and methods

Written reflections for/on action Describing action taken, Exploring justifications for and implications of action, Analysing data to monitor and evaluate action, Identifying and analysing constraints and dilemmas, Presenting alternative ideas/action, Identifying professional gains Figure 2.2

Quality criteria of pedagogical experiments

what purposes. This becomes clear in the teachers’ final evaluations of the role of portfolios for professional empowerment: Constructing this portfolio of experiments was a way of learning to teach that will never be forgotten. We have articulated our teaching with research practices that are crucial for conscious and reflective inquiry. … We have learnt to observe our actions so as to improve and transform our methods and approaches. We have learnt to look at our students as precious, and therefore irreplaceable, players in the teaching/learning process. Our efforts to invest in our own development benefited the students. Autonomous and inquiring teachers generate autonomous and inquiring students. (Portfolio, CL)



Feasibility, Inquiry -orientedness (understanding and transforming

By the end of the semester, we shared a language to talk about pedagogical inquiry towards learner autonomy and were aware of the fact that individual learning paths had been constructed within a common ethical and conceptual framework. In a real sense, we had grown as a learning community, which also meant that my authoritative role had not prevented the teachers from participating in the definition of what counted as legitimate processes of constructing professional knowledge within the course. Conceptualizing the portfolio was the first major practical step towards defining those processes. Initiating classroom inquiry was the second one. However, as we will see, initiating inquiry was far from being a self-determined experience. Initiating classroom inquiry: deciding not to let teachers decide In order to engage in pedagogical inquiry, teachers were expected to identify personal concerns related to learner autonomy and explore self-determined action plans in the classroom. This caused a general state of enthusiastic anxiety. Although they espoused learner-centred principles and were willing to explore them in practice, they did not know where to start. Doubts also emerged about the scope of inquiry, the length of experiments, and the relation to establish between them. I had no definite answers to the questions raised. Uncertainty reigned. This situation led me to a decision that seemed to contradict teacher autonomy – not to let teachers decide what to do in their first experiment. Going through the steps of planning and evaluating a collective experiment together might give us opportunities to deal with doubts and insecurities in a supportive environment, laying the ground for more autonomous decision-making. We needed to undertake an experiment that was both simple and learner-centred, and the best idea I could think of at the time was ‘asking one question to one class’. As Kincheloe (2003) points out, listening to the students’ voices enhances both responsive teaching and self-directed learning. I felt it might help teachers reflect upon themselves on the basis of students’ perspectives and possibly find starting points for further inquiry. The group accepted my proposal gladly. After filling in a selfreflective questionnaire on self-perceptions of teaching and learning (Mason, 2002: 257–9),4 they moved to small group discussion of answers so as to formulate genuine questions to their students about the students’ own perceptions (one/two questions per group). We thoroughly discussed the resulting set of questions in terms of purpose, clarity, expected answers, usefulness of information collected, and assumptions behind their formulation.




Flávia Vieira 23

Trying to uncover the assumptions behind the formulation of questions was a revealing experience in terms of what learner-centred inquiry entails. Let us look at two examples I recorded in my journal:

Question: What do you like best about my lessons? (later changed to Think about our lessons so far. What makes you feel good/bad in our lessons?) The critical issue was the possessive ‘my’. Two major comments were made by some teachers: • Will it be ethically correct to focus the question on the teacher? • Doesn’t ‘my’ indicate a controlling view of the teacher’s role? • Doesn’t that contradict the idea of involving the students in pedagogical reflection? … We ended up with: ‘Think about our lessons so far. What makes you feel good/bad in our lessons?’ This way we avoided a primary focus on the teacher, and we also reinforced the personal and affective dimension of learning. (Journal, 23 February 2003) Example 2 Question: If you were Harry Potter and had magic powers, what would you change about me and the lessons? (This question was kept after discussion, but an alternative one was formulated: If you were the English teacher, what would you change in our lessons?) Assumption – only in imagination can one change something: learner power is a fantasy. The main argument presented by the two teachers who proposed this question had to do with motivating younger students, by appealing to their imagination with reference to a character they love. However, they acknowledged the assumption behind it and accepted an alternative formulation suggested by me: If you were the English teacher, what would you change in our lessons? … We kept both questions and the teachers can choose one of them. And we discussed their implications: when we ask what should be changed, we must be willing to make changes. Action-orientedness implies teacher commitment and counteracts the idea of ‘learner power as fantasy’ which is implicit in the first question. (Journal, 23 February 2003)



Example 1

Through discussing the questions, we raised our awareness of the fact that inquiry is about uncovering personal assumptions of the world, as well as understanding how those assumptions constrain the way we render the world problematic. This is a fundamental issue in all interpretative research. We realized that an inquisitive stance involves (self-)doubt as a necessary condition to develop critical awareness of oneself and others, and that this is directly contrary to the values conveyed by traditional schooling: … Error and doubt do not have merit in school life. Throughout the years we became used to the idea of ‘perfection’ conveyed by our teachers, which we accepted passively and without argument. I now think that it is easy for us to understand how doubt can be much more enriching than certainty. (Portfolio, LD) After we reached consensus on which questions to ask, each teacher chose one of the following: • Think about one of the activities we did today. What did you learn? Did you like it? Why? • My English teacher influences/does not influence my learning when … • What makes you willing/not willing to participate in our lessons? • Think about our lessons so far. What makes you feel well/bad in our lessons? • If you were Harry Potter and had magic powers, what would you change about me and the lessons? • If you were the English teacher, what would you change in our lessons? Answers were collected by the teachers, analysed and presented to the students and among us. This created opportunities to explore further issues related to learner-centred inquiry. The most challenging task at this stage was data analysis. After some of the teachers made their presentation of results, I wrote in my journal: I had some difficulty to manage the task. Maybe because the teachers did not have any written reflection on the students’ answers? Maybe because I felt some insecurity on their part about what to do with those answers? Maybe because we are initiating this work and we are not sure about where we are heading to? Part of the challenge is about that: not knowing the way, making the way as we walk. (Journal, 6 March 2003)




Analysing learner data with a view to pedagogical change is not easy. What appeared to be simple was in fact complex and called for unanticipated strategies. Since I had given the teachers a few excerpts of my journal for free comments about how they were feeling about our course, I decided to analyse those comments and provide examples of how they might be assembled, categorized and interpreted. Discussing these authentic examples created an opportunity for reflection on course quality and proved to be useful for the teachers’ own analyses. They now seemed more confident and able to interpret and draw pedagogical implications from learner data. Having decided that pedagogical inquiry would start with a collective task which was largely managed by me did not seem to inhibit teacher empowerment. I would even say it enhanced it: In my case, I can say that it was from that first experiment that the following experiments emerged, on the basis of questions that came up, situations that were created, alternatives I tried to find for situations I was used to but now seemed unsustainable, constraints I felt, ideas that arose from reflections about what was observed and what was analysed … (Portfolio, CM) As teachers became more confident in themselves, I too became more confident in them and in myself as a facilitator of change. I might even say that having started pedagogical inquiry in a rather constrained format liberated us all in one way or another. We now felt more prepared to take risks and face uncertainty, and also more at ease to ask for and provide support to one another as needed. Frailties had been exposed, fears and difficulties had been shared, possible solutions to problems had emerged from joint reflection … but above all, I think we had managed to overcome ‘the-blank-sheet-of-paper-in-front-of-me’ syndrome and started to ‘write our narratives’ of professional development. After this first collective experiment, each teacher developed a maximum of four self-initiated small-scale action research experiments with lower/upper secondary EFL students, focusing on the following pedagogical concerns: • Raising students’ awareness of teaching and learning processes • Involving students in understanding and solving motivation and discipline problems • Improving the quality of students’ participation in class



Flávia Vieira 25


The process of inquiry involved a series of steps that can be roughly schematized as in Figure 2.3, although it was not as neat as the figure suggests.

Analysing experience & identifying a personal area of concern To what extent do I promote learner autonomy? What can I do to enhance learner autonomy?

Pro-active planning Designing an intervention to deal with the selected area of concern

Monitored intervention Acting and reflecting; collecting and analysing information through observation, field notes, self-reports, evaluation checklists, questionnaires, analysis of students’ work …

Evaluation and re-planning Evaluating the value and shortcomings of the intervention for professional growth and learner autonomy; designing a new intervention within the same area of concern or finding a new area of concern

Figure 2.3

Teacher inquiry

Teachers were free to inquire into whatever they found relevant, when and for how long they found most appropriate, using whatever materials and evaluation strategies they thought feasible, as long as inquiry was seen to enhance some aspect of learner autonomy and professional growth. This high-principled, low-structured approach came to favour empowerment in terms of self-examination, self-determination, tolerance of uncertainty, and willingness to change: Because this is a moment of change, and because inner reflections, whatever their subject, mirror a state that belongs to the moment, this text will express, I know, the ‘wild sea’ that is now my thinking about my practice. I am no longer who I used to be, I do not know who I am, I just know I want to go. Where to? I am not sure yet. How? I am not sure either. One thing is certain – I want to do better and I will try. (Portfolio, AM)



• Promoting cooperative learning among students • Enhancing students’ (self-)regulation abilities • Developing students’ ability to negotiate decisions and self-direct their own learning

Flávia Vieira 27

A final note on empowerment in pedagogical settings In pedagogical settings, empowerment is necessarily paradoxical – it is meant to liberate and it depends primarily on the teacher’s power: I thank to our guide for having offered us the opportunity to construct our path(s) by overcoming our fears, our passivity, our loneliness and … by speaking louder: ‘No one can hear you C. Speak louder!’ (Portfolio, CL) I particularly like C’s reference to ‘speaking louder’ as a metaphor for voice, which is clearly related to issues of authority in classroom settings: who decides what, on whose behalf? As Gore puts it, ‘The pedagogical relation of teacher to student is, at some fundamental level, one in which the teacher is able to exercise power in ways unavailable to students. Teaching remains embedded within a history of moral and cultural regulation’ (Gore, 2003: 344). However, teachers can use power on behalf of the students’ interests. This is illustrated in my own experience by the fact that I decided who should (not) take decisions regarding the course so that teachers might develop self-directed learning experiences. It is important to note, however, that my decisions were not emancipatory in themselves. What was empowering, both for myself and the teachers, was our common desire to change, our commitment to inquiry, and our concern for autonomy as a collective interest. Empowerment can thus be seen a relational phenomenon resulting from interpersonal responsiveness, rather than some good that an ‘empowered agent’ can do for a ‘disempowered other’: ‘When the agent of empowerment assumes to be already empowered, and so apart from those who are to be empowered, arrogance can underlie claims of “what we can do for you”’ (Gore, 2003: 338). Discourses of empowerment often present us with inspiring theories of the possible, envisaging teachers as critical researchers whose theoretical armoury allows them to become ‘rigorous scholars of power’ and look ‘behind the positivist curtain’, where ‘a fantastic intellectual journey’ into ‘exciting forms of consciousness’ awaits them. (Kincheloe, 2003: 187). I must say that neither I nor the teachers I have worked with all my life match this vision. However, our experience



Pedagogical inquiry can thus be pictured as a journey of discovery into one’s self, with no turning back. By predisposing us to continual selfdevelopment, it transforms our identity as educators.

seems to show that we do not need to fulfil a vision of professional empowerment: we need to construct it collaboratively, taking whatever opportunities for professional growth are available, scrutinizing their emancipatory potential from whatever perspectives we find relevant, on behalf of autonomy as a collective interest. Above all, we must feel that our experience is desirable in our local context, even when we are sitting within the four walls of a classroom: It is not just by the sea, feeling free, That the sun falls asleep and awakes us! In a classroom too, within four walls, Away from my sea, from my silence, With company, I could watch The sun’s farewell! And it was equally magnificent! (Portfolio, MS, final portrait of the course)

Notes 1. This is a two-year Masters Degree programme at the University of Minho, Portugal (one curricular year followed by one dissertation year) that aims at developing the pedagogical and research expertise of language teachers and teacher trainers. The programme is run two days a week (13 hours) for 15 weeks a year and includes five other courses which these teachers (all women) also attended while teaching in secondary schools. The fact that MA certificates allow teachers to progress in their careers and get higher salaries is an important motivating factor for them to enrol in these programmes. The project reported here was part of a larger project I was coordinating at the time (2002–04), with a focus on conducting case studies of pedagogical innovation at university through teacher research (see also Moreira, Chapter 5). This larger project was funded by the research centre at the Institute of Education and Psychology at the University (Vieira et al., 2004). 2. We also became more critically aware of the potential of narrative inquiry for accessing and analysing professional development processes. As a followup to the project, I have recently developed a pedagogy of cases in a similar context, centred around the analysis and production of professional narratives. Some of these teachers’ reports were used as the basis for pedagogical reflection. 3. All teacher quotations presented in this text were taken from the portfolios they wrote during the course. They gave me permission to quote from them in publications and in my future work with other teachers. I will also quote from my teaching journal. All quotations are translated from Portuguese. 4. This questionnaire – ‘Self-inventory’ – is aimed at stimulating personal reflection on professional experience, especially through analogies. It




includes questions such as ‘I see myself primarily as …’, ‘The people I serve (teach, train, work with, support, care for … ) are primarily …’, ‘My principle professional activity is like … (e.g. teaching mathematics is like … )’, ‘Being on the other end of my professional practice is like (e.g. learning mathematics is like … )’, and so on. I chose it for its potential to enhance self-reflection as a springboard for identifying personal doubts and concerns that might give rise to pedagogical questions.

Acknowledgements I will be forever grateful to all the teachers who participated in the project reported here, helping me explore and understand the emancipatory potential of pedagogical inquiry in postgraduate teacher education. I also thank my collaborative partner, Hugh, and the editors Andy and Steve, for their constructive support and insightful comments on initial drafts of this chapter, and for helping me prioritize ideas and get a better grasp of my pedagogical reasoning.



Flávia Vieira 29

The Role of Autobiography in Fostering Learning and Reflective Thinking Leena Karlsson and Felicity Kjisik

I discovered that I am ‘fit to learn’.

Background In 1994, a group of teachers at the Language Centre of Helsinki University, Finland, devised an experimental project in autonomous language learning. The purpose was to create a social learning environment in which learners could be actively engaged in their own process of learning. Learners would be able to consider their own needs and objectives, select the way they prefer to learn, plan their own programme, reflect on the process and act upon the results. The programme, which became known as ALMS1 (Autonomous Learning Modules), involves the transparent incorporation of the principles of autonomy through discussion and reflection, and a support system maintained throughout the learners’ programme. Since the beginning, about 200 students each year have chosen to take part in an ALMS module in order to gain the credits to fulfil their degree requirements. ALMS is just one of a wide range of English courses that students can choose from. In an ALMS module, the discussion and reflection begin in an initial group meeting of about 20 ALMS students. This is a compulsory sixhour session dedicated to learner awareness during which the students discuss their language learning history, their learning styles and strategies, and their personal motivation and needs. A week later they plan their programmes, form partnerships or groups and sign-up for a range of skills support groups. During the term they each attend three faceto-face/individual counselling sessions, carry out their programme and keep detailed learning logs in which they continue the process of reflection and self-evaluation. In their final counselling session at the 30



3

Leena Karlsson and Felicity Kjisik 31

The current project Over the last 12 years, teacher development and support in our changing role have been important issues in the ALMS project. We see action research as a way of understanding and developing the approach we had chosen. Like Vieira (1997b), we share two major professional beliefs: reflective teaching and learner autonomy. From the very beginning, we have engaged in collaborative action research as a way of understanding both theory and practice and becoming subjects of our own professional realities. We have approached the current project in the same way. In this project our main motivation has been our belief that counsellor experiences are interconnected with learner experiences and that our histories and theirs should converge. We feel it is important to genuinely acknowledge that counsellors have a part in shaping the students’ learning experiences in ALMS, and their stories as language learners on the whole. In our collaborative inquiry for this chapter, we wanted to look at the role of (auto)biography in fostering learning and reflective thinking. More specifically, we wanted to examine the results of including autobiographical insight in metacognitive reflection in the ALMS context. ALMS students write a reflection text between the opening sessions and their first individual counselling meeting. For some years this reflection has been in the form of a free-form text (with some guidelines), and recently some of the students have used a web-based interactive tool, Kaleidoscope.2 So, as part of our project, we have compared these two tools. We have chosen to report on our project in the form of a dialogue, a form of experiential narrative, between Leena and Felicity, in order to reflect our firm belief in research writing as a method of inquiry. We want to show how a bit of ALMS culture is created in the texts and also in our analysis and interpretation of these learner stories. In this chapter, we focus on: 1. Reflection as a context-sensitive process 2. The writing of the reflection texts as a chapter in the students’ learning autobiographies and how their writing echoes past voices and projects into the future 3. The place of written autobiographies in counselling



end of the term (approximately 14 weeks), their portfolio of work, logs and self-evaluation is discussed, and, if they have fulfilled their initially agreed plan and objectives, they are awarded their credits.

32 The Role of Autobiography in Fostering Learning and Reflective Thinking

In discussing these aspects, we hope to highlight the interpretative force of reflection. We start our discussion by pondering the contextsensitivity of the process. 1. Reflection as a context-sensitive process Leena: We started to ask our ALMS students to write the free-form reflection text because we had come to consider reflection as a process, in that it changes and develops in the very act of doing it. On the basis of earlier research (Karlsson, 2002), we thought that writing a reflective language-learning history would make them more aware of their background, its complexity and influence on their present learning. We worded our instructions3 to reflect our idea of the students as owners of their learning and learning documents, and we were keen to emphasize the value of experiential elements, autobiography and emotions in learning. This emphasis is an essential element of the ALMS module and, in particular, of the counselling. Writing the reflections helps students become sensitive to their own complex learner identity. Our students repeatedly report in their reflection texts that they have seldom thought about their learning approaches, beliefs or knowledge, or their learning histories. Many of them seem to move from anecdotal to analytical ways of looking at themselves and their experiences as they go through the ALMS programme. A good example of the process-like character of reflection and the influence of ALMS comes from Maria’s text: Maria: I think the idea of this programme is just now gradually opening up to me. I’m beginning to understand what kind of process this type of learning is. So it really means commitment to learn, and like finding new ways of learning. Perhaps they are something that already exists in my everyday life but now I’m seeing them as a possibility to improve my skills. I can actually be a very active learner, I think I’ve done it earlier also, but haven’t really thought of it much. Now I can become more active when I’m realizing this … Leena: Maria’s developing awareness has been instigated by the reflection activity itself and she is also aware of the effect on her future learning. Like Maria, many students come to realize the significance



4. Reflection and reflexivity as integral parts of learning, counselling and research writing.

of the past, present and future aspects of learner experiences when they reflect by writing. Felicity, as a way of eliciting reflection, the online tool Kaleidoscope gives more explicit guidance and models, doesn’t it? Can this be seen in the written student profiles you receive? Felicity: Yes indeed, the very structure of Kaleidoscope creates a different context for those ALMS students who are asked to go to the website and participate in the online ‘dialogue’. In contrast to the free-form written texts that you just described, Kaleidoscope obliges the students to focus on specific areas and then write about these areas, thereby building up their own ‘Profile’. The five areas are Needs, Skills, Motivation, Personality and Learning History. Within each area, the student first reads and listens to a general text on the topic and then moves on to read comments made by other language students on this topic. By clicking on a comment, our student can also read a ‘teacher response’. So, they are ‘pushed into’ writing short whole texts in a webpage box. Everything they write is then saved into their own ‘Profile’, consisting of their texts on the five areas, and this, finally, is ‘sent’, and we receive it automatically by email. I found it interesting to see that, in their Profiles, the students not only often referred directly to the ALMS context, as the other students had done, but also that the comments and responses in Kaleidoscope influenced what they wrote. In the next extract, for example, Anna quotes one of the Kaleidoscope texts because she obviously identifies strongly with it. And, in the second, Paula describes herself as a theorist and reflector, which is terminology directly picked out from the teacher responses in the area of Personality: Anna: I feel exactly like one of the phrases here says: ‘I understand almost everything but I can’t say very much’. I have not used English language for a very long time, only been listening to it on TV and films, but not using it in conversation. Paula: I think that I’m both theorist and reflector. I worry a lot about making mistakes and I want to have everything clear in my head before I speak. I also compare myself with others and I think that they are much better than I. I must also understand the grammar before I start to use the language.




Felicity: So we see that the students’ reflections are affected both by the context of the ALMS programme and by the more guided structure and content of Kaleidoscope. But let’s move on now to see how their written reflections relate to the students’ personal experiences and histories. What other voices can we hear in what they write? 2. Learners’ personal experiences, histories and multiple voices Leena: Our students have long and complex histories as language learners. It is necessary to recognize the influence of former teachers and the whole teaching and learning culture of Finnish schools on the students’ approach to their learning and learner duties. In particular, we have to learn to hear these voices in the students’ reflection texts and in the counselling. Otherwise, we might not interpret students’ decisions about their learning in a way that truly benefits them. For example, many Finnish students are constrained by the experience of form-focused language classrooms and the emphasis on mistakes. In the next extract, Johanna shows that she has experienced this but has found a way to get over it: Johanna: If I’m thinking myself now. I’m speaking and writing in English everyday. It doesn’t matter anymore if my language is perfect and correct or not. Everybody can understand me and I can express my thoughts easily in English. Its enough for me. Of course it is good to know the rules for language. But it doesn’t help if you are too shy to use your language. At first I was really too shy to say anything. But years have been teaching me not to be too shy. At the moment I feel fine with my language. I know my weak parts and try to improve them. Leena: We see that Johanna is now quite confident with her own assessment of her skills. Ideally, the reflection texts can provide an opportunity for students to rediscover their own voices after the mainstream form-focused narrative of Finnish schools. For some students, the competitive role of English and the demand for high skills have become an issue and we hear echoes of peer and institutional voices in some of the texts. The following student reveals how past experiences are projected into the future; in this case, in a slightly negative way: Mia: My English studies includes only ‘normal’ studies, not even any longer period in an English spoken country. The beginning wasn’t so




typical. At first I studied German for two years, but then we moved and I had to chance [change] a school. At my new school it wasn’t possible to study German, so I had one summer time to reach the others in English studies. Maybe that left me feeling that I’ll always be a little bit worse than the other students. Leena: Mia, unfortunately, seems to feel doomed to always fairing badly in comparison with and by her peers. The long-term effects of school experiences are often revealed like this in the students’ reflections, sometimes apparently as a new discovery for themselves as well. No matter how much we emphasize to the students that these texts are an opportunity for private, reflective work on their learning and learning experiences, they tend to compare and model their writing on the tasks they were set in language classes at school. We do not want to encourage the discursive practices students are familiar with from school, that is, written products as ‘gifts’ to the teacher. We want to help them see writing as a way of finding out about themselves, as a way of learning and telling. Moreover, reflection into these issues might make them aware of the role autobiographical elements and emotions play in language learning and in the decisions the students take in ALMS and after. Here Päivi writes about a very powerful memory: Päivi: When I was at school I never spoke any foreign language, as a matter of fact I almost never spoke at all. I was very shy and I felt the whole school system ridiculous so I thought that being silent was the best way to protest. During English lessons I used to whisper the right answers to my boyfriend who was sitting beside me and he always put up his hand. This of course annoyed our teacher a lot but there was nothing she could do. I always got the best marks in tests and when I got laudatur in matriculation examination (points 60/60) my English teacher came to me and suggested that I’d come to take an extra test with her and she could give me 10 in my diploma. I never went. Leena: Päivi’s text shows how autobiographical writing can help learners explain – to themselves as well – how their learner identity has come about. This extract presents the beginning of Päivi’s evolving story about her learner identity, how her approaches and choices emerge from her personal history, and how she justifies them in the present situation.




The counselling format of ALMS (students writing the reflection texts and sharing them with the counsellor) helps students unlock vivid memories of past learning experiences and teachers. Counselling is generally a novel situation for the students. We feel that by offering to listen to students’ stories about their histories, we help them find and accept their new role in a counselling relationship – and ours. Although some students want us to direct them, we persist in our role as partners in a dialogue. Flis, what do the Kaleidoscope profiles show in this respect? Felicity: Very similar results, I would say. In Kaleidoscope the students are also asked to write their personal language learning histories and to try to explain how writing such reflections/profiles has affected them. For many Finnish students this history involves several languages with often very different experiences in each language. Finns are generally very language conscious and fully aware that to succeed in the modern world a good knowledge of English is a minimum requirement. Plurilingualism is perceived as a great advantage, as Pirkko shows: Pirkko: I always enjoyed learning languages at school. After my first year in high school I spent a month in California living in a host family and the daughter of the family came to live with my family for another month. After the second year in high school I worked a whole summer as an au-pair in Germany. In university I spend half a year in Spain as an exchange student. These trips and many others have been the key to my motivation in language learning. I’ve been very eager to learn more because I knew that soon I’d be able to use my knowledge and the harder I worked the better I would do in a new country. Felicity: Similarly, Kristiina poignantly analyses her own experiences of the different languages she has studied: Kristiina: I’ve always felt a bit anxious about studying English and French. I’ve felt I’ve never learnt things I should have and that I’ve been pushed to speak and to learn ‘too much too soon’. Sometimes learning has been nice, though. My Swedish learning history is a beautiful fairytale. It was always my favourite subject at school, I studied a lot autonomously and felt I was really good in writing/speaking Swedish. I didn’t become a teacher as I thought I would but I still read lots of books in Swedish. I had a great teacher and we still keep in touch very often – in Swedish.




Felicity: In Kaleidoscope, students’ perceptions of what it means to be a good or bad language learner also often echo the context in which they have been previously taught. External evaluation, either by school grades or a teacher’s damning judgement, have often objectified or undermined the student, as we see with Jaakko and Pia: Jaakko: I haven’t been a good language learner. In high school I did lot of work to develop my language skills but I felt that I just don’t get it. I studied grammar, vocabularies and I tried to write but I always get bad numbers on english tests. That have affected in negative way to my learning process. Sometimes it feels easier to give up because I can’t do it anyway even I had tried. Pia: I haven’t got very good memories from languages classes at school. I felt that the teacher put me to the category which was called ‘not very bad but quite hopeless’. I never thought of myself as a language learner at school. Felicity: For me, one of the most interesting aspects is that of the emotional involvement with language. Positive attitudes and good feelings about a particular language clearly have a positive influence on learning and the students are often aware of this. Equally, the converse is true, as we see in the following extract: Petteri: I had awful swedish teacher, whom I first sceared and then hated, and then hated whole langueage. I have studied over ten years swedish whitout laerning to speak or grammar. Leena: You ended on a rather sad note there. However, we have to be prepared to encounter students whose memories show that in their past language learning encounters they were not heard in the way they would have wanted. As counsellors, we also have to be aware of our own polyphonic discourse which always echoes the voices of our former teachers, teacher trainers, learners, and colleagues. Otherwise, we might be acting on the basis of a past feeling, or sensation, instead of considering the particular here-and-now situation from the point of view of the student we are listening to at the time. Awareness of the layers of discourse is equally relevant when we read the written reflections. But this brings us to the next theme.





Leena: We have asked students to write the text (or do a Kaleidoscope profile) as a way of starting a process of reflection into their learning and as a way for us to get to know our learner’s background a bit. We emphasize the learner’s ownership of this text. Nevertheless, the students perceive the counsellor as the ‘receiver’ of their texts. This shows in the brief clarifying comments they often add to their texts, either in writing or verbally. In the counselling session, some students clearly expect us to respond to the text in detail, while others are happy to just talk about it generally. Counsellors as readers can appreciate the students’ unique history and their current interpretation of that history, with a projection into the future, in many ways. How do you interpret this reader expectation with Kaleidoscope, Felicity? Felicity: I was intrigued by whether there would be a difference with Kaleidoscope as regards the perceived reader. Would it make any difference that the actual context of Kaleidoscope is a website? Are the students writing to a virtual reader, the ALMS counsellor or, quite simply, to/for themselves? If a student simply comes across Kaleidoscope through, for example, the Language Centre homepage, it seems more likely that the process itself would be perceived as being for personal, almost private, use. But within the context of their ALMS module the students are actually told to go and take part in Kaleidoscope. They are aware that their Kaleidoscope profile will be discussed in their first counselling session. Therefore, we might expect that the students may to some degree be addressing a particular counsellor. They probably anticipate that the subject will be discussed further. In the following example, Jaana is clearly addressing the reader – the counsellor – directly or indirectly: Jaana: I study english because I have to. And because I will need english at any job I’ll ever have. I know that I dont have very good motivation to stydy english and I also know the reasons for that. One reasons is that in my opinion english is ugly and heavy-handed language. Sorry to say. Leena: So it really seems to be that with both tools the students are anticipating the counsellor as reader. As counsellors, we aim to communicate to students that we hear what they are saying in their reflections about the past. It is not always possible, or necessary, to fully clarify all the voices speaking in the situation. We shy away from seeing learner histories, or autobiographical elements, as a tool or technique in counselling, and we definitely do not limit our understanding of learn-



3. The place of written autobiographies in counselling

ing histories to a problem-solving oriented approach. It is important to recognize that language learning histories are useful for raising the students’ awareness of the personal, contextualized nature of language learning. It is equally important to bear in mind that the moment of speaking is unique: at a different time and with a different counsellor, the students might interpret their experiences differently. We also try to communicate to them that we ourselves have a history as learners and that our own histories affect our approach to counselling. This is our unique opportunity to enter a dialogue on an experiential level and share bits of our personal (educational) history with the students in a way that is truly authentic and not part of a pre-defined teacher script with set questions and answers. In fact, without the co-telling, the students’ experiences and memories can remain anecdotal and separate instances in their personal histories, instead of becoming part of the novel shared meanings that could potentially help them move on and even find new ways of learning. On another level, I also picture our teacher-researcher voices as part of the co-telling; we are interpreting the learner stories and telling yet another ALMS story here – our last area of focus.

4. Reflection and reflexivity as integral parts of learning, counselling and research Felicity: Over the last 12 years, we have come to believe that a collaborative, dialogic and cyclical action research promotes a sense of community and mutual understanding. It gives the learners an authentic voice in their own language development and helps prevent the teachers from becoming bound by their own expectations and pre-formed ideas. It also creates an authentic community of autonomy. All parties can come to experience a sense of ownership of that community and of the learning process which is its primary aim. We further believe that the writing and discussion of the reflection texts forms the beginning of this collaborative and dialogic process. The insights from our current collaborative inquiry support this and suggest that both the use of free-form texts and the online Kaleidoscope tool are effective ways for guiding students to enter into the reflection process. But do the students see any value in carrying out the reflection or do they simply see it as a chore that the teacher has asked them to do? In the following examples, we can see both self-discovery and a growth in confidence:




Pauliina: I discovered that I am ‘fit to learn’. I also noticed that the biggest problem in my learning is that I think too much about what other people think of my grammar skills and my pronunciation. Anyway the most important things is your own development and not competing with others. Meri: Reflection on language learning is useful because in that way you can get to know your own resources and what kind of learner you are. By self-evaluation you can also notice your own internal barriers to learning. It’s important to understand these because only by discovering these barriers and especially attitudes can you try to change it/them. (translated from the original Finnish) Leena: I like this last student comment a lot: she talks about ‘noticing one’s own internal barriers to learning’. As counsellors, we help learners detect and break down their internal barriers, but we also need a continuous reflective probing into how we are negotiating the process with our students. Each counselling session in ALMS has always been conceptualized as a unique situation with its focus on the individual students and their backgrounds, approaches, beliefs, ideas and problems. In our research and practice, we now recognize the shared nature of the counselling discourse and how both participants’ autobiographies shape the form and content of the dialogue. This means that the learner and counsellor stories, the way of telling and the co-telling, all become more and more important. We notice that learner knowledge has the same experiential elements as teacher knowledge (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). Both types of knowledge have their roots in the numerous instances of language contact in the past and are often used as a basis for later decisions. Peeling off these layers of personal meanings might make a difference as to how students approach their learning. In ALMS, in particular, where the teacher role has evolved into that of a counsellor, it is important to take stock of students’ meaning-making about teachers and teaching. Teachers often figure in students’ stories about significant learning events, for good or bad. Writing or talking about their learning histories helps students see different sides or even layers of meaning-making, or how an experience evolves and becomes transformed. Such a self-reflexive approach to language learning is important because we need to cope with various changes in ourselves and the environment. Being reflexive means understanding how and why certain situations, tasks, learning encounters, or teachers, appear to us the way they do.




Felicity and Leena: As teacher-researchers, we feel we need to look at the research process from the same reflexive point of view. Why do our data and documents appear to us the way they do? Our pedagogical autobiographies influence our interpretation of the learners’ stories. We need to acknowledge that research is autobiography in the sense that the researcher is inevitably using her own life to understand and interpret the lives of the research subjects. As teacher-researchers, we see the need to carefully analyse and interpret the research as well as the writing process to search for the accumulating layers of understanding and temporally located acts of biography (Stanley, 1992; Jaatinen, 2002). Self-reflexivity can begin in a memory work session in which teacher-researchers open up their inner dialogue to each other. When they engage in the process of writing together, this can give them new insights into the stories told and help them claim their own voices.

Closing reflections For us, both counselling and research on counselling mean dialogue, converging autobiographies and individual and shared narratives. Together they form a complex patchwork of emotional, experiential and intellectual aspects that we feel can be best accessed via the kind of collaborative inquiry aimed at in this project.

Notes 1. For more details about the ALMS programme, see the homepage at 2. To view Kaleidoscope in full, please go to 3. Instructions for writing the reflection text: Now that you have spent some time thinking about the process of language learning, it is time to sit back and reflect. Use this page to put down your thoughts about yourself as a language learner. Think and write about your experiences, your feelings and memories, your personal beliefs and views on yourself and your learning. You can give your story a title if you want to. Remember that you are the hero of this story and that you own this story! Reflect and write about: Your Language Learning History – for example, teachers and teaching; classmates and fellow students; materials and methods used; testing, assessment and feedback; support and encouragement; easy/difficult aspects of learning; your personality and learning style; learning different languages;




language courses, self-study, learning outside the classroom; successes and failures and how you felt about them. A Significant Learning Experience – any experience (positive or negative) in language learning that you remember well and that affected you as a learner, and/or as a person. Your Wishes and Expectations – for example, your main goal for the ALMS module; your expectations of yourself as a learner of English; your expectations of the programme. Finally, your Current Skills. Begin the process of Self-Evaluation.




Tensions in Policy and Practice in Self-directed Learning Akara Akaranithi and Suriyan Panlay

The face of change Akara: I can remember the first time I had such an English class. How large the class looked and how small the room was! It was June 2005, and I walked in to find 20 computers, and 60 students sitting in threes, sharing one computer at each table. I had been used to teaching with chalk and board with classes of 25. Now I felt distinctly embarrassed as I looked at the 60 students sitting quietly at the tables and watching me with a gleam of passive anticipation in their eyes. I was supposed to know how to manage the computers, and the students, as always, were waiting for my commands. We started. The computers booted up, but things went slowly and, almost immediately, the first technical problem occurred. Some students started to talk with each other, others to play computer games and chat through e-mail, and I simply couldn’t control what was happening. If I talked to the students on the left side of the room, those on the right would use the computers in any way that they wanted to. I walked from one side to the other, telling different groups of students what to do and not to do. At first, they seemed to listen, but soon they were paying more attention to the computers than anything I was saying or doing. The class finished on time and, tired, I made my way back to my office, trying to figure out ways to solve the all problems we had just faced. Computers, learner-centredness, English. Sixty students in a classroom meant for 20. After 10 years as an English instructor at Chulalongkorn University, I was now facing change directly. Could the ‘new’ really help us?

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44 Tensions in Policy and Practice in Self-directed Learning

Suriyan: In a rapidly developing society like Thailand, educational change has been mandated both nationally and institutionally. The 1999 National Education Act (NEA) promulgated that tertiary teachers should adopt student-centered roles and act as facilitators of learning, while the university where we work has declared that all students need to develop both their computer and English competencies in order to be better prepared for their future working lives. Students now have to take an English proficiency test both before starting their studies as freshmen and before completing their study as graduates. Such requirements are intended to encourage students to be well-prepared before they graduate. Yet, these new roles and goals place great pressure on teachers and students used to more traditional teaching and learning arrangements. Akara: Traditionally, in Thailand, teachers have acted as managers in the classroom. This is reflected in our conventional teaching styles, with students sitting quietly in front of us and responding dutifully to what we say and do. Such roles for learners have long been established and accepted. Learners have tended to see teachers as the controllers of their education, as if it is their teachers only who can decide what they can and can’t do. This is more or less the role that I had got used to playing for a number of years, as my opening experience shows. Suriyan: I think we also have to acknowledge that students have had until recently little cause to act anything other than obediently and passively in the classroom. They have accepted their role, too. When I was a student, I remember well how teachers controlled the classroom and students did not have to take any responsibility for their learning, except to follow the teacher’s instructions. Such behaviour made us passive and less creative. One good thing, in a sense, is that we all seem to be satisfied with this; on the other hand, do we really want this in our real life? Should we have to just follow instructions all the time? We live in a society where things are changing rapidly and, to keep up, we cannot wait for someone to tell us what to do. Such behaviour will ruin our students’ futures. Akara: Learner-centeredness is now emphasized throughout the education system in Thailand from elementary school to university (ONEC, 1999), and teachers are encouraged to lessen their roles as classroom



A changing paradigm

managers. Teachers and learners are being guided, even forced, to move away from their traditional roles. We teachers are to be facilitators who develop students’ own ways of learning, and our students are to be encouraged, not told, to be self-directed learners. Ideally, they are expected to become ‘responsible owners and managers of their own learning process’ (Abdullah, 2001), who can develop the necessary skills to access and process on their own the information they need. Suriyan: At Chulalongkorn University, these new roles and goals have led to some major problems for teachers and students. The most obvious problem for us as teachers is the lack of structured support. We may have been told to be more learner-centred, but no in-service teacher education has been organized. In fact, all the university has done is allocate budgets for computers. However, the computer rooms cannot serve all the first-year students, so just 60 students at a time are now included in these new courses. Akara: Teachers have to find their own way to teach such large classes in a learner-centred way. This is rather different from what we are used to and presents many challenges. Few of us are confident about what to do. Mostly, we simply cannot imagine how we should deal with large classes and computers. However, we have to adapt ourselves to the mandated changes. Suriyan: Our students are in a state of shock too. Students who entered Chulalongkorn never expected they would have to do tests both before and after their studies. This causes stress and unhappiness for them to varying degrees: ‘What should I do if the post-test score is below the pre-test or if I can’t reach the expected score?’ They may well feel that they are learning English under external pressure rather than directing what they do themselves. Akara and Suriyan: Aware of all these pressures on our students, colleagues and ourselves, we have sensed a good deal of frustration and tension in recent times at our university. While we understand the need for change, we both feel that it is not a good idea to implement changes without considering deeply how different parties in the process will be affected. We were therefore interested in investigating the attitudes of teachers and students towards the implementation of self-directed learning in the English Programme at our university, and exploring how the policies promoting such change could in fact be



Akara Akaranithi and Suriyan Panlay 45


Context Akara: Chulalongkorn, one of Thailand’s most prestigious universities, mandates that, whatever academic discipline students major in, they must possess two common skills after graduation: English language proficiency and computer literacy. Graduates are expected to achieve a score on the Proficiency Test equivalent to 550 on the old TOEFL (213 on the new CBT TOEFL). As for computer literacy, students are expected to be able to write e-mails, do web-searches for information, know how to evaluate the information they retrieve and use such information to build their knowledge of the world in both English and Thai. These high expectations have caused many problems for us as English lecturers. Chulalongkorn University Language Institute (CULI) provides Foundation English I (FE I) and Foundation English II (FE II) courses for first-year Chula students. The overall aims of these courses are to enhance students’ basic skills in English and, as students should be prepared to use English in their subject-specific areas, to develop their English academic ability for their particular major. Students from all faculties except the Faculty of Arts are required to take the two courses – which means 4,000 first-year students each year. Suriyan: There are three credits for each course, which meets for three hours each week. Though there is a variety of faculties and subjectspecific areas (social science, business, science and technology), the common point of first-year study is FE I and FE II. Not only is English language required for the students, but different skills development and content are also needed to help them to become more fluent in English. A final challenge is that there are tremendous social expectations on Chulalongkorn graduates to perform well, yet during the past few years, both the government and private sectors have demanded that our graduates have better English skills in order to be qualified and successful candidates for international companies and help the country in its national development. At present, the English proficiency of our graduates is basically not sufficient for what society demands of them.



realized. In this chapter, we examine the tensions between what is expected and what is actual – between policy and practice – by looking at how different teachers and students at Chulalongkorn interpret and enact the new roles and responsibilities demanded of them.

Akara: As English lecturers, we feel that we now have an unavoidable responsibility to find appropriate ways to enhance students’ English language skills, computer-based self-directed learning and learner autonomy. There are nearly 80 teachers at CULI, but fewer than 10 have been involved in the new mandated courses. We share learning materials and use the same syllabus and assessment criteria, and students are also expected to experience self-directed learning through using computers as their main learning aid. In line with this policy, budgets have been allocated and approved to equip rooms with computers. The aim – or rather hope – is that computer-based, self-directed learning will encourage students to learn by themselves. So, some of our major concerns are ‘appropriately-structured learning environments, the implementation of relevant teaching and learning strategies, and access to suitable resources’ (Boekaerts, 1997). Suriyan: To reach these ideals, we teachers have to find the most suitable way within our context to lead courses focused on computer-based self-directed learning. This is extremely difficult for teachers who have been used to ‘chalk and talk’ for more than ten years. Some of us feel that we may lose our power and control once computers are used in the classroom – and even lose our confidence, too. Students, however, may be happy with the use of computers in the classroom, but an important question for them is how they can get themselves ready for the new expectations. Akara and Suriyan: To understand these tensions between traditional and new roles around the ideal of self-directed learning, we interviewed and surveyed different teachers and students. In the next part of our chapter, we will explore in more detail the different general positions and concerns of both teachers and students.

Exploring student and teacher perceptions of their roles Akara and Suriyan: We wanted to find out from as many ‘players’ as possible about their perceptions of their roles, because this would help us to start organizing our own in-service education with our colleagues more clearly. We also wanted to do our research in a way that would support our colleagues and, possibly, help boost their fluctuating morale. We first interviewed about 25 second-year students from the Faculty of Accountancy and the Faculty of Science who had already been exposed to self-access learning in their first-year English courses.




We also interviewed teachers who have been at CULI for more than 10 years (randomly chosen) about teaching and learning in the new era. Our goal in these interviews was to elicit a broad sense of student and teacher views of self-directed learning so that we could later survey a larger number of students and colleagues. Suriyan: Our initial research let us see that students and teachers have quite different views about self-directed learning. Most students agreed that they needed guidelines to develop their English abilities on their own, but some were concerned when they did not get sufficient teacher guidance. They felt that using computers was interesting and gave them a chance to explore the world through English. However, despite the fact that students enjoyed researching and working on their own, most found studying in class was still important for them, and over half of them still wanted to study in a conventional classroom with their teachers: • I enjoy with computers but sometimes it wastes time in the classroom. • I prefer studying in the classroom and do the task outside. • I really want the teacher to explain what I wrote and correct my paper. They were used to getting language correction and guidance from their teachers, so they wanted their learning environment to be a combination of self-directed learning and studying with a classroom teacher. Akara: Most teachers agreed that there should be a change in the current context. For many years, they had been following a teachercentred chalk-and-talk strategy. They themselves found their own approach boring and reported that students did not pay much attention to their classes, except when they had to do a quiz or prepare for an exam. The teachers we initially interviewed agreed that any change bringing benefits to students should be considered. However, when it came to questions of self-directed learning, half of the teachers surveyed said that a traditional teacher-led, teacher-directed approach was sufficient for their students. Suriyan: We also tried to get a clearer idea of students’ and teachers’ ideas of self-directed learning. Teachers generally saw it as an alternative to the traditional approach, which we took as a confirmation that many were dissatisfied with their conventional roles. Yet, many still regarded classroom learning as important, believing that teaching and




learning would be more effective if their classes became more interactive. In this sense, they saw self-directed learning in terms of class groups rather than individuals, although they also felt they should give students tasks to do outside the classroom. Computers could be used as an aid for learning and researching, and teachers should retain their roles as classroom managers: • I do not oppose the idea of using computers in the classroom. However, it can be a tool for searching only. Teachers still have to be there. • If self-directed learning has to be implemented, the combination should be made. Instead of letting students do the tasks on their own, teachers should have a role too. Teachers felt that roughly 80% of students’ learning time should be based on teacher-guided classroom study, with the other 20% devoted to self-study. They did not reject the new emphasis on self-directed learning, though. Many simply commented that it would be better if they were provided with guidelines as to how they should train students to become self-directed learners. Akara: So, our preliminary survey showed some interesting, different positions between teachers and students. Teachers expressed relatively strong beliefs in the continuation of traditional learner and teacher roles, while students showed a much stronger interest in developing their self-directed learning. The latter felt that learning to use computers was beneficial for them, and they wanted to study on their own. To move beyond these general points of difference, we decided to find out in more detail about particular student and teacher attitudes towards the problems they really faced in coping with self-directed learning.

Students’ and teachers’ views on the new implementation Give me something to hold on to, just anything. I feel so lost. Suriyan: No matter how polite and respectful this particular student appeared to be during the interview, we know well how frustrated she must have felt inside. When her eyes were lowered and these words were gradually let out, as fellow Thais we knew things couldn’t get any more honest. The interviews that we conducted with 20 students randomly chosen from both the Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy and the Faculty




of Science and with 10 teachers led us to understand the views and concerns of students and teachers in much more subtle ways. Most students found the new implementation interesting and even exciting. Obviously, most of them had never been in a classroom where computers with full Internet access were placed right in front of them, very much at their fingertips. It was inviting, of course – so inviting that often, as a lot of them admitted, they found themselves going off track, surfing for things totally unrelated to classroom activities. ‘With 60 students in the room, there’s no way the teacher can see what we’re doing. When she’s near, we just close or hide the sites.’ This student admitted to us that he usually visited other sites that had nothing to do with the assigned activity, but only after he finished the task, he said. Others said the computers were in the way, distracting them from studying: In each class, we spend only ten to fifteen minutes with the computers. The rest of the time we just do something else, e.g. listening to the teacher, doing group work, brainstorming, planning, etc. But with the computers right in front of us, it’s tough not to play, especially when it takes forever for the teacher to get to us. This – coming from the users themselves – clearly suggests that the role of the computer, including its physical presence, needs to be more carefully managed. As much as we want to include technology as part of students’ learning experience, the minute it starts to interfere with their learning, things need to be re-evaluated. Akara: The teachers also had some interesting views to share on this very topic, as suggested by one who said, ‘I have to admit that I don’t know much at all about the computer. A lot of times I just ask my students to show me how to do this or that.’ Another teacher commented, ‘It’s like playing a game of cat and mouse, except some of us are old cats that can never catch any mouse.’ Some saw no need to have computers in the classroom, preferring to devote each session to lecturing or drilling, and basically falling back on traditional methods. ‘I just can’t get their attention. How can I get any of their attention when the world is right in front of them?’ Although we found this interesting, some of our colleagues were however very positive, saying that computer-based education is what students today need: ‘They need to be able to construct knowledge on their own, of course with some supervision from us.’ They also added that one vital skill needed for most teachers in a class like this was classroom management, knowing how to move the class forward





Suriyan: As for the new roles that students and teachers have to play, both parties have interesting views to share. As much as they appreciated the ability to construct their own knowledge and to be more independent, most students said they still needed their English classes to be a little more teacher-oriented. They wanted someone to explain grammatical points explicitly to them, instead of looking for their own explanations from the Internet or elsewhere. ‘I’m just not sure if I can trust my own understanding of what I gain from the Internet. I want my teacher to explain it to me,’ said one female student. This desire was linked to both mid-term and final exams: students thought they would not be able to perform well on the tests without explicit lessons from teachers. It was apparent that students found the new concept of selfdirected learning a bit daunting and that they needed more guidance and support from their teachers. The teachers themselves did not seem to mind their new role as facilitator. They, however, expressed concerns on their students’ behalf. ‘We have to realize that most of them come from a learning environment where everything is spoon-fed to them. To drastically change from this to total independence is perhaps too overwhelming for them,’ stated one concerned teacher. Most of them seemed to agree that their students still needed a lot of help and support. To achieve optimal results, total independence should be gradual, they believed. Akara and Suriyan: All of the above views, from both students and teachers, are of extremely great value. Both have shed light on pressing matters that require immediate action. As for incorporating computer technology into the classroom, perhaps a compromise needs to be made in order to reach better arrangements for learning and teaching. By that, we do not mean that we should get rid of the computers. Technology is essential in today’s learning: that we realize. We all want to include technology as part of our students’ learning experience, but to let it interfere with their learning is not the better way to go. One solution that we would like to propose is to devote two hours, out of the three class hours that students have in one week, to classroom learning, group work, practicing, planning, brainstorming, or preparing the students to be ready for the tasks that they need to carry out on



with well-prepared and appropriately structured tasks or activities. Others suggested that they had nothing against technology, so long as it did not deprive students of their opportunity to learn English. After all, they said, this was a language class, not a computer class.

their own in the third hour. The tasks that students need to complete with the help of computers also need to be carefully planned and wellstructured with clear learning objectives and outcomes, so that students have no time to waste on other irrelevant sites. Regarding the new roles, total independence for Thai students, even at a university level, is probably not the best policy. A lot of help and support still need to be given initially to guarantee their later success. Teachers seem to understand the roles demanded of them quite well in general terms. Although at times, out of frustration, some tend to resort to traditional methods, that is mainly because the materials or activities utilized are not carefully planned or structured. This results in chaos in the class and a feeling of helplessness for both teachers and students. The concerns and frustrations articulated during the interviews are, we believe, positive indications that those involved – policy makers, administrators, teachers and students – need to be fully aware of. They should be taken into account when considering any policy modifications, so that students are enabled to develop their full practical potential as autonomous learners. To minimize the tensions between policy and practice, these voices need to be heard, so that both students and teachers will have something to hold on to and that no one will feel lost.

Closing the ‘gap’ Akara: As can be seen, there is something of a gap between teachers and students. Whether they like it or not, teachers have to adapt to the change and understand their new roles more clearly, to facilitate the empowerment of students. Having been classroom managers for so long, this is a challenge: teachers are afraid that they may lose their traditional authority and status. To overcome their fear, they need help to develop a clear understanding and positive approach towards selfdirected learning. Closing the gap also requires clear mutual understanding so that collaboration between teachers and students can be nurtured. The worst possible scenario is that both teachers and students end up feeling uneasy in the classroom, so that any attempt at teaching and learning in their changed roles will fail.

Loosening the tension Suriyan: We would like to suggest that the implementation of any policy should be planned and be within the time and resources available. Warschauer (2002) defined four aspects of access to technology in




the ELT sector: access to ‘physical resources’, ‘digital resources’, ‘human resources’, and ‘social resources.’ He saw physical resources as encompassing access to computers and telecommunication connection; digital resources refer to digital material that is made available online and social resources to the community, institutional and societal structures that support access to Information and communication technology, and human resources to issues such as literacy and education. In the current situation at CULI, the policy makers have tried to prepare for the innovation physically, digitally and socially. Classrooms were well equipped with computers and Internet access, and digital material was made available online all the time. Social and human resources are the most difficult areas to cater for, because this involves people, namely teachers and students who need to be wellprepared for the new implementation. Teachers should have been trained in the use of computer technology for the learner-centred classroom, but at CULI, due to the teacher’s traditional role, training in the use of computers has tended to focus on teachers as managers of a computer-based classroom. Naturally, this led to frustration and a lack of confidence: teachers as ‘human resources’ in this context should have at least the capacity to encourage students’ self-directed learning with computers.

Policy and practice: is it possible? Akara and Suriyan: As official policy cannot be ignored, the practical implementation of such policy should be made clear and practical. Policy quite often causes frustration in any organization, but this can be eliminated by effective internal communication regarding the policy. When a new policy is going to be implemented, clear direction and explanation are necessary to ensure that all staff have a clear understanding of what will happen and the direction the policy will take. The situation at CULI is rather similar to that of any organization where communication may not happen when it is needed. The administration has tried to convey the message by means of formal meetings. This has helped a lot in terms of nurturing initial mutual understanding, but we have been hard-pressed for time in which to hold proper training sessions to develop full understanding of the policy and its practical implications. These challenges are true not only for CULI, but for any organization that is likely to encounter change. We have tried in our study to look




critically at the Thai context when self-directed learning is being implemented to change fundamental learning arrangements. The key stakeholders are teachers and students who both need to have a clear understanding of what is involved to avoid tensions occurring when the change is made. Both groups have the same interest in working constructively to create a successful teaching and learning environment. Akara: As for my own experience, I found that the change and frustration actually encouraged me to speak more and find my own voice. Communication among colleagues increased and the advice and ideas that emerged helped us move forward. Besides, lacking confidence in using computers encouraged us to practise more, which meant we were learning more all the time. Suriyan: ‘I didn’t realize that I could learn this much on my own,’ said one hardworking female student in my class right before the semester was concluded, and she ended it with a big ‘Thank you.’ Thank YOU, each and every one of them, for making last year an eye opener for me. Truly, they helped me find balance between policy and classroom practice, taught me the kind of compromises that need to be made in order for new implementation to work, and simply turned me into a more patient individual. It is always tough to accept change or embrace innovation. Through collaboration and discussion, however, things can turn around. As clichéd as it might sound, I believe there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.

Conclusion Akara and Suriyan: As teachers working with the implementation of the new policy, we felt unhappy with the new way of teaching at first. We had objections about change and were reluctant to accept innovation. However, official policy has its own mandatory requirement that teachers must follow. Once we were able to clarify self-directed learning in terms of its implementation and approach in our classes, we could make it our own. It became much easier for us to look at our practice together through the process, and to find the most suitable way to move forward. Classroom practice is not a one-sided affair: different opinions arose and tensions occurred between the two groups, students and teachers. We as teachers should listen to our students and work to solve the problems together with them. To find appropriate




solutions requires mutual understanding through collaboration and discussion. Just blindly following policy is not enough, since this might not always be effective in practice. Both parties affected by the policy need to find a way to make it work, or else the gap between policy and practice could move from being a tension to a source of ongoing resistance, conflict and frustration.




On Democracy and Learner Autonomy in Initial Teacher Education: Guerrilla Warfare? Maria Alfredo Moreira

A critical incident in the ELT methodology class … There I was. It was the middle of the second semester of the 2004–05 school year, and the topic under discussion was the course’s process evaluation. We were discussing the results of a questionnaire about the attainment of course objectives and the impact of the pedagogic strategies developed. After a rather quiet start, with few students commenting rather uninterestingly on the results, I went on to the third part, dealing with problems and difficulties students were experiencing in the course. All of a sudden, they seemed to wake up and started on a fiery discussion. They complained mostly about the lack of time and surplus of hard work they were having in the course, and their problems with making reflections on their learning portfolios. At a given point, one student said the most astonishing thing: ‘We have had too much negotiation in this course so far!’ While the majority seemed to feel otherwise (and reacted very strongly, saying that the problem was that they negotiated nothing at all in other courses), this student felt we should have stopped negotiating at the beginning of the semester, after we had agreed together how students would be assessed. Another said that there was no negotiation at all: they were having to do too much work that had already been settled at the beginning of the semester. ‘The concept of negotiation has to be redefined,’ he said. These opposing views about the negotiation carried out in our classes led there and then into a group reflection about the concept. I said I thought they had misconceptions about negotiation, and this troubled me, for it was central to the whole pedagogical approach I was trying to implement. I tried to explain to them that we could not talk 56



5

about autonomy without talking about participation (in decisions, in having one’s voice heard), about responsibility (for the decisions made, for carrying out the assigned tasks, for being on time and in class through the whole lesson … ), but, above all, without thinking about information and negotiation. Critical reflection, I explained, could only start when students reach an acceptable level of information. I meant the choices they had made about the content of their learning portfolios, as well as their choices about the assessment demands and criteria. I stressed the need for engaging in negotiation in an informed way. Without the necessary information, students cannot really choose, for they are easily manipulated by the teacher. This was the reason, I told them, why I kept negotiating, even though we were now heading towards the end of the semester. At the beginning, they did not have the ability to make informed choices, so what they chose, and how they did it, was very much ‘blind’. Now this was changing because we were negotiating right now how to continue. When I said this was a lesson on democracy, most of them smiled, as if agreeing.

Learner autonomy, democracy and action research … the seeds of conflict and negotiation My main aim as a critical pedagogue is to promote my students’ autonomy as future language teachers in a democratic and critical direction. As we walk the walk and do the talk, my students and I will hopefully deepen our understanding of how teachers and learners become more engaged in developing autonomous and alternative practices to the status quo in the schooling culture. In this chapter, I will argue that a democratic approach to teacher education, with a view to learner autonomy and empowerment, deepens both the teacher’s and future teachers’ critical awareness of the political nature of their work. I will liken this type of work to guerrilla warfare and also explore this metaphor. As Little (2004: 124) puts it, developing learner autonomy aims at equipping learners to engage critically, yet responsibly, in the social processes they encounter. By taking democracy as the foundational stone of both pedagogic and research practices (Apple and Beane, 1999; Gustavsen, 2001), teachers and learners are contributing to the survival and further development of democracy as a political process. Democracy in education implies reciprocity and interdependence: the very act of teaching should carry lessons about democracy, by recognizing



Maria Alfredo Moreira 57

and validating the individuality and responsibility of each participant in social and political change (Cunat, 1996: 130). It should endow individuals with the right and duty to participate, based on the exploration of their own experience and the expression of their own ideas, through reflection and exchange, with a view to empowerment (hooks, 1994; Greene, 2003). As I see it, democratic transformation in the classroom is achieved through a shared struggle to promote students’ autonomy as learners, and, in the process, increase the democratic nature of the teaching and learning process. Furthermore, I believe that democracy in both education and learner autonomy can be pursued through the implementation of an inquiry-oriented approach to pedagogy. And this is where action research comes in as a suitable means for developing both democracy and learner autonomy. As a way of asking personally meaningful questions and striving to find appropriate responses or actions, action research changes not only what my students and I do, but also how we think about what we do and how we position ourselves in the world. In other words, it ‘forces’ us to assess the practical, political and ethical extent and implications of our actions. This means that my role as a teacher must be redefined as an agent of empowerment, as an attempt to help students to exercise power, while recognizing that power is created and exercised in a network of context-specific and practice-related relationships (Gore, 2003). Implementing action research with a view to democracy involves my students and me in ‘engaged pedagogy’ (hooks, 1994), where I strive to carry out a process of self-actualization that promotes my own well-being and theirs and helps me teach in a way that empowers them. On the other hand, my understanding of (foreign) language didactics in initial teacher education is one of praxis, whose optimal development takes place in the students’ training year. This is when they have the opportunity to integrate the (often conflicting) discourses of didactics research, teacher education and pedagogy. However, the didactics classroom also offers a space for coherent integration, where the teacher, through her pedagogical practice, is able to exemplify the relevance of the direction of the knowledge construction processes. The seeds for this study can be found in my need to articulate ideology and pedagogical practice towards democracy and learner autonomy in my classroom. Action research, as a critical reflective strategy serving both teacher and learner development purposes, seems, then, to be highly appropriate to my aims.



58 On Democracy and Learner Autonomy in Initial Teacher Education


A case study in initial teacher education … engaging in political warfare

The case study I will briefly describe was conducted with with 53 university students, in two semesters at the University of Minho, in two different school years (2003–04 and 2004–05). The course on English Language Teaching (EFL) Methodology takes place in the fourth year of a five-year graduation course on Portuguese–English Language Teaching and has a weekly schedule of five hours for 15 weeks. I had a total of 23 students in the first year, and 30 in the second. They came from around Braga, with different social and economic backgrounds. They were all white, mostly female, 21–23 years old, with only four over 30 (working students). My main drive for this study derived from an awareness of the limitations of my pedagogical practice so far. I noticed a low degree of coherence in my action, between my ideology and my pedagogic practice, which I wanted to bring closer to a democratic view aimed at the promotion of my students’ autonomy (Moreira, 2005; Vieira and Moreira, 2007). I hoped that these students’ future professional practice would be influenced by mine, in terms of the development of their own learner autonomy in their teaching practice year in local secondary schools. So I decided to improve the pedagogic strategies I developed with these students, working on them so that they would better fit both my ideological choices and the course objectives. I also wanted the students to participate in teaching decisions and to take more responsibility for their learning. In order to achieve these aims, I updated the existing course objectives into these: 1. raise students’ awareness of their own personal theories concerning foreign language teaching and learning; 2. question teaching/learning theories, practices and contexts of language education; 3. acquire relevant information on EFL teaching/learning; 4. confront different perspectives and opinions on the issues covered by the course; 5. reflect on problematic issues of EFL teaching/learning; 6. express personal opinions; 7. reconstruct former representations and stances on the covered issues;



Characterizing the context


Implementing action research I decided on a task-based approach where the students could be constantly experimenting and reflecting on the teaching/learning process by: • • • • • •

reflecting on course aims/methodology negotiating pedagogical roles collaborating with peers taking initiatives making choices doing self-assessment and process evaluation.

In this process, reflection on, and experimentation with, evaluation were prized developmental tasks, both for me and for the students. This involved students reflecting on the relative weight of course components, designing assessment criteria and instruments, and using them in their own assessment. The changes in the evaluation and assessment activities were intended to challenge dominant views and practices at universities, where assessment is largely summative, exam-based and almost always the teacher’s sole responsibility (cf. Bobb-Wolff, 2002; Brown and Glasner, 2003). My main aim was to encourage students to assume more responsibility for the class by promoting assessment activities more consistent with the democratic classroom: getting students to choose project themes and to generate assessment criteria and instruments, and involving them in self-assessment and cooperative learning. In preparation for the case study, I developed a set of action research strategies that were also pedagogic and self-development strategies for myself in that they integrated teaching, systematic inquiry and teacher development (see Table 5.1 for a detailed overview of the pedagogic/self-development/research (PSDR) strategies used). I felt that critical reflection on the teaching/learning process (PSDR Strategy A) was particularly important in terms of data collection and analysis, because it favoured a metacognitive view of the course by students and myself. It involved all of us in the evaluation of all the other strategies with the aim of fostering our critical awareness of their



8. develop research skills in language didactics; 9. develop a critical understanding of: (a) pedagogical knowledge; (b) the EFL methodology course; (c) one’s own role as student in a teaching course; (d) the teaching course.

Pedagogic/self-development/research (PSDR) strategies (2003–05) Typical tasks

Example questions addressed

Type of data produced

A. Critical reflection on the teaching/ learning process

Creating moments in class where students are required to reflect on/ evaluate (both individually and collaboratively) aspects of the (language) teaching/learning process, such as expectations for the course, attainment degree of course objectives, PSDR strategies, or tasks in the EFL Methodology workbook

What are the assumptions and principles for the EFL Methodology course? How are course objectives related to these assumptions and aims? How are the pedagogical strategies appropriate to the objectives? What is the quality of pedagogic practices at university? What should the teacher’s and the students’ role be? (…)

Questionnaire about expectations for the course, representations and perceptions of students’ and teacher’s role, and of the course Questionnaire about the quality of pedagogy at university Questionnaire about the attainment degree of course objectives and the relation between PSDR strategies and course objectives Videotape of oral discussions in class

B. Collaborative construction of assessment/course evaluation criteria and materials

Constructing criteria and materials for the assessment of students’ learning and for course evaluation: negotiating weight of assessment components (final exam/learning portfolio, course participation, project work), cooperatively designing criteria and materials for the final exam/learning portfolio, participation in class/ outside class, and project work

What should the elements of student assessment be? How should they be valued in the students’ final assessment? What assessment criteria should be used? (…)

Self-assessment form of classroom participation Self/co-assessment form of oral presentation of project work Guidelines for the assessment of portfolios/ project work final report


61

PSDR strategies

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Table 5.1

continued

PSDR strategies

Typical tasks



C. Providing information on the course themes

Presenting and discussing course supporting texts, oral presentation of theories/research findings, done by the teacher

What information is relevant for the language teacher? What do students know about these course themes? How are students’ learning experiences relevant to the course themes? (…)

Teacher’s field notes Oral reflection in class

D. Analysis and discussion of professional practice

Doing activities where students are required to analyse/interpret professional practice situations, using the EFL Methodology workbook. Pair/group work, followed by discussion in the large group

What do students know about these course themes? What do students think about these themes? How are students’ learning experiences relevant to the understanding of tasks? (…)

Teacher’s field notes Oral reflection in class

E. Project work

Doing project work, in small groups, on a theme selected by the students among the course themes. Involves literature review and field work (visiting local secondary schools to observe one lesson, administer questionnaires to learners, and interview trainee teachers)

What EFL themes would students like to know more about? How can field work be used in order to deepen students’ understanding of learner autonomy and situational constraints on it? (…)

Project work final report Questionnaire on the impact of project work Oral presentation of findings in class



Pedagogic/self-development/research (PSDR) strategies (2003–05)

62

Table 5.1

Pedagogic/self-development/research (PSDR) strategies (2003–05)

continued

PSDR strategies

Typical tasks



F. Learning portfolio (school year of 2004–05 only)

Developing an individual course portfolio by students whose contents, structure, and assessment criteria are negotiated between teacher and students. Includes artefacts (newspaper articles, scientific papers, cartoons…), lesson plans, literature reviews, lesson summaries, assessment materials, course questionnaires, and several reflections on the learning process in the course

What course themes are regarded as particularly relevant by students? What are students’ opinions about course themes? How do students integrate course themes with world themes? (…)

Students’ learning portfolios

63



Table 5.1


Evaluating the experience The first year was dedicated to experimenting with and evaluating Strategies A to E. As a result of student feedback, the PSDR strategies in the second year changed somewhat. Project work and critical reflection on assessment/evaluation became foregrounded as the most transformative strategies that were the most closely related to the development of students’ autonomy as future teachers. Students perceived their role to be changing, towards greater participation in class decisions and a more critical attitude. In the second year, I decided to give a stronger emphasis to critical reflection on, and experimentation with, the assessment process, with a heightened focus on self-assessment. This concern led me to replace the compulsory final exam with a learning portfolio (Strategy F). Anonymous student feedback about the course objectives and the PSDR strategies developed was obtained mainly through questionnaires in April 2004 and April 2005. The questionnaires had three sections. In the first section, I asked students to rate on a 4-point Likert scale how well the course objectives had been attained. The results of this section are presented in Table 5.2. In the second section, I asked students to relate the course objectives to each PSDR strategy (shown in Table 5.3). Finally, in the last section, I asked them to comment on their responses. The students felt that the majority of the course objectives had been attained to either a high or medium degree. Over half of the students pointed to the acquisition and critique of EFL knowledge, along with the expression of personal opinions, as well-achieved course objectives. When asked about the least favourable result, that is, develop a critical understanding of the teaching course, students highlighted the lack of course time to widen the criticality of their reflections. Table 5.3 relates these results to each PSDR strategy developed, by exploring how relevant the students considered them.



relevance. We would thus be in a privileged position to decide on their maintenance or abandonment, or even reformulation, according to how appropriate we saw the other strategies for case study purposes, course aims and objectives, and students’ needs.


Minimum

Medium

High

No response

Acquire relevant information on EFL teaching/ learning

1

2

12

31

0

Express personal opinions

0

9

11

26

0

Develop a critical understanding of pedagogic knowledge

0

4

16

24

2

Reflect on problematic issues of EFL teaching/ learning

0

2

19

23

2

Develop research skills in language didactics

0

3

21

22

0

Develop a critical understanding of one’s own role as student in a teaching course

0

4

22

18

2

Confront different perspectives and opinions on the issues covered by the course

0

3

25

18

0

Question teaching/ learning theories, practices and contexts of language education

1

4

24

17

0

Develop a critical understanding of the EFL methodology course

0

3

24

17

2

Reconstruct former representations and stances on the covered issues

0

5

25

14

2

Raise students’ awareness of their own personal theories concerning foreign language teaching and learning

0

5

29

12

0

Develop a critical understanding of the teaching course

4

7

22

11

2

Course objectives



Zero

Table 5.2 Course evaluation (2003–04; 2004–05): attainment of course objectives (N = 46)

66 On Democracy and Learner Autonomy in Initial Teacher Education Table 5.3 Course evaluation (2003/04; 2004/05): contribution of each PSDR strategy to the attainment of course objectives* (N = 46)

Course objectives

A

B

C

D

E

F

Raise students’ awareness of their own personal theories concerning foreign language teaching and learning

23

2

16

11

8

6

Question teaching/learning theories, practices and contexts of language education

16

1

6

23

7

2

Acquire relevant information on EFL teaching/ learning

13

3

31

11

7

7

9

20

10

15

6

3

Confront different perspectives and opinions on the issues covered by the course Reflect on problematic issues of EFL teaching/learning

16

0

8

26

14

5

Express personal opinions

17

30

0

10

2

16

Reconstruct former representations and stances on the covered issues

7

5

6

15

8

7

Develop research skills in language didactics

7

6

8

6

27

13

Develop a critical understanding of pedagogic knowledge

24

13

5

12

13

6

Develop a critical understanding of the EFL methodology course

30

22

3

7

9

5

Develop a critical understanding of one’s own role as student in a teaching course

23

13

2

9

12

3

Develop a critical understanding of the teaching course

11

9

3

7

8

1

*Each student could point out more than one strategy for each objective. Key: A = Critical reflection on the teaching/learning process B = Collaborative construction of assessment/course evaluation criteria and materials C = Providing information on the course themes D = Analysis and discussion of professional practice situations E = Project work F = Learning portfolio (April, 2005)



PSDR Strategy


• critical reflection on the teaching/learning process (A) was highly valued in the promotion of learner autonomy (developing critical knowledge on pedagogy, on the course, and on students’ roles); • project work (E) was valued in the development of research skills; • collaborative construction of assessment/evaluation criteria and materials (B) gave students the opportunity to express their own opinions and to make choices; • doing the tasks on the course workbook (D) made students reflect on problematic issues of EFL teaching; • the presentation moments by the teacher (C) helped students acquire relevant information on EFL teaching/ learning. When asked about their views of my approach, students again pointed out, first and foremost, problems with lack of time to develop course work and surplus of workload. They also reported some lack of experience in learning tasks that require discipline, research, and a critical attitude. The perceived lack of criticality in their written and oral reflections was due, in their opinion, to limited previous experience and information in other courses regarding self-assessment, negotiation and expression of personal opinions. These were, they reported, largely absent from pedagogic practices at university. Discussing the results To better understand my students’ perspectives, I decided to look more closely at other questionnaire feedback about their perceptions of my approach to pedagogy. Here, I wanted to see how they framed the issues in their own terms. The majority of students valued highly the pedagogic approach in the promotion of their own autonomy as learners and its relevance for their future professional development. However, a few students were neither comfortable nor confident: In this course I was hoping to learn teaching methodologies, as the course’s name suggests: exercises, the best way to present themes, and so on. Even though we learnt related subjects, it was not as direct and objective as I expected. (Student A, June 2004) In spite of my efforts to make everything explicit by telling them the why and the what for my pedagogical choices, there will always be students who do not validate such an approach. In this lies the source of conflict in my classroom, which, before doing this study, went largely unnoticed for me. A democratic



The students believed that most of the PSDR strategies were appropriate for achieving the course objectives:

approach to language education allows spaces for learners’ voices to be heard; and when they are heard, dissent naturally arises. Action research serves the purpose of rendering conflicts visible through sharing informed critical reflection by both teachers and students. My two-year action research project has made me realize that there is too much ambiguity and lack of security in an approach to pedagogy that fosters democracy and learner autonomy. Even those students who accept the kind of approach described still need ‘scaffolding’, as well as opportunities for continuous reflection on, and experimentation with, the teaching/learning process. … this course is close to everything I defend in teaching – I wrote about a more humane teaching; about the teacher as a guide; about the teacher that stimulates thought and reflection on her students … I am aware that these ‘principles’ were followed in this course all the time. (Student B, June 2005)

The teacher’s work towards democracy and learner autonomy … guerrilla warfare? The first struggle I found myself involved in relates to the problematic nature of the teacher’s work. I find my work towards democracy and learner autonomy to be neither a certain nor smooth process. The weight of a transmissive approach to education, where students do not find spaces to exercise self-determination, critique received knowledge and take on situated social responsibility, is a heavy burden to carry, both for students and myself. Students’ representations and experiences of teaching at this level reveal that they have previously experienced it largely as a certain, static, teacher-centred endeavour that disempowers them as learners and perpetuates the status quo: … [the course] made it possible for me to see that there is not only that traditional way we have all been programmed to operate ever since we entered school … [the teacher] made it possible that the students would be autonomous in the right measure, allowing them to take their own decisions … so that her students would feel the taste of ‘freedom’ and, at the same time, the weight of that responsibility. (Student C, June 2005) Another fight is the rather isolated nature of this kind of work. According to Kemmis (1993), it is a mistake to think that the people who constitute a social group will, inevitably, be able to critically




change their situation. They need to share a commitment – a commitment to dialectically change their world. And this is what the dialogue with my partner project colleagues from Warwick University brought about (Brown, Smith and Ushioda, Chapter 6). I was challenged to make explicit my assumptions and my views (and resistances, actually) and to confront them with theirs. Our common concerns relate to how to better develop our students’ autonomy as (future) teachers in both contexts. We found out that our core principles for teacher action are valid in both contexts: balanced support and scaffolding, systematic feedback, transparency of goals and of assessment criteria. This collaboration has made me think, not only about my practice, but, more importantly, about my convictions and how I can make them both more coherent. I am not sure that my understanding of pedagogy has actually changed as a result of such collaboration and action research. What has most likely changed are my views about the limits for (transformative) change in my context, and how it links with change in similar contexts. I am also finding out that my pedagogic, philosophical, and political priorities and concerns find resonances with other people who work in very different contexts. This enhances my confidence and self-esteem. Even though there are bumps on the road, I know where I am heading, and I will not change my direction. So far, my students have kept me going, by reminding me of the political nature of teachers’ work: … we cannot turn away from the fight … the teacher must [work towards achieving] the goal of obtaining the best possible results with her class. The words ‘to give up’ and ‘conformed’ should not be part of any teacher’s mental dictionary. The teacher must, at all times, foster his/her students’ abilities and allow them the utmost degree of their individuality – their autonomy. (Student D, June 2004) The way I see it, and inspired by my students’ words, transformation towards democracy and learner autonomy (therefore towards teacher emancipation) resembles guerrilla warfare. As a teacher, I position myself in a resistance stance – a movement towards a greater good that is connected to, but outside of, the self and self-interest (Kincheloe, 2003). I see myself engaged in a moral war (Glickman, Gordon and Ross-Gordon, 2001). This often means relentlessly developing ways of fighting the status quo, or developing creative solutions to constraints when they seem insurmountable, in a largely stealth, undercover mode of transforming teachers’ and learners’ stances in the world:




… doing this work [project work] cleared my perceptions in what comes to the origin of certain problems: the school has no walls like Troy and, even if it had, its doors are wide open to any Horse that comes near by. However, even though these problems may not originate in the teacher, they are still there. And the teacher’s responsibility to fight them is not diminished. (Student E, June 2004) In this guerrilla process, action research works as an ideological and methodological ‘weapon’, for it serves my purpose: as I struggle to enhance the coherence of my pedagogic theories and practices, I develop my capacity for integration, that is, of understanding and adapting to reality while making informed critical choices that (hopefully) will change that same reality (Freire, cited in Beyer, 1996): At the beginning of the semester, I did not have great expectations as this course is concerned and that may explain why the course was a big surprise. … I never expected that it would become a course where besides teaching what autonomy is, it would make autonomy its working method. … Because the teacher develops responsible autonomy, because she is a teacher who believes in the students’ power and is not afraid of it, a teacher who has the courage to work against a tide of incredulity and permissiveness, a teacher who does not ‘pour content into students’ minds’, for all this, the teacher got really closer to my ideal of an university teacher, she even redefined it. (Student F, June 2005) The tentative conclusion I draw from this study is that the spaces for democracy and learner autonomy are to be found in the dialectical relationships between philosophical stances and pedagogical choices. Tension and conflict pervade my intent to align them, as can be seen from the critical incident at the beginning of this chapter. Like democracy, the autonomy classroom requires a vigilant stance by both parties. Democracy and autonomy can only happen when learners have their voices heard, are able to participate in pedagogic decisions, and are able to decide on the course of their learning. It is ‘warfare’ because it is a political struggle, in the sense that the critical test for my practice is the extent to which it is liberatory and empowering for both my students and myself in practice – not just in its theoretical pronouncements.




6 Peter Brown, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda

Dear Richard, Ema and Peter I am one of ELSM student and am writing this letter to say something about our class. … This is not just my opinion, as you might notice (or not), we sometimes talk about our class and most of students (at least more than half) seem to be dissatisfied with our lesson. The reason is firstly, there are too much discussion rather than input from you. I understand in a way that we should study and read many things by ourselves, however, if that is what we have to do, there is no point for us to pay a lot of money and being here. …

Letter from ‘a student’ This chapter is a story of resistance to autonomy and our responses to that resistance. It begins in early February 2004, when we received an anonymous letter from ‘A student’ on the core ‘Professional Practice’ module that we co-teach for pre-experience English teachers taking our MA in English Language Studies and Methods (ELSM). The contents of the letter were distinctly worrying. Had we been blind in thinking that our students were eager participants in our version of ‘pedagogy for autonomy’, when all the time it seemed that ‘at least more than half’ were dissatisfied with the module? Had we misread the signals? Surely the student feedback to date had generally been positive? But no, the anonymous letter told us we could have little faith in this feedback: I am not sure about what feedback you had from all different student, but I strongly believe that not everybody is honest on that issue, as we don’t want to offend against any of you. However, what is sad is even though 71



Responding to Resistance

72 Responding to Resistance

It was sadly paradoxical, indeed, if our attempts to foster autonomy were in fact creating an unhappy climate of stifled complaints and forced compliance, with the exception of this lone and daring voice of resistance. Clearly, we had to respond – but how? What follows is the story of (a) our response to the immediate situation in 2004 (what we might call action research as crisis management), and (b) the adjustments we made to the course the following year (relatively delayed action research). Before continuing, however, we need to set the story in its context by giving some more background information about the course itself.

The setting Our story takes place in the heart of England at the University of Warwick. Here, at the Centre for English Language Teacher Education (CELTE), we offer various MA programmes for English language teaching professionals from around the world. Most of these programmes are for students with prior teaching experience, but one programme, the MA in ELSM, is specifically designed for students who have less than two years’ experience or, in most cases, have just finished their first (undergraduate) degree. The spring term (January to March) Professional Practice module has a central but, in some ways, problematic role within the programme, in the sense that we rely upon it to help students relate theory to their own practice in the context of an academic course of study. However, there is not much opportunity for teaching practice since the module lasts for only one 10-week term, with five teaching hours allotted per week. The overall strategy we have adopted in this setting since spring 2001 has been to run the course on an ‘action research’ model, and to focus less on imparting teaching skills per se than on developing students’ autonomy as learners of teaching, purposefully engaged in self-directed knowledge construction. Our goal, then, is ‘teacher-learner autonomy’ (see Barfield and Smith, 1999; Smith, 2000; Smith and Erdogˇan, 2007), that is, the development of our students’ ability to evaluate and continuously develop their teaching into the future. In a nutshell, here is what we ask students to do. They plan, teach to peers and evaluate for themselves (on the basis of peer feedback and



students have complaints, they just accept the fact and do not try to talk to tutors about their real feeling.

reflection on a video-recording) two 30-minute English lessons, one at the beginning of term and one at the end. Between these two points, we help them to investigate an area of their teaching which they are particularly concerned about. The research methods they use include interviewing experienced teachers, observing English classes within CELTE, analysing a transcript of their lesson, and reading in their chosen topic area. The insights they gain in relation to their research questions feed into improvements which they attempt to implement and evaluate the second time they teach. This makes the overall experience akin to one of action research. Students also write a conventionally assessed 6000-word assignment, but in stages corresponding to the three phases of the module: Part I reports on the initial teaching and self-evaluation experience with clarification of a topic for research, Part II reports on research into the topic, and Part III reports on self-evaluation of improvement. Students submit drafts of Parts I and II at the end of the respective phases of the module and receive formative feedback from their tutor, either orally or in writing. In parallel, we have consistently adopted an action research orientation to our own work. In teaching the module, we engage in continual self-critical reflection on its design and delivery (see Smith et al., 2003; Smith, 2005). On the basis of ongoing evaluation, we have retained the overall course design but have made adjustments every year, both in line with analysis of the previous year’s feedback and ‘at the point of need’, as new concerns and issues arise during the course. Thus we return to our story of spring term 2004, when the concerns and issues raised in the anonymous letter certainly did seem to demand further research and relevant action.

Our immediate response One point – indeed, an accusation – made by the letter-writer was that while we had asked students to voice problems and concerns through private written feedback the previous week (four weeks into the term), we had not done much to respond to the issues raised. This prompted us to look again at what individuals had written (we had simply invited everyone at the end of class to write a few lines about any ‘problems and worries’ they were experiencing). Of course, we had already read this feedback and had found nothing to worry us unduly, or else surely we would have discussed it with one another and responded. However, recognizing that students might be reluctant to reveal their true feelings, we looked more critically at their comments



Peter Brown, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda 73

to see if the letter writer’s concerns indeed reflected a general feeling of dissatisfaction. We could still find little evidence to support the view that feelings of disquiet and resistance were rife, though we admitted we had no way of gauging the reliability of the feedback. While most students did express anxieties (which was hardly surprising since we had solicited feedback on problems and worries), these were mostly concerns about coming to terms with the research itself rather than scepticism about the value of what they were doing. Students repeatedly revealed that they were having difficulties in narrowing down their research topic, but seemed to regard this as a legitimate challenge rather than a focus for complaint. Nevertheless, we took our letter writer’s point about the need to respond, and consequently posted detailed comments on the feedback received so far (appropriately anonymized) via the electronic discussion forum we had set up for the module. Our comments sought to clarify procedural points of uncertainty students had identified, and to offer reassurance by acknowledging that feelings of confusion were a common experience during this early phase of the course. Mindful, however, that students’ written feedback might not be revealing the true picture and that our posted responses might thus merely be touching up minor surface problems, we felt we needed to deal systematically with the letter writer’s specific complaints and find out how far they represented the majority view. Thus we devised a short anonymous questionnaire to assess students’ agreement or disagreement with statements encapsulating these specific complaints. The first area we asked about was peer teaching, and we were reassured to find that only one student (presumably the letter writer her/himself) agreed that ‘there is not much point doing peer-teaching’. Thirteen students disagreed and five remained neutral. There was less agreement about the organization of peer teaching sessions, and we responded to student opinion by making some minor changes to timings. However, a clearly worrisome finding emerged from responses to the statement ‘there is too much discussion in class as opposed to input from tutors’. Thirteen agreed, nobody disagreed and six remained neutral. This was the main reason for dissatisfaction cited by our letter writer, and was evidently a vexed area which hasty crisis management could not easily resolve, short of letting the tail wag the dog and duly providing more input (cf. Moreira, Chapter 5, on her students’ resistance to ‘too much negotiation’). We administered the questionnaire mid-way through the course when – as we knew from previous experience – most students are par-




ticularly anxious, needing both to draft the first part of their assignment and to identify a topic for further research. It was, then, reasonably reassuring that about half the group disagreed that they were ‘confused about how to investigate [their] research questions’, though nine out of 19 did agree they were ‘worried about how to describe [their] research.’ We realized from this that we should remind students that we were accessible for consultation more or less on demand. Enhancing proactive tutorial support would be something else to think about for the following year. A final question bit the bullet and asked students to respond to the blunt statement ‘I am personally dissatisfied with the course’. Ten students disagreed, five agreed and four remained neutral. Interestingly, when asked to comment on a differently worded statement, ‘Most students are dissatisfied with this course’, eight students agreed, five disagreed and six had no opinion. What did this tell us? Perhaps that our letter writer had been proselytizing, or perhaps that when students (as well as teachers!) get together for a chat they tend to focus on negatives rather than positives. It certainly told us that we needed to keep explaining ourselves, provide enhanced support, and keep communication flowing – all lessons that we would attempt to put into practice during the rest of the term and in our action research with the following year’s students. Finally, it was salutary to discover that although ten students disagreed with ‘I don’t think I am learning much from this class’, eight students did agree. What more could we do, then, to ensure that students would not only feel they were learning, but also develop an enhanced appreciation of learning as self-directed knowledge construction? This became a key concern for our action research the following year.

A year later Actions taken Responding to the anonymous letter in 2004 crystallized for us the following chief issues to take forward to 2005: • take into account mid-term student desires for more input and less discussion • enhance tutorial support • keep explaining ourselves and keep communication flowing • more deliberately validate a ‘constructivist’ understanding of learning.




In discussing the first of these, we agreed that we were not willing simply to provide more input and reduce discussion, since this would undermine our own principled commitment to the development of students’ autonomy as learners of teaching. Instead, we agreed to try to alleviate dissatisfaction in other ways, in effect through dealing with the three other issues. Our action research thus revolved around two main adjustments we made to the course in spring term 2005 to deal with these issues: 1) Enhancing tutorial support We had 20 students in the 2005 ELSM professional practice module – from mainland China (5), Taiwan (4), Thailand (4), Japan (3), Cyprus (2), Syria (1) and Hong Kong (1). In order to ensure that individual concerns were better addressed, we decided to enhance the existing tutorial group system so that each of the three course tutors had specific responsibility for tracking and supporting a particular group of students throughout the module. We achieved this partly by timetabling individual and group tutorial time during the first half of the course. In other words, instead of waiting for problems to fester or for students to come to us when their difficulties were intense, we actively sought them out to monitor and smooth their progress. In short, we sought to keep communication flowing between tutor and student and to provide added support and advice when required, rather than revert to more teacher-directed arrangements. 2) Promoting reflection on personal development Our second modification was to promote more explicitly than before a conception of learning as self-directed knowledge construction rather than consumption of pre-packaged input. In this area, our response to the problems which arose the previous year coincided with a general shift towards the promotion of reflection on learning within British higher education, under the banner of ‘Personal Development Planning’ or PDP.1 Our main innovation consisted in making reflective writing on what students had learned during the course a substantial part (1500 words) of the 6000-word assignment itself. Throughout the course, we explicitly related to this requirement the various kinds of in-class reflective writing and discussion we asked students to engage in at different stages. In effect, we wanted to give more legitimacy, indeed institutional respectability, to reflection on learning, and to enhance the perception that discussion and reflective writing were for students’ own benefit rather than an interruption to the ‘real business’ of learning.





Our subjective impressions overall during the 2005 course were that we succeeded in being much more ‘in tune’ with students’ needs than in the previous year, tailoring what input we gave more effectively ‘at the point of need’. To us, the overall classroom dynamic felt better (though, of course, this may have had a lot to do with the make-up of the group). From a more objective point of view, we turn now to discuss data from end-of-term student evaluations and the reflective writing component of student assignments. During the final session, all 20 students responded anonymously to the invitation to write freely, in bullet-point form, about ‘good points’ and ‘points to improve’ about the course. Our content analysis of the comments (see Table 6.1) shows the following main points (with Table 6.1

Students’ end-of-term evaluations ‘Good points’

‘Points to improve’

Suitability to needs/suitability of particular activities

(13) Peer teaching/teaching improvement (6) Experience of research (6) Overall positives (5) Interviewing/classroom observation (4) The course being practical (4) Recording own lesson (2) Freedom of choice (1) Presentation of research (1) ‘Reflection grid’ [personal construct questionnaire]

(3) Reporting research at end of course (3) Teach real students (2) Classroom observation (2) Personal construct questionnaire (1) Teaching room (1) Too much reflection (1) Transcription analysis

Tutors’ input/ feedback/ guidance; overall organization of the course

(18) Organization/ instructions (10) Tutor support/feedback (5) Staging of assignment (4) Demonstration of teaching (4) Feedback from peers and tutors (4) Discussion/collaboration with peers (2) Cooperative/team teaching by tutors

(5) Structuring of course (3) Too much group discussion (2) Earlier start/better preparation (2) Assignment-related (1) More feedback from tutors (1) More input (1) More help with research methods (1) More help with references for reading



How things turned out

frequency of comments indicated in parentheses), classified into two broad areas. Firstly, we were pleased to note that positive comments (89) far outnumbered comments on points to improve (29). We were particularly interested in responses relevant to our specific concerns – the balance between input and bottom-up support from tutors; and the extent to which students appreciated the opportunities for self-directed knowledge construction. In relation to the first concern, there were isolated requests for ‘more feedback from tutors’ (1), ‘more input’ (1), ‘more help with research methods’ (1), ‘more help with references for reading’ (1), and a few complaints (3) that there was ‘too much group discussion’. From an opposing perspective, however, there were several endorsements (10) of the amount and quality of tutor feedback and support, and the value of peer and tutor feedback (4) as well as discussion and collaboration with peers (4). In addition, our felt need to ‘keep explaining ourselves’ undoubtedly contributed to achieving this greater balance between input and bottom-up support. Quality of ‘organization/instructions’ was the feature most frequently commented on as a good point (by 18 respondents). The provision of better explanations of the rationale and purposes of different activities along the way is something we had identified several years earlier as needing enhancement, and clearly we had improved. In relation to our second concern (whether students appreciated opportunities for self-directed knowledge construction), we examined the data on ‘suitability to needs/suitability of particular activities’ for any signs of resistance. There were a handful of comments relating to some course elements, including three useful suggestions about modifying the way research is reported to the class at the end of the course. This seemed to indicate that students were interested in hearing more about colleagues’ projects. We noted just one sign of possible overall resistance from a student who commented that there had been ‘too much reflection on my teaching learning process’, though the same student also made several favourable comments about other elements of her experience, which reassured us. On the positive side, 13 noted peer teaching as a good point of the course, while six noted that the course also provided an effective introduction to research. While the end-of-term evaluations were anonymous and thus offered us a global picture only, students’ reflective writing in their assignments gave us insights into their individual development as learners and teachers. To capture these personal perspectives, we decided to use I-statement analysis of each student’s 1500-word piece of reflective




writing. I-statement analysis examines how people speak/write in the first person to describe their actions, feelings, abilities, goals and so on, and how they thus construct particular socially-situated identities for themselves (Gee, 2005: 141). I-statements can be categorized according to the type of predicate that follows ‘I’ (for example, cognitive I-statements such as I think, I believe or affective I-statements such as I feel, I like). Following initial re-working, we developed seven categories of I-statements, as shown in Table 6.2. The data set comprised reflective writing from 18 students, totalling 602 I-statements and averaging 33 I-statements per student (though the actual number per student ranged considerably, from 8 to 86). Table 6.2 summarizes the total distribution of I-statements across the seven categories. Table 6.2

Distribution of I-statements in reflective writing

I-statement category

Sub-total

% of total

Actions & events: what I did or did not do, what happened during the module (for example, I started, I designed, I had the opportunity)

168

28

Insights & gains: what I’ve learned, discovered, gained during the module (for example, I realized, I became aware, I have learned, I found, I benefit)

160

27

Future goals & challenges: what I want, should or need to do in the future, what the future holds for me (for example, I would like to, I plan to, I might, I will, I want to)

78

13

Feelings & states: how I feel or felt, how I see myself now and during the module (for example, I was glad, I’m surprised, I felt nervous, I have many concerns)

73

12

Thoughts & beliefs: what I think, believe, speculate (for example, I think, I mean, I believe, I guess, I wonder)

72

12

Constraints & pressures: what I cannot or could not do, what I should have done or have to do during the module (for example, I could not, I did not how, I had no idea, I have to)

33

5

Personal history: experiences and events from the past (for example, when I look back at my own experience of learning English, when I was in China)

18

3

602

100

Total




We were struck by the relatively high percentage of I-statements reflecting personal insights and gains (27%), and the relatively low percentage reflecting constraints and pressures experienced during the module (5%). We felt this suggested that the perceived benefits outweighed the perceived negatives, and that students did not feel cast adrift through lack of teacher input or other causes. Of course, the reflective writing was part of assessed work, and students may have been reluctant to voice their true concerns or criticisms of the course (as our letter writer had originally pointed out to us!). However, closer analysis of the I-statements categorized as insights and gains suggested to us that lack of teacher input and direction was not an issue. Our analysis seemed to indicate instead that students gained a rather different understanding of how knowledge comes to be constructed – a development which had been a primary intention of our action research. In essence, these I-statements express insights gained through action, experience, interaction with others and reflection, and express recognition of the diverse ways in which knowledge develops or input can be sourced, for example: • During the course, I have discovered a lot of aspects of myself as a teacher that I had not thought of before • From my peer teaching, I recognized that what happened in the classroom cannot be absolutely controlled • I have realized the value of having discussion in order to organize and develop my topic area • I realized that writing the aims and tasks helps teacher organize the lesson clearly • I have also found the classroom a much more interesting place to notice and observe • I have learned that teaching is an experienced action which we have to learn by ourselves and it takes time to become a skilful teacher • I did not realize that another interesting way to learn is to do research While many students did reflect on problems they faced, their I-statements cast these problems as opportunities for positive change and growth rather than reasons for sustained resistance. For example, let us consider the case of R, a student who explicitly mentioned initial feelings of resistance and low motivation. R was enrolled in the MA in British Cultural Studies and ELT programme. Since this programme straddles courses offered by the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies and CELTE, R had (wrongly) assumed





• I did what was necessary, nothing more • I did not have much interest in it (the module) • I felt anxious and nervous when I was told I had to interview some experienced teachers in CELTE Gradually, however, R constructs a narrative of change and personal development as she begins to see things in a different light. The key factors that trigger change seem to be (a) the experience of teaching (in Week 3), which, despite herself, she finds motivating: • I found that I actually enjoyed preparing a lesson and enjoy teaching it • Thus I felt motivated to learn things because I wanted to improve my lesson • I knew I got my motivation and would do a better job and (b) the experience of discussing ideas with peers and tutors, which she finds an illuminating way of arriving at new knowledge and insights: • During the discussion in this module, I got some interesting and useful information • From then on, I became much more active and participate much more in later discussions. By the end of the module (Week 10), not only does R see things in a different light, she also sees herself differently: • After finishing all the research work, I realized I was not that shy as I used to think • The close-linked learning process in which I learned more about myself was discussion and sharing ideas with peers and tutors • Through the two peer-teachings, I came to know more about the teaching process and about myself as a teacher R’s case clearly provides an interesting counter-story to our letter writer from 2004. Of course, we have no way of ‘proving’ that the changes in



that the ELSM module was not a required component for her. She was thus a reluctant participant to begin with, and had missed the first week of classes. Her I-statements convey her initial resistance, anxieties and low sense of autonomy:

R’s attitude from initial resistance to motivated engagement can be explained by the specific adjustments we made to the course in 2005. Yet the fact that she identifies discussion with peers and tutors as a key element in her own metamorphosis suggests that these adjustments may have had a pivotal role to play.

Final reflections The teaching and research experiences we have described above show that promoting autonomy is not simply a question either of ‘giving learners what they want’ or of ‘letting them get on with things’, although both of these may be important at certain times and in certain areas. Ours is quite a tightly structured module within a tightly structured programme, and we do not (indeed, do not consider ourselves free to) allow students control over important areas of overall module design (decisions as to overall objectives, approach and evaluation criteria, for example). Within the overall structure we have developed over the years, however, students do plan, monitor and evaluate their own teaching and research projects. In general, their self-directed activity in these areas, combined with reflection on the experience, does seem to contribute quite powerfully to the development of their autonomy as learners of language teaching (Smith, 2006; Smith and Erdogˇan, 2007). Thus, embedding a supported experience of action research within initial teacher education has proved itself, in our context, to be a valuable and viable strategy for promoting teacherlearner autonomy (see also Moreira, Chapter 5). The corresponding action research orientation we have built into our own practice enables us to respond flexibly to students’ problems on a ‘just in time’ basis: we investigate and make modifications when necessary within the overall structure we have established. However, as the case reported on above shows, responding to resistance does not necessarily have to involve giving students what they say they want at a particular point. More effective responses, we have found, can include careful elicitation of all students’ opinions (to complement those of the most vocal), better explanation of the course aims, heightened legitimation of relatively unfamiliar practices (in our case, explicit reflection on learning) via their inclusion in assessment procedures, and improvement in the targeting of support for students as they undergo the sometimes difficult transition to greater autonomy. For us, the 2005 module we have concentrated on evaluating in this chapter was a positive experience, in comparison with the more worri-




some experience of 2004. The 2005 course left us with a desire to build on what we thought of as our ‘success’, with no major new problems to address. Without the resistance expressed in the anonymous letter of 2004, however, we would not have made the modifications which contributed to this success. Were such resistance to be entirely absent, indeed, there might be dangers of complacency and, perhaps, of the imposition of a new ‘orthodoxy of autonomy’ as innovations brought about originally in a spirit of adventure and genuine experiment become systematized and fossilized. This has led us to think that ‘resistance’ to pedagogy for autonomy should be viewed as a positive phenomenon, one which can be welcomed and turned to good advantage as an opportunity for teachers to reflect on core values in collaboration with students, and as a basis for continual improvements.

Note 1. PDP is defined as ‘a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development’ (Higher Education Academy, no date).




Commentary on Part One: Necessary Contradictions … and Beyond Elsa Auerbach

If there’s one story that these chapters tell, it’s that autonomy is not simply a noun: it’s not a state that one arrives at, an individual psychological attribute that one either has or doesn’t have, or the outcome of a particular form of instruction. Rather, it’s a verb or an adverb – a way of doing, perceiving, and acting that is fluid, variable, ideologically situated, and constantly ‘under construction’ as Flávia Vieira (Chapter 2) says. Each of the chapters challenges the notion that working toward autonomy is a linear, predictable process. Each focuses on the dialectic between ideals or visions and the realities of practice, on the ways in which values frame and shape the construction process. In discussing their journeys toward enacting a pedagogy of autonomy within their specific contexts, many of the authors focus on paradoxes and conflicts that they have faced. They write about their struggles to address these tensions and confront the constraints along the way. As I read about their work, it strikes me that there are several ways of framing the contradictions and that the ways of framing them matter for practice. The fundamental contradiction that many of the authors confront is that the source of the learner autonomy project is actually the educator, not the learner. The teacher’s goal for the learner is that the learner will generate her own goals. Vieira explores how this contradiction plays itself out in her teacher education course: The teachers’ choices reflected the ideological underpinnings of my own convictions as a teacher educator. Whether this is primarily a sign of liberation or subjugation is hard to tell, and here lies one of the most crucial dilemmas of reflective teacher education: how can teacher educators foster a democratic learning environment and still be in charge of it? 84



7

This dilemma arises in the first moments of the journey. Vieira decides to let the participants in the course create the curriculum. This is her choice. As such, she has control: she takes the initiative to promote autonomy; she decides to let teachers/learners decide. What a paradox: the educator has the power to decide that learners should be selfdirected. Educators can use their power to choose a pedagogy of autonomy whose goal is to diminish their authority as educators and foster increasing power of learners. Vieira calls this exercising power to empower. But exercising power to transfer power creates uncertainty. This uncertainty, Vieira notes, is itself productive: in her project, it fostered creativity on the learners’ part and opened spaces for them to take greater charge of their learning. This overarching paradox gives rise to a second contradiction related to the role of the teacher/teacher educator. Several of the authors struggle with the question of how teachers can both guide and step back from the process of enabling student autonomy. Do structure, overt instruction, and even mandatory guidelines enable or impede the movement toward self-direction? In the project which Leena Karlsson and Felicity Kjisik (Chapter 3) describe, the dance of role and control played itself out in a complex dialectic: the teachers decided to create an environment in which learners could be actively engaged in their own learning; the students could choose to participate or not, but once they signed on, they had to engage in a mandatory six-hour session dedicated to learner awareness. This process entailed autobiographical writing in which students were required to address specific questions that focused on needs, skills, motivation, personality, and learning histories. Again, facilitators’ values informed the process. The underlying premise was that students’ learning histories (and the way that they construct these histories) shape their trajectories as language learners; thus, in order to take control of their learning, they need to name/make explicit prior learning experiences and reflect on them. The teacher’s role evolved into that of counsellor, but rather than taking a hands-off stance in order to allow student awareness to ‘emerge’, the teacher/counsellor actively engaged in co-narration. The counsellors’ interpretations contributed to shaping student stories. As such, ‘Autobiographies are the unique stories of individuals but are constructed dialogically’, yielding another contradiction: although the learners were encouraged to take ‘ownership’ of their texts, they often perceived the counsellors as audience for the texts. This, in turn, raised the question of whether counsellors were peers, guides or teachers.



Elsa Auerbach 85

Akara Akaranithi and Suriyan Panlay explore a different sort of contradiction in Chapter 4, one which entailed a government and businessdriven mandate for self-access learning through computers in Thailand. The authors recount their struggle to implement imposed self-direction (!) in English language instruction with little support or training. The mandate resulted in enormous uncertainty for both teachers and students. Teachers were concerned that their new role would deprofessionalize them and cause them to lose power and control. Students wanted guidance: ‘Give me something to hold on to, just anything. I feel so lost.’ Out of this uncertainty, arose the need for creativity: because the teachers had to find their own way, ironically, they were forced to become self-directed and to take control of the process. As Akara said, ‘… I found that the change and frustration actually encouraged me to speak more and find my own voice’. Resistance to the imposed policy of self-directed learning generated collaborative self-direction. Interestingly, contradictions such as these related to the imposition of a pedagogy of autonomy and the reconstruction of the teachers’ role create a further contradiction: learners may prefer more traditional teaching, and their resistance itself may catalyse self-directed learning. In Chapter 5, Maria Alfredo Moreira opens with an account of a student complaining about too much negotiation. Her underlying belief is that ‘democratic transformation in the classroom is achieved through a shared struggle to promote students’ autonomy as learners, and in the process, increase the democratic nature of the teaching and learning processes’. The student’s complaint, however, highlights a contradiction: ‘A democratic approach to language education allows spaces for learners’ voices to be heard; and when they are heard, dissent naturally arises.’ She attributes students’ resistance to the static, teacher-centred ways in which they have been socialized, arguing that the weight of a transmissive education is huge. Moreira constructs this experience with resistance as an opportunity for action research, and, based on this research, concludes, ‘… there is too much ambiguity and lack of security in an approach to pedagogy that fosters democracy and learner autonomy’. This, in turn, leads her to the position that learners need scaffolding, support, and systematic feedback. Through dialogue with colleagues, she reframes the contradiction as one between limits and possibilities, likening teaching for autonomy to guerilla warfare in terms of ‘… relentlessly developing ways of fighting the status quo, developing creative solutions to constraints when they seem insurmountable …’. Resistance is an inherent feature of the journey toward transformation; action research is a tool for illuminating the journey.



86 Commentary on Part One: Necessary Contradictions … and Beyond

Likewise, resistance is the cornerstone of the pedagogical struggle in Peter Brown, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda’s study (Chapter 6). After receiving an anonymous student letter which not only complained of too much discussion, but also noted reluctance to raise complaints in class, the authors comment, ‘It was sadly paradoxical, indeed, if our attempts to foster autonomy were in fact creating an unhappy climate of stifled complaints and forced compliance …’. They used the occasion of this complaint as an opportunity to re-examine their practice. While refusing to accommodate the critique by providing more teacher input, they developed strategies such as increased tutorial support, opportunities for reflection, and transparency of purpose to help students understand the rationale for their approach. They conclude that resistance itself is positive: it prevents complacency or a new ‘orthodoxy of autonomy’ and that it should ‘be welcomed and turned to good advantage as an opportunity for teachers to reflect on core values in collaboration with students, and as a basis for continual improvements’. So what do we make of all these struggles, contradictions and paradoxes? We could, quite simply, say that moving toward autonomy is a bumpy ride where contradictions, uncertainty, and conflicts are obstacles to be expected and overcome. In his response to a draft of this chapter, Steve Brown wrote: I can recall frustrations as an idealistic high school teacher in my twenties, when such dilemmas became very debilitating – probably because (I now think) I didn’t recognize them, or see them as a platform for inquiry, or have the space for meaningful dialogue with colleagues, … but just experienced them as problems that overwhelmed me. My sense is that many of the authors may have felt similarly when they first encountered the dilemmas. Another perspective, however, arose as they struggled with the contradictions: each of the authors seems to conclude that in fact the constraints, contradictions, and resistances were not only necessary, but productive. These authors came to embrace them as the motor that propels the journey. Where resistance could be seen as a sign of ‘failure’ on the teacher’s part, it is instead constructed as an opportunity. This stance of acknowledging the dilemmas, making them explicit, and using them to trigger reflective inquiry or action research leads to refining practice (through strategies like structured teacher guidance, scaffolding, transparency of goals, and ongoing elicitation of feedback and assessment). Thus, it is



Elsa Auerbach 87

the teachers’ agency in relation to the resistances and contradictions which enables the paradoxes to be generative: this stance transforms student resistance to autonomy into a catalyst for autonomy, yielding greater self-direction. They find that uncertainty enables creativity; accepting authority leads to letting go of power. The dialectic between the opposing aspects of the contradictions propels the movement toward increased autonomy. Much as I agree with the analysis that contradictions are necessary and productive, I would like to suggest yet a third way of framing the contradictions that the authors explore. I believe there is a contradiction that is not explicitly addressed in these chapters, and examining it leads to repositioning autonomy as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. The contradiction to which I am referring is that between autonomy and democracy. Many of the authors equate these concepts (often using the terms interchangeably or in tandem). They assume that autonomy is informed by a democratizing impetus and that the greater the self-direction in learning, the greater the capacity for democratic engagement inside and outside the classroom. I worry that assuming this relationship, rather than problematizing it, may feed into its opposite. Problematizing the relationship between autonomy and democracy would entail asking questions like: Why is autonomy being promoted here and now? In whose interests is it being promoted? What is the relationship between autonomy and larger global forces? Who benefits from the pedagogy of autonomy? What are its consequences? Does it foster or undermine democracy? Does it support or challenge existing dynamics of power and privilege? Like all approaches, a pedagogy of autonomy is situated and interested. It is rooted in a particular historical moment, and serves particular interests whenever and wherever it is enacted. It is not, as Schmenk argues, ‘a universal and neutral concept’ (2005: 115). Thus, rather than autonomy being inherently democratic, it may, in some contexts and manifestations, be in conflict with democratic or transformative pedagogy. As Benson (2001), and others have argued, autonomy can either facilitate fragmentation, competition, individualism, and control over others, or it can foster critique of status quo and motivate collective action for change. Benson notes that the discourse of autonomous learning often aligns with discourses of management: Socio-economic and ideological changes are rapidly bringing the notion of the autonomous learner into harmony with dominant ideologies of what it means to be a fully functioning member of a




Elsa Auerbach 89

He warns that rather than giving more control to learners, in some contexts pedagogical innovations are implemented ‘in order to achieve reductions in unit costs and are accompanied by measures that ensure that little real power is actually transferred’ (Benson, 2001: 19). The concept of autonomy, thus, may result in ‘privileging those who possess “learning capital” over those who do not’ (Benson, 2001: 20). It can draw on discourses of ownership, consumerism, and commodification; or it can draw on discourses of critical reflexivity and social action to resist domination. It can be imposed as a vehicle for promoting new hierarchies, or it can be a form of resistance to top-down bureaucratic one-size-fits-all policy mandates. Schmenk (2005) goes further in proposing that certain versions of autonomy are linked to neo-liberal globalizing agendas: Whereas on the one hand globalization leads to homogeneity in many domains, on the other hand it brings about increasingly heterogeneous local environments in which the global and the local interact in many different ways … Globalizing autonomy has predominantly been a matter of homogenization … (Schmenk, 2005: 111) Schmenk argues that autonomy in service of globalization can be contradictory to democratization. When learner-centeredness is defined as self-access through computers and individualized learning, it can become a vehicle for spreading values of competition and hierarchy in a globalizing world. This analysis leads to framing critical questions more sharply: when and under what conditions is learner autonomy being promoted and commodified by forces of global capital? In which circumstances can it be used to privilege some at the expense of others? How can it serve as a gate-keeping tool? In what ways can it be used to undermine democracy or be co-opted in service of neo-liberal agendas? Without explicit exploration of critical questions like these in each context, autonomous learning can inadvertently become a tool to reinvent stratification and justify it. I worry that when self-directed learning becomes an end in itself, it can obscure critical analysis of the



modern society. One indication of this harmony is the parallel that can be drawn between constructs belonging to autonomy in learning and constructs belonging to progressive models of management. (Benson, 2001: 19)

social context. History has demonstrated over and over that individual agency or competence, on its own, is rarely the antidote to oppression and injustice; rather, social change comes through political organizing and collective action. This leads me to the view that, rather than equating autonomy and democracy, we should reposition autonomy in service of democracy so it becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. Looking back at these chapters through the lens of this analysis does two things, I think: first, it expands the scope of what counts as context to the social world outside the classroom, and hence the critical questions that educators must pose. So, for example, in Thailand, such a view would shift the focus onto why questions: teachers and learners together might consider why, at this moment in time, this policy is being imposed, with class sizes expanded, computers introduced, and teachers’ roles shifted. This might trigger discussion of how to collectively respond to these pressures. Second, if enhancing critical awareness and moving toward democratic participation are goals, contradictions between structure and openness, teacher and learner direction, or authority and autonomy become less oppositional. Both learners and teachers can contribute to these goals in different ways at different times. The teachers’ role might be to structure investigation of students’ social realities, guide reflection on individual experience to more critical social analysis, and teach skills that enable students to affect change outside of class. This analysis repositions teacher input: instead of being seen as the transmission of knowledge, it is seen as a contribution that can be used in service of social change. The teacher has an active role that is explicitly guided by an ideological stance. Freire suggests that the opposition between teacher- and learner-centredness becomes a false dichotomy: The teacher’s authority … is indispensable to the development of the learner’s freedom … If my political-ideological belief is democratic, liberating … the contradiction I experience with students’ freedom is reconcilable. … That, however, does not mean that the educator stops being an educator and stops teaching or that the learner stops being a learner and stops learning. What the educator needs to do, if he or she is truly and coherently democratic, is to ‘take good care’ of his or her authority by exercising it. And the best way a teacher can take care of his or her authority is to respect the freedom of the students. (Freire, 1996: 163–64)




Once teachers let go of the view that relinquishing power and accepting authority are not oppositional, the struggle with contradictions like that between discussion and input diminishes; teacher- and learnerdirected practices can alternate according to what is most effective in promoting the deeper, democratic goal. Embracing one’s authority as a teacher goes hand in hand with fostering dialogue and decisionmaking among learners. Both can serve democratizing ends. In my own practice, I have found that if students are passionately engaged with the content of learning because it helps them make sense of their lives (as teachers or learners), questions of process and power usually take care of themselves. I often start with structured exercises to elicit aspects of students’ experience and pose back issues that emerge for them to consider. We then reflect on commonalities and differences in their responses and dig deeper with ‘why’ questions related to the larger social context. The process entails drawing out student beliefs, generalizing, analysing with teacher input, learning new information and skills, strategizing about possible actions (and potential consequences), trying out strategies, and evaluating the process. I explicitly invite student resistances (asking questions like ‘What makes you uncomfortable about this process, this reading, this lesson?’). I try to create lessons about tensions in classroom dynamics as they arise in order to model the kinds of problem-posing they may utilize outside of class. The question of first language use in ESOL classes provides one example of how an issue arising from the teaching context can become content for problem-posing in language education. Use of students’ first languages is often a source of tension among both teachers and students. Teachers may hold the belief that ‘English Only’ should be the rule in ESOL instruction while at the same time realizing that students often are most engaged when they are able to express their ideas in their L1 or help each other through use of the L1. Tensions between students may arise, with some feeling that L1 use wastes time or creates bad feelings, and others seeing it as a necessary support. These dilemmas, in turn, lead back to the question of the teacher’s role: should teachers make rules about language use and enforce them? Because the underlying issue is not just a pedagogical one, but an ideological one as well, I would argue that what’s critical in addressing them is not so much the decision that ultimately gets made, but rather the analysis leading to the decision. Asking students their opinion is not enough; this does little to extend their capacity for critical analysis. I think the key here is creating a context which enables them to make informed,



Elsa Auerbach 91

critical decisions. This entails drawing out arguments, providing input, and addressing pros and cons with learners. The teacher can create a text in which two people disagree about whether L1 use should be permitted in an ESOL class. Then, through a series of structured questions, the teacher can draw out participants’ opinions about the functions (and disfunctions) of L1 use. They can move from simplistic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ positions to more nuanced positions which look at the conditions and contexts in which L1 use is and is not productive and why. Questions may invite discussion of why English is dominant outside the classroom (even globally); the class may discuss the political functions of the English Only movement. Teachers can contribute their own knowledge and perspectives in these exchanges; students can read about various stances, learn to structure arguments, provide evidence, and write persuasive essays. Through this process, students can arrive at their own rules for language use in the classroom, and evaluate how these rules work. The teacher moves from being a problem-solver or arbiter of tensions to a problem-poser or facilitator of critical reflection. This process entails going back and forth between traditional and participatory modes. In my own practice, I often get the balance wrong (a favourite moment, for example, was when a student in one of my classes, an elderly Somali gentleman, stood up in the middle of a lecture (!) about Freire and said, in a loud voice, ‘It’s enough!’). Vieira raises a final dilemma in her chapter when she recognizes how great the distance is between the realities of practice and the vision. But with the wisdom that is characteristic of all the authors of these chapters, she adds, ‘We do not need to fulfill a vision of professional empowerment: we need to construct it collaboratively …’. Her words echo those of one of my all-time heroes, Myles Horton (who founded the Highlander School in Tennessee which was influential in building civil rights and labour movements in the US); he argued that if you have a goal you can attain in your lifetime, it’s the wrong goal (Horton,1998: 226–8). In other words, we need both to hold on to our vision and to recognize that we won’t achieve it. The point of an ideal is not to reach it; it’s to let it guide the journey. Thus, as these chapters show, struggles to shift from teacher to learner power may fuel the trip, but the key in addressing these struggles is ideological clarity about the destination – fostering democracy both inside and outside the classroom.




Part Two Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Classroom Practice





Nurturing Language Learner Autonomy through Caring Pedagogic Practice Huijuan Shao and Zongjie Wu

Words are for catching meaning; once you’ve got the meaning, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him? (Zhuangzi, Chinese philosopher, fourth century BC) The discourse of learner autonomy has become popular in the current Chinese educational context. Learner autonomy was listed as a desirable goal in the recent National English Curriculum Standard for High Schools (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2003), and by the China National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, in arguing that one tendency in FLE in the next five years will be the encouragement of self-directed and self-access centred learning (China National Research Center for Foreign Language Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University, 2002). Yet, for many people, education in the Chinese context is thought to be a very passive affair, with Chinese students characterized as dependent (Cortazzi and Jin, 1999; Pierson, 1996). Learners are observed to favour rote learning (Harvey, 1985; Pierson, 1996), have a seeming obsession with marks or grades (Scollen, 1999) and tend to approach textbooks and teachers as authorities (Cortazzi and Jin, 1999). Students in China are further considered receptive to activities based on reactive autonomy (Littlewood, 1999), and this is usually thought to be the heritage of the Chinese traditional culture, especially that of Confucius. These assumptions directly remind us of challenges in our practical business of teaching and meanwhile force us to seek a way out. If Chinese students are inclined to be more obedient owing to particular traditions, how can we provide learners with what are normally 95



8

accepted as autonomous skills? Does our embodied Confucian identity conflict with autonomy? Just what is the inner power behind the outer autonomous performance which will sustain learners’ lifelong learning? What forms of pedagogy can nurture that power in our practice? These questions drive us into a more ontology-oriented exploration, starting with an authentic self-exploration of the traditional conceptions that constitute our socio-cultural identity.

Autonomy, authenticity and language Confucius states, ‘I never enlighten anyone who has not been driven into being “fen” ( ) and never express to anyone who has not got into being “fei” ( ). When I hold up one “corner” ( ) of a square and one cannot come back to me with the other three, I desist’ (Analects, Chapter 7, Statement 8). In this brief statement, Confucius indirectly points out a vision of autonomy with particular reference to its relationship with understanding and language. ‘Fen’ ( ) describes the inner frenzy when our hearts get deeply touched. With pre-understanding penetrating our hearts, we become eager for learning as clarification. ‘Fei’ ( ) describes our facial expression when we stammer to put understandings into words. ‘Fen’ ( ) and ‘fei’ ( ) here together refer to the existential state of learner autonomy which is so deep in heart that it demonstrates itself through body and emotion. In such whole-connectedness, a language of heart with a rare mix of rigour, elegance and precision becomes ‘present at hand’ (Huebner, 1999: 151) in the process of acquiring language for meaning. Once the understanding is embedded and converted into words, the words can be forgotten. Corner ( ), a metaphorical sign of understanding grounded in life, points to a totality of involvement. By showing it, Confucius projects possibilities into an opening where learners can in turn respond with the other three corners of a square. With the horizons of learning so established, teachers and learners come together for inquiry and dialogue. For spiritual enlightenment, Confucius lives with his students in a deep understanding of human autonomy so that they can mutually constitute and illuminate the world of learning (a square with four corners). Confucius requires a real desire and ability rising from our inner hearts before he gives any instruction. Authentic autonomy rises from the individual’s deep inner heart, the ‘meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self’ (Palmer, 1998: 11). Without the heart of



96 Nurturing Language Learner Autonomy through Caring Pedagogic Practice

Huijuan Shao and Zongjie Wu 97

The caring pedagogic project The setting for this study is a provincial teacher training university located in a middle-sized city in China. Here, English is documented and authoritatively defined as a subject with rigid classifications of skills and grammar points. We believe that such division of learning content violates the fundamental way of knowing and can become a barrier to the heart of learning. With the simple wish to help learners take a more active role in learning English, a group of ordinary teachers initiated an exploratory practice several years ago and have since engaged themselves in ongoing curriculum innovation with their students (Wu, 2005). Our action research is collaborative and inspired by the work of our colleague Huanglaoshi, whose innovative ways had inspired us to go further in our exploration of caring for autonomy. Huanglaoshi’s pedagogic practice was the engaging focus of our project, and while our research lasted one year (September 2003–June 2004, with six periods of formal class a week), our investigation has gone far beyond that span. A class of freshmen (English majors, 22 females, 3 males) was chosen at random as the participants, in the belief that the journey of autonomy favours an early start. To nourish our vision of autonomy, we wished to engage our learners’ genuine life concerns in topic-based learning. Our perception was that their personal interests and practical concerns could bring into view their inner landscapes. The activities we used in class mainly consisted of topic-deciding, group-forming, informative learning, in-depth exploration, communal presentation, related discussion and reflective writing. Learners were also encouraged to make portfolios and keep journals for reflection. Huanglaoshi herself was also invited to keep personal journals for our interpretive exploration. By taking ‘heart of learning’ as the priority research issue, our pedagogic practice is inherently a caring one. Care is here understood as a deep life concern for the meanings that emerge spontaneously in the pedagogic process. This nurtures learners with the capacity to ‘take charge of their own learning’ and depends on ‘happenings of truth’ to bridge autonomy and learning. Caring pedagogic practice brings into dialogue teachers and students around tasks organized to disclose and activate students’ capacity for learning.



learning, there can be no revelation; without the real desire to express convictions, there can be no illumination; without pedagogic caring, there can be no freedom of inquiry.

We wanted in our action research to explore how caring pedagogic practice may enable teachers to meet students’ horizons and thus foster autonomy. In the whole process, we had no rigid pedagogic rules to follow. On the contrary, we followed the natural course of our curricular practice to see how meanings were disclosed and autonomy nurtured. We captured those moments of discourse in spontaneous conversation and recorded them through participation (videotapes or written notes) and interviews (audiotapes or written notes). We shared our students’ life concerns, positioning ourselves through observation and reflection in the students’ learning horizons. We kept logs and journals, periodically reading over the evidence, and summarizing what we had learned before posing new questions. We also initiated and regularly attended teacher forums once every other week. Because we see the spontaneous as authentic pedagogic care, we were particularly interested in how well we could capture discourse that emerges from unpredictable and unplanned encounters. What if one corner of the square were freshly cut grass or a single leaf on a tree? What stories might unfold? We chose narrative inquiry out of our belief that truthful knowledge is born within the intuitive, pre-interpreted understandings of story. We believe that narrative captures intelligent human behaviour (Donnelly, 1999) and allows us to enter empathically into another’s life and being. Through stories, we can envision new possibilities for human action and feeling, new horizons of knowing and understanding, and new landscapes of engagement and even enchantment (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000). An interpretive, rather than explanatory mode of action research, concerned with the issue of the dialogic nature of language, thus seemed to help us capture the themes emerging in the stories from our data.

Stories on the way towards autonomy The return to authenticity Huanglaoshi communicated with us how she incidentally made a change to her classroom practice. One day, in front of her class, she recalled caring for lawns in Cambridge, an experience which had been buried in her memory for 10 years. Huanglaoshi shared her reawakened understanding with her students by saying, ‘Each time after my landlady Mrs Bermon cut the lawn I felt the air was especially nice, sweet and fresh. And I would take deep breath to enjoy it! …’ She stopped a second and took a long breath as if smelling that air again.




After class, a student approaches her teacher excitedly, saying, ‘Laoshi [teacher], I also love the smell when the grass is cut, but I dare not tell it to others. I am afraid of being laughed at. “Isn’t it stupid to love the smell of grass?” So I have never dared to tell it to others. But in reality I feel particularly happy each time when I smell it. You told us your story today. You love the fresh smell of grass too. I am so happy you are the same as me.’ The simple statement from the heart awakens the student’s heart. The student hears the call of ‘the smell of grass’ and responds; or rather she is drawn to it speaking through her. Huanglaoshi spoke of her memory of Cambridge simply to show herself in front of her students as a person of authenticity rather than authority. However, with the acknowledgement of her own inner world, the inner truth of the student is publicly honoured and the heart of language legitimated. The next morning, Huanglaoshi received a hand-written letter of over 300 words in English from the student as a dialogue. In it, the student revealed her acute feelings and sharp eagerness to share her own stories. … I can’t fall asleep. I want to let you know my feeling immediately … I like your class very much. You told us that you like the smell when the grass was cut. So do I. When I was in the senior middle school, I told my classmates I liked this kind of smell. They laughed at me for my weird hobby. Now I am so glad because I find you are the same as me. During the class, I thought that moment was so sweet for me. I even dared not smile because I was afraid of the vanishing of the wonderful feeling … (student letter) An inner life aspect is evoked, and the student becomes who she is as knower and learner. Yet, we are so shocked to notice how a person’s authentic language of heart could be suppressed by a discourse that denies the truth of life. Evidently, the smell of grass had not been legitimated in the student’s previous learning environment. With the heart of language dismissed, the student’s life of mind had been covered up. Through the live encounter with her teacher, the student is free again to be herself, to speak her truth. This is exactly the wonderful sense of ‘renaissance’. Her excitement in listening to Huanglaoshi lays less in what is said than in recovering a long-suppressed dimension of identity about which she begins her frenzy. With this, the student projected her being of fen ( ) onto her own world – a heart to heart dialogue with herself as well as her teacher.




I was greatly touched by your introduction of personal experiences … I appreciated that kind of world too … My heart had flied to visit England with you as you described the beauty of it. At that time I kept asking myself why I myself had no courage to notice the beauty, and nearly ignored plenty of other beautiful things in my own life … (student letter) What Huanglaoshi had said to her class was not merely an articulation of words which could be repeated or imitated on other occasions by other teachers. Her words had taken her students into their unique inner landscapes. I feel many things are recovered in my heart and find there are plenty of beautiful places in my own lifeworld which I have nearly ignored. (student letter) Dialogues had spontaneously started in which the students truly had something to say. A few days later, after the class learnt Whitman’s poem ‘Leaves of Grass’, Huanglaoshi asked her students to look around their surroundings phenomenologically, to collect a leaf and compose an English poem based upon this experience. The students had never imagined they could do so in a language they normally learned to exchange information instrumentally. One boy reported to Huanglaoshi that he had failed to get a single leaf during the whole week because ‘the leaves would feel painful. I was not willing to hurt them’. He wrote a long poem to express what emerged from this experience for him. The Leaf All the grasses are brown And the sky is gray I went out for a walk To find back my long lost smile I found a leaf in a bald tree Green, vigorous and alone Dancing in the wind, singing and smiling … The leave sitting in the middle of the tree Looking gently at me. Look! She is a newborn baby, Clean and innocent. And I know when it approaches summer,





The language may not be perfect, but it vibrates with the call of the writer’s heart attuned to the being of leaves. We would not be so naïve to affirm the student became an autonomous learner by that single lesson, but his journal let us see the journey he had embarked on: During the course of writing the poems, I put myself into the Nature to get the inspirations. You will find if you put all your heart into the Nature you can communicate with the nature, and the nature will give you much feelings which help me to complete the ten poems. I am a careless man, and never put myself into nature, to touch, to feel it before I began to write poems. (student journal) It is so ordinary, even trivial, to love such things as the smell of grass. Huanglaoshi’s plain but powerful words had touched the students’ inner hearts and truly made them open their own worlds. Here, caring pedagogy as an inquiry into life is no longer a dogmatic academic game, but a venture into the essence of authenticity to enact the happening of truth. The outcome is a self-awakening, the greatest spiritual freedom. The care of community The way toward autonomy is intermingled with struggle and pain. Accompanying the excitement of empowerment and progress, beneath what often appears as a smooth surface, much tension, uncertainty, discontinuity and conflict exist. To let learners take responsibility sometimes causes anguish. Student Yuli is a case in the extreme. When preparing her oral presentation, she changed her topic of inquiry several times, from ‘Calligraphy Studies’ on her own to ‘Communication’ with others, then back to ‘Calligraphy Studies’, and a few days before the deadline of her oral presentation, she joined Tingting’s group for ‘Hollywood’. We couldn’t help supposing she might well have made a fifth change if time had allowed. Chinese calligraphy is probably her authentic choice in that she returns to it and also chooses it as an optional course, but she is thrown into fear with the empowerment of such choice. Paralysed, Yuli’s learning capacity shuts down.



She turns a bright beauty. There is her cradle. As an angel she smiles Shy but sweet.


I listened attentively and encouraged her. She speaks in a low voice and dare not contact others’ eyes. I suggested her going to the field and shouting as Tod Anderson read the poem in ‘Dead Poets’ Society’. I also stressed my offer to help her exploration. (teacher journal) By seeing the facts clearly and consistently, Huanglaoshi felt anxious to hear Yuli into speech. However, her conscious motivation led Yuli nowhere further. As the oral presentation approached, Yuli retreated behind others to become anonymous in the midst of the crowd. By 9 o’clock of the night before their presentation, the group visited my home for the final discussion. Yuli sat nearby, listening, hardly said anything except the polite words such as ‘en’ or ‘ok’, occasionally nodded and attempted to smile. (teacher journal) The teacher’s sense of caring for free options maintains Yuli’s authentic being, yet fails to dissolve her fear within. As fear took the lead, Yuli was thrown into silence, withdrawal and cynicism. Huanglaoshi’s inner quiet was uneasily disturbed, yet the presentation was soon due. The next morning, the class sat in groups freely as usual. Unexpectedly, Yuli took the initiative to give the opening speech. She stepped briskly to the front of the class without hesitation, her fists half-clenched and her back straight. Instead of giving a report about their inquiry project, she began her inner clarification (417 English words). First I want to thank Tingting. She gave me the courage to stand here bravely. I will never forget last Friday evening. We were talking … walking on the campus and I told her that I don’t know how to face you, my classmates, when I was giving speech. I feel very nervous and don’t know what to say, and how to express … how to express my … my … opinion, so I was … actually, I was very … I cried that night very seriously, and I almost lost my confidence. And Tingting gave my confidence back (laugh). So, do you know? Actually I have lost my confidence in giving speech for a long time, and I used to … let the other people speak, and I was just sitting there saying nothing, and didn’t show my feelings to you … my opinions to you, and I became lazier and anxious. At last, I



To help her student recover her heart, Huanglaoshi talked with her on several occasions. One day, they went for a walk around the campus after supper.


Like a volcano erupting in an instant, Yuli opened her heart fully, revealing her suffering and struggle. Her passion penetrated the class. The speech fell upon the community, bearing its own truth grounded in authenticity. In escaping her inner fear, Yuli got back her heart of learning, went to other places in her inner landscape and began to constitute a learning world of her own. … Do you still remember the little cat in a story? He almost caught nothing because he gave up each time. But that little cat will grow up one day, he will know many things, and me too, I will get my fish, and I will get my success … (CD-ROM transcripts) Sitting at the back of the classroom, we could personally feel her shivering heart, with its intense and mixed emotions of fear and agony, courage and determination. The whole class came into the culture of a caring community, reverberating with her acute feelings and embracing her heart with the passion as deep as in her. We responded with heartfelt applause, and Huanglaoshi gave her a discrete thumbs-up. Yuli had finally escaped from the fear of established discourses and returned into a community where learning stands out in the openness of each person’s inner landscape. Tingting later told Huanglaoshi what had happened after leaving their teacher’s home the previous night. After leaving my home that night, Yuli requested Tingting’s company. They walked around the lake on campus. Yuli revealed her inner fear and cried, ‘You know, I can’t say anything in class. I can’t, even if the teacher asks me to say. I can say nothing. Even if I say something, that would be meaningless. Now I can’t speak!’ Yuli couldn’t calm down, saying that it was so unbearable that there were even moments when she would like to end her life to finish everything! Tingting listened carefully and tried to comfort her. Suddenly, Tingting spotted a line under their feet. She pointed at it and urged Yuli to step it over, ‘Do you see the line? Step over it!’ Concentrating on the line, Yuli temporarily forgot about her acute suffering. She raised her right foot, hesitated and withdrew, raised it again, hesitated … and finally stepped over it. She tried it this way several times, cried hard and then said ‘I felt better’ … (teacher journal)



even didn’t know, oh, what’s my opinion? I really didn’t know, er … how to express my … express my feelings to you. So today I want to change myself, (pause) and so I am showing my feelings to you (silence then laughter). (CD-ROM transcripts)

Being empowered totally frightens Yuli, throws her into fear and finally steals her heart of learning. With communal caring, however, Yuli finally recovers her learning heart. In everyday living, such moments are not rare when learners need communal appreciation for their heart of learning. A caring community is thus crucial for the nurturing of authentic autonomy to become a possibility. The phenomenological way of seeing The prevailing classification and framing of English courses impose technological standards and evaluation of language on academy which greatly constrain learners. Student Anjing revealed her painful pressure in competing with others. Her sense of being a ‘poor student’ had almost paralysed her ability to learn. When she told the teacher, ‘Laoshi [teacher], I feel very nervous now. They make so rapid progress that I can’t catch up with them no matter how hard I work. I feel very anxious, which in turn obstacles my improvement,’ her discourse revealed something about her images of knowledge and learning. If knowledge is viewed as something already out there, waiting to be acquired, the process of ‘getting it’ becomes an individual dilemma. The sense of being a ‘poor student’ exerts painful pressure in competing with others. The desire to catch up with others becomes an external motivation to work hard, yet a cause of painful false autonomy. One morning, Huanglaoshi went to her class 20 minutes earlier than usual, to allow herself to walk lazily in idle enjoyment of the peaceful and clear morning. As she was rounding the Teachers’ Cafeteria, she was suddenly drawn to some forsythias in bloom, some of which had already blossomed, while others were still in bud. She could not resist picking a bunch for the class and, pondering them, she walked on. I was walking around the lake towards the classroom, with the flowers in my hand. In my mind I am searching for the story of the flowers. What would the story look like? I asked myself. (interview notes) Entering the classroom, Huanglaoshi showed her students the lovely flowers and asked, ‘What’s this?’ The students opened their curious eyes, responding in Chinese ‘ying chun hua [forsythias]’. ‘Do you know the name of the flowers in English?’ ‘No’, the students echoed. Huanglaoshi told the class she once learned its English name in America, but then could only remember its initial letter as ‘f’. Spontaneously, she continued:




Look at the flowers! Look at this bunch, some of them have already come out while some are still in bud, but all flowers will eventually come out. That’s the law of nature. The early flowers are appreciated earlier; while the late ones will be later also. That is the only difference, SO YOU ARE. (teacher journal) Then she put the flowers down on the desk without further elaboration. It seemed this was the end of the story. Several days later, Huanglaoshi was deeply surprised to find in a student’s portfolio a reflection on this incident. In a long essay passionately written in English of nearly 400 words, entitled ‘Meditative Flowers’, student Qingqu made sense of the flowers and found herself in them. … We persons are similar to these flowers. Someone’s talents have already become visible under the suitable environment. Many other people might not be so fortunate; they may still hide themselves in bud. If someone guides them to come out, they may get free rein to develop. In other words, they need nutrition and opportunities to show their talent. It’s no need to compare with others in some aspects … (student journal) The teacher’s intuitive articulation brings to the class her phenomenological way of seeing, along with a language which distinguishes no right or wrong. The language opens the student’s heart of learning which was once covered by the technical criteria of educational values. Seven weeks later, two months after the caring pedagogic practice was over, at a teacher forum where several students were present, the truth of the forsythias was further clarified. Zongjie (to students): Didn’t you feel strange then when she brought flowers [forsythias] into the classroom? Wenwen (recalling): I didn’t know why she brought the flowers. She just told us some came out earlier, some later, which activated some deep feelings in me. Zongjie (interested): What kind of feelings? Wenwen (in thought): She said in the class that some flowers came out earlier, some later. Zongjie (smiling): I can say that too. I also know ‘some come out earlier, some later’, but why have you been so deeply touched? Mulan (suddenly): Oh, en, concerned, cared! Because I feel I am concerned. Flowers, some have already come out, some are still in bud.




I identify myself as either flowers or buds. In the first year I just drifted along aimlessly, so I feel I was a bud then. (All laugh heartily) Zongjie: It’s interesting (excited, laughter). It is very interesting. (To Huijuan) Is it the very sense of caring and understanding? (to all) All of a moment, she shifted the consciousness of herself, the position of herself, the identity. She viewed herself as a bud, yet to bloom, how beautiful that is! … no longer a poor student in the sea of struggle. Suddenly she found herself a bud yet to become flowers! (All laugh heartily). (Audio-record transcripts) Our reward is not merely in actions. What we value here is the way of thinking about real life. By articulating her intelligibility of such happenings of truth, the teacher projects possibilities into a space where learners can open up and discover and develop their own ways of understanding the world. Such dialogues of lived experiences show learners ways to the heart of language and re-activate their natural capacity for thinking.

On the way to authentic language autonomy Truthful knowledge is born within intuitive, pre-interpreted understandings. These can, as we have seen, be greatly constrained by the institutional framing of academic subjects and technological language. Authentic learning occurs when we reach the heart of learning, as we eagerly try to catch and clarify our intuited understandings with language which penetrates our heart. As soon as the words become embedded in our inner heart, they can be forgotten. Wittgenstein (1953) suggests a similar paradox of learning to use a language, in that before we can apply a name to something, we must already know it. Authentic autonomy isn’t merely consciously motivated through reasoning, but vibrates with the ‘authentic call coming from within’ (Palmer, 1998: 29). Through heart to heart dialogues with the self personally, communally, and social-culturally, learners embark on the dynamic ‘inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world’ (Palmer, 1998: 6). Through a phenomenological way of seeing, learners ‘remain aware of the sources of the paths’ and thus become ‘able to return to the freedom of the original decision points’ (Huebner, 1999: 145), where they take the responsibility and are ‘ready to undertake organizational and discourse initiatives’ (Little, 1995). This in turn nourishes their ability to transfer their understanding to wider contexts (Little, 1991).




Authentic language autonomy cannot be a static product achieved through a certain project. Rather, it is a dynamic ‘personal growth’ (Little, 2002). In essence, it is a lifelong process of self-nourishment in the form of continual ‘transformation of the social identity’ (Benson, 1994: 10). Learners are on the way when they take the stance of exploring authentic self-knowing: they have started an inner journey towards identity disclosure and nourishment. They do not superficially look for knowledge but make meanings by personalizing the words about which they know how to forget. In the learning process they are not ones to whom things merely happen; they are ones who, by their own volition, cause things to happen (Candy, 1991: 271).

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Ms Huang Aifeng and her 0301 class of the Department of Foreign Languages of Zhejiang Normal University. Their innovative practice provided opportunity and inspiration for the exploration of caring for authentic language autonomy. We also acknowledge the support of the China National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education at Beijing Foreign Studies University for the research described in this chapter.




Active Learnership in Continuous Self- and Peer-Evaluation Teija Natri

Introduction Like many other researchers, teachers and tutors engaged with developing learner autonomy (for example Pemberton et al., 1996; Skehan, 1989; Wenden and Rubin, 1987), I am generally optimistic about the value of autonomy in language learning. Although we may have doubts about our students’ capacities to learn foreign languages without teacher-centred instruction, I feel that we cannot afford to be sceptical about the importance of learner autonomy in today’s rapidly changing world. Learners need to be aware of their ways of learning – their strengths and weaknesses – in order to be able to continuously develop their skills for their future personal and professional lives. Yet, finding appropriate ways to encourage learners to develop more independent methods for language learning within the constraints of a one-semester university course presents many interesting challenges that are not easy to solve. In this chapter, I shall concentrate on the design of a course evaluation system that I have created in order to enhance students’ understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in learning French at the Language Centre, University of Jyväskylä in Finland. I shall first briefly present a picture of language studies in Finland. Secondly, I will explain my attempt to promote learner autonomy, or active learnership, through a specific course evaluation system. My basic position is that if part of the evaluation is carried out by the students, they become more responsible about their own learning. I will also report on some of the student feedback I have received from this course and, finally, I will discuss some of the limitations of this approach within my own particular context. 108



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The University of Jyväskylä’s Language Centre operates within the Finnish higher education system and offers all language and communications studies required in different university degrees in Finland. Because those studies are quite extensive (they involve the national languages, Finnish and Swedish, and one or two foreign languages), all regular degree students at the university are also students of the Language Centre. As Language Centre teachers, my colleagues and I aim to develop students’ language and communications skills for two main purposes: proficiency in academic study and professional life. In addition, we try to enhance students’ language learning skills in order to encourage continuous language learning (Räsänen and Randell, 1999). There are many different paths that can be followed in developing learner autonomy in language learning. Here, I concentrate on one practical approach which is geared to enhancing students’ self-awareness as learners and their ability to evaluate their own language skills by using different self- and peer-evaluation methods during one course.

Shared evaluation: where and for what purpose? When I started to create this learner-centred evaluation system in 2001, I was convinced that if one part of the evaluation were carried out by the students, they would become more responsible for their own learning. I also felt that, if they were to carry out peer-evaluation and have clear responsibility for other students’ learning, their awareness of different language skills would develop even more. Observing and evaluating fellow students would also be of use in understanding their own specific skills. Such active, collaborative learnership would, I believed, provide them with critical tools for nurturing life-long learning. I piloted the evaluation system presented in this case study in 2002. In this system, I emphasize the division of linguistic competence into more specific skills that can then be tested and separately evaluated. I use the division of five linguistic skills introduced by the Council of Europe in the Common European Frame of Reference (Cadre européen commun de référence pour les langues, Council of Europe, 2000b), namely listening, reading, spoken interaction, spoken production and writing. The Common European Frame of Reference (CEFR)1 divides every linguistic competence into the following three broad bands, each of which is further subdivided into two more specific levels:



Language studies in a Finnish university

110 Active Learnership in Continuous Self- and Peer-Evaluation

I mainly use shared evaluation in one intermediate level French course, where the aim is to improve and strengthen students’ skills before they attend the so-called academic level courses required by different faculties. Students taking my class may have begun their French studies at lower or upper secondary school, or only at the university. Course groups tend to be quite heterogeneous in terms of the students’ linguistic skills and also in their ability to evaluate their own skills. The course includes 60 contact hours and some 60 hours of independent learning, with the time shared between developing different skills: listening and reading, spoken and written production, spoken interaction, vocabulary, grammar, cultural know-how and so forth. Yet, with such time constraints, relatively little space is available for focusing on the development of independent language learning skills. Shared evaluation in action I start each course by explaining to the students desired linguistic and practical skills. This gives the students a general sense of the aims of the course, which becomes more specific later when the students are asked to draw on the CEFR and its different skill levels from A1 to C2. At the beginning I also ask them to write down their histories as French learners (where have they studied the language, for how long, how many years ago) as well as their strengths and weaknesses as French learners. Even if the CEFR has its limitations within an academic context, I see its detailed division of linguistic competence as very useful for students when they first start to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Here, the following kind of response is quite typical: ‘I think that I am quite good in reading although I have forgotten a lot about the things I learnt at school. My spoken comprehension and interaction are weaker.’ Generally speaking, most students see their strengths in reading and their weaknesses in spoken use of French. The next stage of self-evaluation involves a more specific skills selfassessment. After the students have carefully read the Common Reference Levels self-assessment grid, either in French or in Finnish, I ask them to indicate which reference level most accurately represents their best prevailing skill in Reading, Listening, Spoken Interaction, Spoken Production, and Writing. A student might, for instance, describe their



• Basic user: A1 (Breakthrough) and A2 (Waystage) • Independent User: B1 (Threshold) and B2 (Vantage) • Proficient User: C1 (Effective Operational Proficiency) and C2 (Mastery).

course-initial listening ability as ‘threshold independent user’ (B1), ‘I can understand the main points of clear, standard speech on familiar matters regularly encountered in school, leisure, etc. I can understand the main point of many radio or TV programmes on current affairs or topics of personal or professional interest when the delivery is relatively slow and clear’, and their course-initial reading ability as ‘vantage independent user’ (B2), ‘I can read articles and reports concerned with contemporary problems in which the writers adopt particular attitudes or viewpoints. I can understand contemporary literary prose.’ The students also determine a target level for each skill, which they aim to achieve by the end of the course. After this more detailed self-evaluation, the students are asked to define some suitable learning methods for every skill. Many students are content with writing down methods used at school because they have never thought about what they could do on their own to learn a language, for example: • (Methods for reading) Repeating vocabulary with different texts. Making lists of words. Exercises with the vocabulary. Seldom do their replies mention alternative ways of reading for different purposes. However, this questioning of learning methods helps them to become more conscious that there are different ways to learn a language. It thus prepares them to diversify their own approaches later in the course. The benefits of self-evaluation This starting self-evaluation serves the learner in two ways. Firstly, it can help the learner to find their own strengths and weaknesses because it lets them see that language learning consists of exercising many different skills and that any one person can be weak in one skill but better in another. Secondly, the learner gets acquainted with varying level descriptions which they can use to specify separate starting and target levels for the five target skills, as the learners start to define their personal goals and orientate their own actions. In sum, the focus on self-evaluation lets the learner take the first steps towards greater learner responsibility and goal determination. The students’ self-evaluation also serves me in many different ways. It provides a lot of information about the students, their learning histories, general skill levels, and so forth. It also shows me clearly their preferred learning methods and goals. I make a list of these and present it to the students, together with other convenient methods that they



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have not mentioned. So, from this point on, course activities and exercises are tailored according to how a particular class group has described and identified their starting skills levels and goals. To bring things together for the students, I present them with a table summarizing the ‘mean level’ of the particular group (see Table 9.1). I explain to them that this will be the basis on which I create the course. Generally, students seem to appreciate the fact that the course is tailored to their own differing skills levels. Every learner can use this table to compare his/her own level against the mean level of the group. If a student realizes that he or she is weaker than the average student in the group, she/he can either move to an easier course or ask for complementary work and continue in the group knowing that she/he has to work harder than most of the group.

Variation in starting skills From one group to another, the mean starting levels may vary significantly. Because of this, the course must be tailored for every group separately. Table 9.1 demonstrates the mean level variation of prevailing skills (where only one or two significant percentages are presented) for six different groups on the same one-semester course between Autumn 2002 and Autumn 2005. (Spoken production is not included in the table, as students hardly ever distinguish it from the spoken interaction in their first self-evaluation.) Table 9.1

Variation in skills starting levels for different groups * Group 1 Group 2 Group 3 Group 4 Group 5 Group 6 (Autumn (Spring (Autumn (Spring (Autumn (Autumn 2002) 2003) 2003) 2004) 2004) 2005) % % % % % %

Listening

A2 45 B1 35

A2 33 B1 29

n/a B1 72

A2 35 B1 47

A2 40 B1 47

A2 29 B1 62

Reading

B1 55 B2 25

B1 38 B2 38

B1 77 n/a

B1 58 n/a

A2 33 B1 40

B1 67 B2 24

Spoken interaction

A1 30 B1 45

A2 38 B1 33

A2 61 n/a

A1 47 B1 29

A2 67 B1 20

A1 29 A2 43

Writing

A2 25 B1 65

A2 33 B1 48

A2 50 B1 33

A2 41 B1 41

A2 27 B1 47

A2 67 B1 24

*Note: A1–A2 (Basic User), B1–B2 (Independent User), C1–C2 (Proficient User)




The table shows large differences in students’ perceptions of their starting levels. One striking difference is in listening skills, with a third of Group One clustering at the level B1 while two-thirds of Group 6 evaluated themselves at that same level. On the other hand, at least half of the students in Groups 3 and 6 put their writing skills starting level as A2, but a near majority of students in other groups estimated their initial competence as B2. Similar contrasts can be noted across other skills areas for these six groups. Deepening the self-evaluation Once the general starting level of the course has been discussed with the students, I prepare another description of the course content which is adjusted to the target levels of the group by using CEFR descriptors. I then present this to the students. This description contains learning paths that have been defined together, that is, the goals specified by students, from starting point to target levels. Students always seem to accept this description voluntarily because they feel that they have actively participated in its creation. The next step is to explain the evaluation design to the students. I normally keep my first explanation quite basic and short because students often seem to get anxious if different forms of evaluation are stressed at the beginning of the course. The evaluation design contains two major types of evaluation, outcome-related evaluation done by the teacher and process-evaluation performed by the students at the end of the course. During the course, students gradually become better acquainted with these two different forms of evaluation.

Patterns in student evaluation In terms of outcome-related teacher testing, I test and assess reading and listening skills twice during the course with small comprehension tests of 15–30 minutes (one in the middle of the course and the other at the end). This test evaluation is accompanied by individual written feedback and common oral feedback, which provide the students with more information about the particular skill tested. In general, reading is one of Finnish students’ most developed abilities with regards to foreign languages. This can probably be attributed to the students’ strong reading abilities in their own language – Finnish pupils, for example, get excellent reading scores in OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2003). So, it is not surprising, then, that



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my students score better on reading than other skills at the beginning of the course. Yet, by the end of the course, students’ final assessments show that they understand that reading is also something else than vocabulary and also that they have the responsibility for their own learning: • I gave myself this grade because I have also been active in reading other texts than the course materials. • My capacity for deduction has strengthened. In contrast, students evaluate their listening skills at the beginning of the course to be clearly weaker than those of reading. This is due to the fact that French is hardly heard in Finland, either on television or on the street, and is only occasionally used in French lessons at school. Most of the independent assignments that I give during the course are related to this skill. Students often say in their later self-assessments that they have tried independently (beyond the course) to improve their listening ability in particular: • I watched some French TV. It was very useful. I find it a very good method for learning. • I still have much work to do on my spoken comprehension. The students also have to produce two different texts (for instance, letters or stories about their past), which I correct and evaluate. I give some written comments about the fluency of the text. French written production appears to be difficult for some students and easy for others. Those who find it difficult mention in their final self-assessment that they have particularly rehearsed vocabulary and grammar or that they should have practised writing more. Some students also seem to be more equipped to recognize their specific writing problems, for example: • My special difficulties in writing are a restricted vocabulary and orthography. • Every day I try to write something in French. I find that particularly those skills that students evaluate as weak benefit from this skill-related approach. From the beginning of the course and the first self-assessment, students pay more attention to their weaker skills and tend to devote more time to developing them




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more than other skills. From this very general point of view, assessing skills separately seems to be useful.

During the course, the students use face-to-face peer evaluation after different spoken interaction exercises, as well as after every spoken presentation. I want them to raise their awareness of excellent or good spoken language skills by becoming familiar with peer evaluation so that, at the end of the course, they can also self-assess their own language skills more accurately. I first give students a scale with a short explanation of six criteria from ‘failed’ to ‘excellent’ that emphasizes, for instance, in spoken interaction: the complexity of sentences, fluency and correctness of phrases and pronunciation, and the capability of maintaining a conversation. I have noticed that in peer evaluation students tend to give each other relatively good grades. They are probably initially uncomfortable giving negative feedback because they do not want to discourage their peers. Such ‘positive feedback’ motivates students and is a necessary part of their growing awareness of learning and language use. I see more progress with spoken presentations because peer evaluation is regularly repeated over a relatively long period. In spoken presentations, the peer-assessment criteria and comments concentrate on how the presentation is structured and whether it is understood by other students, and to what extent. Students seem to have difficulties in distinguishing whether the pronunciation of the speaker/partner is good or not, particularly with regard to intelligibility. A student with pronunciation problems may get the following kind of comment at the beginning of the course: ‘Good presentation. I understood nearly everything you said.’ They develop their pronunciation little by little during the course. At the end, when students have practised more pronunciation and peer evaluation, they can give somewhat more precise comments about the intelligibility of presentations: ‘The presentation was quite easy to follow, although, you still have some problems with your pronunciation.’ Of course, pronunciation is only one feature that they can evaluate. As far as the structure of presentations is concerned, I rarely see any development in the students’ comments over such a short course. In summary, peer evaluation is a supporting exercise that helps raise learner awareness of different levels in language skills. Even if it is relatively difficult to distinguish its benefits with total certainty, I believe that practising different forms of self- and peer evaluation develops students’ analytic skills in language learning.



Using peer evaluation


The final self-assessment is the last step towards learner autonomy in this particular course. The students review the self-assessment grid that they filled in at the beginning of the course and evaluate whether or not they have achieved their goals. They also reflect on their aspirations and efforts to achieve their goals and what they could or should have done differently. In their final end-of-course self-assessments, students report many methods they have used independently, outside the course, to improve their spoken production, for example: • I have practised [speaking] with exchange students. • I am so eager to learn that I speak French even to my mother. [Not mentioned if the mother in question speaks French or not] • I speak French to myself. After these reflections, the students give themselves a separate grade for each skill and explain their final evaluations. In most cases, students report that they have found at least some of their strengths or weaknesses or done more work independently than was asked for the course. Such self-assessment forms about 40% of the final grade. As the teacher, I then combine all the different separate skills grade components and give a final global grade. This consists of self-assessment (40%), teacher evaluation (44%) and peer evaluation (16%) and is entered as the course grade required by the university system.

Advantages and limitations of the evaluation system At the beginning of the course, students often point out the complexity of the evaluation system that is used. However, this situation changes so that, at the end of the course, they seldom criticize the evaluation system. Instead, they emphasize the fact that they have started to see more clearly how to develop their skills and, furthermore, what skills should be practised more. This shift in concern and focus shows that students have not only participated in this course and completed the given tasks, but also reflected on their strengths and weaknesses and quite often done some independent work to improve their weaker skills. If they have only done what was asked of them, they tend to give themselves a lower grade with the following kind of justification: ‘I should have done more’ or ‘I should have worked harder to improve this skill.’ Such additional work was never asked for during the course;



Final self-assessment

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• During the course I have discovered my strengths and weaknesses as a learner. I have also found a new learner in me. In the future, it would be easier for me to set targets for my learning. • At the beginning, I thought I was better than I actually was in reality. Now I am more realistic. • I have decided to learn French but now I see that it will take all my lifetime. In their self-evaluations, the students often define more precise goals for the future, or at least, some things that they should have done in a different way during the course: • I should have practised my oral skills more. • In the future, I will concentrate on spoken production. • I should know more about culture-related conversational constraints. These comments indicate that the students have started making plans for further studies or for life-long learning. Their French studies have not come to an end with that particular course. Even if the comments from students’ papers are rather positive, the evaluation system does not guarantee that after my course every student is fully aware of their strengths and weaknesses as a language learner. The system certainly raises some students’ awareness, and those students are convinced of the usefulness of the system. But then again, some students complete all the different evaluation tasks, but it is very difficult to see any progress in their self-directed learning. This is hardly surprising as many external limitations (for example, university regulations about the course length, large course groups and students’ heterogeneous prevailing skills) have their impact on the results. There are also questions about the structure of a course where students vary in terms of independent goal setting or their capacity for self/peer-evaluation. Students who have had less prior practice at self-evaluation find it sometimes difficult to assess their skills at the beginning of the course or even during the course. The limited practice that is provided during the course is not enough for these students, and they probably need more help in understanding what particular measures would help them to improve their French learning or language learning in general.



rather, students have come to see it as necessary for achieving their individual goals set at the beginning of the course. Other examples of students’ general remarks underline this growth in active learnership:

The evaluation system can also be seen problematic as far as the grades are concerned. In as much as the final grade given to students is not a formal testing grade, it perhaps does not offer the same information about general language ability that some objective test might. An important part of the grade in this evaluation system comes from the student and involves their subjective opinion about their own learning development. In that sense, the final grade is not comparable with other grades which result from more formal outcome-testing. Nevertheless, in their self-evaluations, students are informed and probably also influenced by objective test results for different skills. I believe that evaluating different skills and promoting reflection on learning processes are more valuable than outcome-related testing, even if it is the latter that tends to be formally required by the university. Our students might initially need to show good test scores to employers when they start working, but once they have started their professional lives, they still need to improve their language skills independently. That will be much easier if they have learnt how to reflect on their own individual learning processes while at university.

Conclusion What happens then after this course? How do students go on with their learning processes? I have conducted a small survey of students’ views about learning methods and learning independence after my course. Many students report that after this particular course they understand better their strengths and weaknesses as a French learner and can set themselves more precise goals in learning French. For instance, one student wrote: ‘I found the self-assessment in the beginning and in the end of the course very useful. But it is only useful if one can be honest with oneself. Personally I find it easier now to distinguish my weaknesses and concentrate on them in my language learning.’ Some students report that they do not consciously use this awareness in learning languages other than French: ‘I have had no use of this evaluation system in other language studies’, but the same student also writes: ‘It is a very good method to see one’s language skills and their development.’ Her response suggests that she would see a value in adapting this kind of self-evaluation approach for her other language learning, although it is not clear that this would actually happen. I also have some subjective knowledge of my students’ studies after the intermediate course because they very often go on with my courses. In those courses, they define their language levels and target




levels with more precise versions of CEFR self-assessment grids (using can-do statements) and in most courses continue with the same evaluation system. I demand a more active learnership (online-learning, independent projects and reporting) in my advanced level courses. This kind of teaching is easier to organize in advanced courses because they are not as strictly regulated by the university as the intermediate course. Many of those students who have participated in my intermediate level course continue with me and show their independence by carrying out their individual projects successfully. Of course, not all of the students continue with their studies or with me. There are certainly many reasons for students’ choices, but one of them is probably the fact that some students may have disliked my teaching or my evaluation system. They perhaps did not feel comfortable with self- and peer evaluation or found it of no use for them. One challenge for me, in the future, will be to try to serve those students better too, not just by assessment but by creating new forms of exercises and activities that support independent learning. Even if I am happy with every student who seems to have gained more independence in their language learning during the courses, I fully understand that it is impossible to serve all the different learners well with a single approach. Fortunately, there are other teachers in my Language Centre sharing the same values, but offering different approaches and methods for the development of independent learning. Our teaching is based on the same goal of active learnership. Students therefore have a range of opportunities to develop their own learning in different ways.

Note 1. Example global scales of the common reference levels are: A1 (Basic user) Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things he/she has. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help. (…) C2 (Proficient user) Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read. Can summarize information from different spoken and written sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation. Can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of proficient meaning even in more complex situations.



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Seeking Autonomy in a Lecture Course Hugh Nicoll

Swimming upstream Mid-March: the days lengthening, and the air softening with the passage into spring. In two weeks time we’ll be saying farewell to our graduating students, and to this academic year. I am also racing to prepare for the new one. The anxiety of preparing the new syllabus never seems to diminish. The message I have to keep telling myself is the same one I use to reassure my students: ‘It’s okay to feel confused. In fact, it’s a necessary part of learning … Yes, I know it’s hard,’ I say when I’m trying to help them get or stay focused on a writing project. ‘Just take it step by step.’ Inevitably, I start telling stories about growing up in a small village in Maine, and then moving to the very different world of Washington, DC at the age of six. ‘If you want to develop the ability to wander, to take delight in discovering the woods or the big city, you have to cultivate the ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We have to keep working and not to be afraid of getting lost.’ I remember how true this is as I reflect on my perennial struggle with my Introduction to American Studies lecture class here at Miyazaki Municipal University (MMU). That struggle began with my attempts to understand and address the inherent constraints the university timetable imposed on me as the instructor and on the students as learners. It continues as I try to find ways to turn these constraints into a ‘springboard for improvement’ (Vieira, 2003: 220) and construct models of teacher and learner autonomy appropriate to our shared institutional setting. There are times when my effort to challenge the dominant paradigms of the introductory lecture course in this small Japanese university seems pure folly, and destined only to fail. The Introduction to 120



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American Studies class meets once a week, for 90 minutes, for a 12-week semester, and generally has an enrollment of between 140 and 160 students. It is designed to meet the Ministry of Education requirement for an introduction to American history and literature for students studying for a teacher’s licence. It is also supposed to help students to reflect on their identities as Japanese citizens, and raise their awareness of cultural differences. Clearly the primary limitations on any sort of development for the students are the lack of contact hours, and logistical difficulties for me in providing feedback to the students on assignments. While the course is not a language course per se, I am teaching in English in order to give the students further opportunities for developing their English abilities. My twinned struggles to understand my situation and communicate coherently with others about it thus frame the key questions I explore in this essay: What do I want my students to take away from their experience of the course? And, not so parenthetically, its complement: what do I not want them to experience? How are these first two questions linked to the ways in which I would define learner autonomy and learner empowerment in this institutional context, and also in relation to the content of the course? Where do these questions fit in my own interrogation of education, and of what I assume learning and teaching to be? In what ways can learning how to listen to the students’ voices inform my own practices as a teacher? Finally, how can the writing of this chapter help me better balance my responsibility as lecturer with my belief in learner autonomy?

Outcomes, invisibility and exhaustion In an earlier version of this narrative (Nicoll, 2004), I used the image of a salmon swimming upstream, against the current, to spawn, as a metaphor for expressing my sense of myself as teacher. I am not sure I remember precisely what I had in mind at the time, but perhaps the image of the salmon represented my sense of myself in what I felt, and still clearly feel, to be my perennial challenge to reinvent myself within the context of the course: the teacher as romantic rebel, swimming against the current of the established paradigms. In my case, I see myself swimming against the tide of exam-oriented teaching. The standard in the Japanese lecture room – even here at MMU with its emphasis on seminar-based learner-centred teaching – is for the professor to transmit knowledge, and the students to take notes, study for and pass the exam in order to get credit for the course.



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I assumed these stereotypes to be more or less accurate when I began to teach the American Studies lecture course. Casual walks past lecture halls and glances into lecture room windows seemed to confirm these impressions. Most students appear less than fully engaged in the content of the lessons. They sit as far back in the classroom as possible, many sleeping, studying for other classes, furtively or openly sending text messages, talking with their friends, adjusting their hair, and retouching their make-up. In the 23 years I’ve been teaching in Japan, MMU is the first institution I’ve taught in where there is something of a homework culture. And even here, I’ve been told by a colleague that he would never assign homework because the time it would take to correct or comment would interfere with his research. When I began teaching the course, I felt that it would be impossible to give a sufficient introduction to American cultural history in a 12-week semester with once-a-week 90-minute lectures. I knew that most of the students would not have the language skills to deal with large amounts of authentic texts, and that most of them would not have a very good grasp of world history, American geography, or current events. These gaps in their knowledge would hinder their ability to connect with my passions for American art, history, literature, and music. I chose, therefore, to use an introductory text from a major publisher, and encouraged the students to read the text as a way of preparing for the content of the lectures, in which I would introduce music, paintings, excerpts from historical texts and/or contemporary news articles addressing key issues in American history and social life. I continued this practice for two years, but grew disillusioned. Based mostly on outside-of-class conversations, I felt sure that the students found the texts I had chosen too difficult. I also felt increasing uncomfortable with the constraints imposed on us by the text-based syllabus, particularly with the way in which it silenced the students. As Allwright has observed, textbooks ‘revolve around the basic idea that units should consist of particular things, quite narrowly conceived, to be taught in a particular order, in particular lessons’ (Allwright, 2005: 11). After considering my options, and discussing strategies for giving some control over content to the students with colleagues, I decided to experiment with a poster presentation session. In its first iteration, I devoted just one day out of the semester to a poster session and asked students to organize their own groups, choose topics and present their work to the whole class (Furmanovsky and Sheffner, 1996; Glick et al., 1999; Yamane and Ryan, 2000). With approximately 150 students divided up into research and poster making groups of four to six



122 Seeking Autonomy in a Lecture Course

members, this made for a noisy, albeit cheerful, special event. But I still felt that there should be a way to move toward a more interactive, less teacher-centred approach, despite the formidable logistical constraints. There seemed no practical way in which one teacher in such a large class setting could manage the portfolio-based project work we were introducing successfully in our reading and writing classes at MMU. And yet, I remained committed to the goal of a transformative pedagogy, with an emphasis on learning rather than teaching. I was seeking some way of acting on the eight ways Leni Dam (1995) suggests the teacher’s role may change in making the shift to a teacher/learnerdirected learning environment. In particular, I wanted to create time and space for dialogue, to ‘focus on learning rather than teaching,’ by being ‘open to learners’ ideas and suggestions’ (Dam, 1995: 5). Achieving this shift in my lecture course setting felt especially paradoxical. On the one hand, the students had embraced the poster session as the best part of the course in post-course surveys. But they also enjoyed being introduced to new knowledge and wanted me to provide them with new ways of thinking about the world and new ways of linking American art, history music, literature, to their own concerns. I also felt that no matter how many good moments I had as a lecturer, I would never be sure if these efforts would help my students become more autonomous learners and gain access to the discourses of history, literature, and cultural criticism. The fundamental problems were and remain the invisibility of learning, how long learning takes, and of course, how fragile and elusive it is. The moments of discovery, the epiphanies of learning and communication, which I hope to facilitate, are fragile, evanescent, and elusive – analogous perhaps, to the statement that closes jazz musician Eric Dolphy’s final recording session, Last Date (1964): ‘When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.’ With those thoughts in mind, and aided by student suggestions on how to further develop the poster session idea within the lecture course setting, I began to discover a more compelling reading of the salmon image – one that is, I hope, more accurate and more ecological.

Creating greater spaces for collaborative learning In the effort to shift to a more teacher/learner-directed learning environment, I introduced open-ended narrative questionnaires at the end of the semester to help me respond to students’ ideas and suggestions. I have used such questionnaires in 2003, 2004 and 2005. Comments



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124 Seeking Autonomy in a Lecture Course Table 10.1

Student feedback in 2003

• I think it’s important that researching a theme which one is interested in. Making poster is one way of researching and thinking. • Many of other course, teacher always teach us in words and prints. So, we only listen. But, doing poster project, we can research American culture by ourself. And, there are many group, there are many theme. So, we can relate to many cultures. So, this project is very useful. • I think it’s good for student, because we have no chance to cooperate other people in the university. • I suggest that each group speak in front of other people about their poster.

from the students in 2003 encouraged me to consider how to give more space for student presentations in the following year (Table 10.1). Students seemed to enjoy the sense of achievement they gained as individuals, but most importantly, took pleasure in learning from each other, cooperating in their project teams and, in sharing their posters with the whole class, began to build a sense of whole-class community. In response to these suggestions, we held three poster sessions in the 2004 academic year. Following the leads from colleagues pursuing similar strategies in other Japanese universities (Glick et al., 1999, for example), I assumed that the repeated practice of speaking in front of their peers would provide them with a chance to improve their fluency and self-confidence in public speaking. I also assumed that the presentation format – requiring the groups of students not presenting during a particular week to move around the room, listen to their peers’ presentations, ask questions and fill out feedback and evaluation forms – would facilitate greater interactivity and learning. While the overall response to the project was positive, I was surprised by the strongly expressed suggestions that all presentations be one group at a time, and that the instructor exercise stricter control over topic selection. Some students, it became clear, wished to hear and respond to all of their peers’ presentations (Table 10.2). These comments forced me to re-examine my assumptions concerning student attitudes about doing presentations in front of the whole class and about the importance of my own lectures. In my teaching diary on course re-design in 2004, I included the note ‘learner as informant’, which served to remind me of the potential importance of



• I could know many things about American culture and history to watch our posters. This study style is very good.

Hugh Nicoll 125 Table 10.2

Student comments in 2004

• … next year I want you to have many time of poster project. This year, I couldn’t hear all poster project. It is very regret to me. • I wish the number of poster project add. There were so many people that I could not listen all team presentation, so I want to increase the number of poster project. • … in next year, this course will be the class that everyone can debate what they think without any shame. The Poster Project gave us a lot of time to announce our opinion. but in next year, students should be given more time to do that. • I wish that the next year everyone can listen all group’s poster project. So if possible, poster project must be taken place many times, not only three times.

learning how to listen to the students. Despite my professed faith in learner autonomy as an appropriate goal, I realized that I still felt a strong, almost overpowering urge to work and rework my lectures, to somehow squeeze in more and more content into them. I feared I was falling victim to the fallacy that the students were going to learn what I was trying to teach. I realized, in short, that I had once again to let go of the teaching points, or at least not overvalue them, and find ways of helping the students to become more articulate in knowing themselves as learners. That required giving them more power to negotiate the syllabus, and would, I felt, force me to accept failures in our respective domains as teachers and learners. I would have to accept my failure to communicate all that I wanted to share about American cultural history, and I would also have to accept their failures in researching and presenting their projects, as the necessary price of co-creating a more truly collaborative learning environment. In 2005, therefore, I changed the syllabus to include six presentation sessions and rewrote the course questionnaire in an effort to tease out student attitudes on the respective benefits of my lectures and their own presentations. In 2005, 138 students chose to finish the course. The final assessment session was scheduled during the exam week, and attendance was required for all students who wished to pass the course. Final reports were collected, and I asked the students to write a brief narrative self-assessment and to give themselves a letter grade and the corresponding score in points, in addition to filling out the questionnaire.



• Poster presentation publish one group in front of class.

I deliberately built redundancy into the questionnaire, in the hope that student perceptions of positive outcomes in developing academic literacy skills, the development of better understanding of collaborative learning strategies, and student critiques of the course activities might be drawn out by more than one question. This produced some repetition in responses, which I see as useful in so far as the paratactic accretion of details and affective factors in student responses tend to corroborate particular factors in assessing the overall design of the course. The accumulated corpus of student responses can thus be mined and used to support my long-range goal of turning the course constraints into opportunities for the re-evaluation of teacher and learner dynamics, and building a more ‘teacher/learner-directed learning environment’ as discussed by Leni Dam (1995). This seeking of learner and teacher autonomy remains, in my experience, in continuous tension with the competing pressures on me as instructor to fulfill the role of lecturer. This same tension in some cases informs individual student responses to the end-of-course questionnaires and is also observable in groups of students holding different attitudes on what their roles and responsibilities should be, as well as in the perceptions of the instructor. The experience I’ve had in this course is akin to the experiences in seeking autonomy in other contexts here at MMU; in reading and writing courses, and in seminars in American Studies, in which I have had to labour under similar, though in some ways less extreme conditions. The closest analogue was in writing classes of 65 students, in which I had to learn to let go, and trust the students to eventually find the high-frequency errors in their own and their peers’ compositions. This is by and large an extremely stressful tack – the ambiguity, and the necessity of staying calm in the face of confusion, self-doubt, and the pressure to intervene and fix things can feel almost unbearable. In 2005, one student proved exceptionally articulate and aware of the challenges and benefits the course design provided her (see Table 10.3). These are, of course, the sort of ideal learner perspectives we as teachers would like to observe or receive as a matter of course. Although this student was exceptionally articulate, her opinions were consistent with a majority view, and her observation that students listened more carefully to each other’s presentations than they did to mine certainly jibes with my own informal observations during class. She also linked peer learning explicitly to the benefits she perceived as most valuable in her learning:




Hugh Nicoll 127 Table 10.3

Student no. 49’s comments in 2005

1. What benefits did you get from the lectures? I got a lot of things from this lectures. The lecture to use English (English only) was a first experience for me, so I could learn how to listen “real English” how to write “real English,” I think. 2. What benefits did you get from doing your group presentation? I have never done such a work so group presentation was a good experience for me. I could learn how to search, how to do presentation, how to speak English in front of a lot of people and how to think about histories of America. 3. What benefits did you get from other groups’ presentations? I could know that America have a lot of cultures from other groups’ presentations. Some group search about American histories which I have never heard. Therefore other group’ presentations gave me so many knowledge about America, I think. 4. What relationship did you see between the instructor’s lectures and student group presentations? I think these two lectures are important for us. However, we listen to other students’ lectures more carefully than teacher’s because students’ lectures are made by all of students. Section B: Comments and suggestions 1. I wish … … that I study English (include cultures, history, language and so on) hard. I got a lot of useful skills from this class so I think that I should use these skills to improve my skills more and more. 2. The best part of the course … … is Group Presentations, I think. We could study about American cultures and histories. It was an important experience for us because there are few chance to do presentation to use English. 3. I learned most from … … Group Presentation. It was a great experience for me. I could learn how to search, how to do presentation and so on. 4. My suggestions for the presentation project are … … Group. I think that 7 or 8 group did their presentation same class was so hard. Therefore, I think that 5 or 6 group should do presentations in the same class.

• Knowledge of content – American history, culture, and so on – deepened, at the same time as she saw her language skills improving. In her response to item B1 as well, she celebrates knowledge and the benefits of academic literacy, although not specifically in standard ‘academic’ terms.



Section A: Classroom experiences


The thoughtful, articulate, and positive responses from this student are exactly the kind of responses I sometimes need, at least to keep my spirits up. Especially when I slip back into thinking that I have to bear the full responsibility for what happens in the classroom, to put on the hero’s mantle in pursuit of positive outcomes, this sort of response becomes especially attractive. Such a response is, however, rare, and most importantly, disputed by other quite different responses: silences, requests for more Japanese translations and for more transmission-centred teaching. And yet, it is precisely in the margins, where opposing views come into conflict, and the tensions between ‘the teacher’s lectures’ and ‘the students’ presentations’ can be explored, that both the students and I may gain the most critical purchase on what is most valuable in our continuous efforts to collaboratively re-construct the classroom and our authority as teachers and learners. I am, then, increasingly drawn toward student responses that reveal tensions, gaps, dissonances, and difficulties that will affect all of us as members of a more teaching/learning-centred class (see Table 10.4). Table 10.4

Dissonances in student comments in 2005

Embracing interactivity, collaborative work, learner/teacher relations: • I thought it is a wonder that professor Nicoll lectured to us, but we didn’t ask you any questions. • My suggestions for the presentation project are ‘not speaking one-way but communicating teacher or students and students’. • In the instructor’s lectures we became passive because we were only listening to and thinking. But in student group presentation, we had to make effort, so not passive, negative, but positive. • I got various knowledge through other groups’ presentations. Their presentations taught me things which I did not know. Thanks to their presentation, my knowledge about American culture widened. • Our instructor gave us some hint. Then we studied a lot of things. In a words, he was a guide to lead us the goal of our presentation. Vs. a request for a more teacher-fronted approach: • I think relationship between the instructor’s lecture and student group presentation is not well. I want to teaching from teacher more.



• The group presentation project was her favourite part of the course, and in her response to item B4, she has constructive criticism to offer regarding the constraints under which student presentations were given.

Critiques such as the last example in Table 10.4 have been expressed by a relatively small number of students each year and are often immediately contradicted by a response to a different question. The student quoted above, for example, also claimed that the best part of the course ‘is group presentation, because I haven’t had presentation time by now’. But over the years I have learned to accept these dissonances and conflicts, and no longer believe that I should expect such tensions to be resolved, for myself or for the students. It is in the gaps, misunderstandings, and mistakes that we can find the space to negotiate the curriculum. And it is in those spaces, only by embracing ambiguities and lack of closure over time, that we can build authentic learning experiences. This discovery also helped me to read the salmon metaphor in a new way and see the journey upstream against the current, from a species or collective point of view. Learning to listen to the learners, and in that knowledge to begin to let go of the image of myself as an individual struggling upstream in isolation, has given me new confidence in my attempt to create a demanding but learner-centered laboratory. The student responses to the questionnaires and on their weekly feedback sheets indicates that students are beginning to see that academic literacy is built on this struggle to see the world and oneself in new ways through dialogues – with texts, with themselves, with each other, and with their teachers. In their study of learner autonomy in the Japanese context, Aoki and Smith (1999: 20) argue that, in embracing a critical pedagogy necessary for students to ‘become authors of their own worlds’, we must avoid undermining students’ potential for growth and development. And, as Pennycook reminds us, autonomy ‘is not something achieved by the handing over of power or by rational reflection: rather, it is the struggle to become the author of one’s own world, to be able to create one’s own meanings, to pursue cultural alternatives amid the cultural politics of everyday life’ (Pennycook, 1997: 39). In other words, our efforts must begin in our classrooms with a shared commitment to literacy and learner autonomy, even though students may ‘begin, but not complete their development of academic literacies in our classrooms.’ (Johns, 1997: 19). My experiences in the American Studies lecture course, and with my American literature seminar students, tell me that underestimating our students is exactly the wrong direction to take. Only by building – together with our students – a foundation for the continuous, lifelong development of literacy can we fulfill our responsibility as teachers committed to an engaged pedagogy. Ann Johns



Hugh Nicoll 129

describes the enormity of the task thus: ‘to educate and motivate students to confront a myriad of texts, roles, and contexts that we cannot possibly predict or describe with accuracy’ (Johns, 1997: xi). The Japanese verb okuru or okuridasu includes the meanings of send, dispatch, to take or escort a person to their destination and to spend a period of time or to live a life. Using this as a metaphor for learner autonomy creates an ethical and critical counterpart to what Brian McVeigh (2002) has described as the malevolent ghost that haunts the Japanese university classroom, and also to the ideological forces in Japanese corporate and institutional culture, which continue to define the university as a simulacrum, rather than as a space of real learning. To help our students ‘negotiate intelligently the texts, roles, and academic contexts in which they operate’ (Johns, 1997: 18) means linking Johns and other applied linguistics researchers with literature professors such as Jerome McGann and Gerald Graff, who are pursuing similar inquiries but from different disciplinary starting points. Graff, for example, reminds readers of Clueless in Academe that what students most need to know is how to join what he calls the ‘culture of ideas and arguments’ (Graff, 2003: 2) – how to play the writing game, in other words, how to enter into imaginative conversations with one’s peers. ‘Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, [academics] have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize … [their arguments] in a recognizable way, and make [their] own relevant argument. This argument literacy,’ he goes on, ‘the ability to listen, summarize, and respond, is rightly viewed as central to being educated.’ As Johns points out, this involves the development of an informed concept of literacy, beyond the notion that skills as conceived in an exam-oriented institutional culture of education can be easily and quickly acquired and tested. This is, I think, the realization that many of our students will and are making, but only if we swim with them, and in so doing sustain the environment within which we make our perennial returns to this struggle towards autonomy and literacy.

Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Miyazaki Research Foundation in presenting an earlier version of this paper in Hangzhou, China in June 2004, and am especially indebted to my collaborative partner, Flávia Vieira, for her comments and questions, and to our editors, Andy and Steve, for their support.




Uses of Adversity: Moving Beyond L2 Learning Crises Rebecca L. Oxford, Yaru Meng, Zhou Yalun, Jiyeun Sung and Rashi Jain

Sweet are the uses of adversity … William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Sc. 1 Our lives are surrounded by our stories and those of other people. We see everything that happens to us in terms of these stories, as we sometimes try to lead our lives as if we were recounting them. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots, 1964

Introduction A crisis is an unstable, unpredictable, difficult, and sometimes dangerous situation. A significant L2 learning crisis can occur over a major cultural and linguistic identity shift, especially if the person has moved to a new country. In such circumstances, many L2 learners, no matter how articulate they may be in their native language, often feel babyish, foolish, or humiliated when trying to communicate in the L2. L2 learners might also experience crises in a classroom in their native country if they have a major style conflict with the teacher or are ridiculed by the teacher or peers. L2 crises frequently occur when learners experience failure. We are not implying that language learning consists of nothing but difficulties, that it is not enjoyable, or that all L2 learners will inevitably face a crisis. However, instances of crisis, fleeting or longer-term, can and do arise for many individuals, who have different ways of dealing with these events when they occur. We, the chapter authors, have experience with L2 crises. Recently one of us, an experienced teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL), had an L2 crisis involving language-based social rejection and powerlessness in the US, but managed to regain her sense of self by 131



11

writing deep, emotional reflections. Another experienced an L2 crisis involving social isolation and erosion of self-esteem while living in a European country and was able to transcend it only after leaving that country. Another was publicly slapped, ridiculed, and humiliated by her language teacher but transformed that crisis by trying to understand and forgive the teacher. Yet another experienced several major cultural and linguistic shocks when moving to different countries, though she rapidly recovered through immediate local involvement and diligent efforts to improve her L2 skills. Still another encountered several sharp L2 crises as an EFL learner in her native country, but she vanquished them through private practice and courageous linguistic risk-taking. Our personal experiences have taught us some lessons: (a) crises are situations in which we feel powerless and believe we have no effect or choice, that is, we lack a sense of agency and autonomy; and (b) surmounting a crisis involves regaining or developing agency and autonomy. As Palfreyman states, some ‘find or construct opportunities for autonomy in unlikely places’ (Palfreyman, 2003: 13, emphasis as in original), including L2 crises. In addition, the first author intuited that resiliency, the ability to prevail against risk factors and succeed despite odds, is crucial for overcoming L2 crises. Later, she discovered that resiliency is a vibrant, recognized research field not yet discovered by L2 researchers. Our impassioned research question became: To what extent and in what ways do autonomy, resiliency, and other factors synergistically contribute to an individual’s transcending an L2 crisis in a specific socio-cultural situation? To answer this question, we decided to use narrative inquiry. Narrative – the telling and interpreting of stories – is a way of making sense of our lives and those of others (Bruner, 1990). We present four stories of learners in crisis, discussing each L2 learner’s psychological reactions and the power relationships in the learner’s socio-cultural setting. Two of the stories are from our own authors’ experiences, while the other two come from the first author’s database of authentic stories of L2 learners. Before presenting the stories, we present a number of key concepts relevant to our interpretation of learner crises.

Key underlying concepts in our interpretation of learner crises We discovered the importance of the following concepts as we interpreted the stories about learner crises: self-determination, autonomy,



132 Uses of Adversity: Moving Beyond L2 Learning Crises

and resiliency. Self-determination, a theory of motivation, addresses the extent to which people choose their actions (Deci and Ryan, 1995; Ryan and Deci, 2000). Empirical research shows that autonomy (capability to regulate one’s own thoughts, learning, and actions in a particular situation), competence (a belief in one’s own ability), and relatedness (a sense of being connected with others) are related to intrinsic motivation (doing something because of its novelty, interest value, and challenge), and that these elements synergistically create self-determination (Ryan and Deci, 2000). Several forms of extrinsic motivation, that is, doing something because of an external system of rewards, punishments, or values, are not related to self-determination; however, if a learner closely identifies with and internalizes that external system, the more the person feels autonomous and the greater the possibility of self-determination (Ryan and Deci, 2000). The definition of autonomy is given above. Autonomous learners tend to display social competence and social involvement (Brown, 2003; Little, 1994), as well as motivation, self-efficacy, sense of purpose, positive attitudes, and strategic action (Bandura, 1997; Breen and Mann, 1997; Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Deci and Ryan, 1995; Oxford, 2003). Many of these qualities are also germane to resiliency. Resiliency is the ability to face risk factors or crises without being debilitated and to become successful despite the odds (Berliner and Benard, 1995; Masten, 2006; Zimmerman and Arunkumar, 1994). The ‘protective factor’ model of resiliency states that certain factors, such as sense of purpose, problem-solving skills, autonomy, and having a mentor, can protect the at-risk person (or person in a crisis) and reduce the probability of negative outcomes.

Exploring learner crises As noted earlier, our research approach to the stories in this chapter is narrative inquiry, which is fundamental to human meaning-making (Polkinghorne, 1996). When we read or listen to stories, we seek the voice of the storyteller, but the process of story composition ‘is not completed in the text but in the reader’ (Ricoeur, 1991: 26). ‘And so the worlds of readers and texts, speakers and listeners, must be brought together, co-inhabited, in order for understanding to occur’ (Squire, 2004). Therefore, although we present our own interpretations of stories in this chapter, readers will also create their own understandings. In analysing and interpreting the stories in this chapter, we used several tools: thematic coding, self-designed pictorial and verbal sto-



Rebecca L. Oxford, Yaru Meng, Zhou Yalun, Jiyeun Sung and Rashi Jain 133

rymaps, and iterative, multifaceted oral and written discussions, until we reached consensus. Our interpretations benefited from the team members’ different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, international living experiences, and age range (from the mid-twenties to the late fifties). Through re-telling the stories to each other and discussing our interpretations, we gradually came to agree on the following interpretations for each of the stories below.

Four learner crises interpreted The following stories struck us as particularly interesting because they involve very different ways of dealing (or not dealing) with L2 crises and because the learners are of different ages, genders, and backgrounds. These are the stories of Eerik, Flavia, Ying, and Ji. Eerik’s story Eerik described learning German in his former Finnish high school. He was about 16 at the time of the events. My worst teacher was my German teacher in Finnish high school. I have an open learning style: I support really relaxed studying environment. In fact, I like the idea ‘Study if you want to.’ Means that you’ve to study by yourself and teacher gives advices to you, but doesn’t give the pressure of bad homework grades, etc. However, my German teacher was 50 years old and supported old methods: many rules and lots of homework. Homework was many times memorizing and learning words and sentences. She tested us every class randomly. She just pointed someone to answer, and that was really stressing to students. It is a good teaching style for someone, but for students who are not interested in German or doesn’t want to study so hard it’s frustrating and stressing. I didn’t want to study two hours a day German in home. I want that studying is reasonable. I wasn’t the only one who used skip German classes quite often. Main reason was too many homework and tests without mention before. I didn’t want to go to class and be like in cross-imagination. Many people learn a lot in that class but for some people, like me, it was just pain and totally useless class. My grades were OK, because I read a lot for final German test, but she was awful and I hope she has retired or moved away … Interpretation: Eerik’s L2 crisis was ongoing, simmering with the resentment of an isolated young man who did not have problem-solving strategies to deal with a bad academic situation. We might think that the crisis reflected a rebellious teenage phase, but details reveal a




deeper teacher–student style conflict between his learning style (open, relaxed, ‘Study if you want to’ and study by yourself) and his German teacher’s highly traditional, teacher-centred, test- and homeworkintense style. He never wanted to see the teacher again (I hope that she retired or moved away …). The class was frustrating and stressing. He read a lot to pass the final exam, a joyless expression of extrinsic motivation, and the German course remained just pain and totally useless. There is an underlying theme of social powerlessness. Eerik did not express his needs to the teacher. Uninterested in German, he was resistant – a form of ‘negative autonomy’ – toward the teacher, skipping class and avoiding homework. This resistance did nothing to change the classroom power balance. Flavia, whose story follows, showed greater positive autonomy than Eerik but still exhibited bitterness at grammar-based language learning. Flavia’s story In her twenties, US-born Flavia wrote about learning Spanish as an undergraduate and then going to Spain. My language classroom experience, as a student, has been limited to four semesters of study in Spanish at the University of X. The four classes are essentially indistinguishable (although there were four different instructors) in that they were all non-communicative, follow-the-book, instruction-in-English types of classes. As a first-time language learner (and a relatively young one at that, age 19 to 21), I … simply adapted (and, as far as grades were concerned, successfully – all A’s). The first conflict or tension I felt regarding the instruction I received did not arise until four months after completing the final course. At this time, armed with a relatively large vocabulary (I had made extensive use of flashcards – not a teacher suggestion – to memorize) and a ‘grade A’ knowledge of grammar, I entered Spain for an extended visit (intended to be two months – ended up being six!). I was shocked and dismayed to realize that despite all my [prior Spanish-learning] efforts, none had been communication-oriented. My ‘only success’ had been in the realm of superficial communication (ordering in restaurants, making travel arrangements, hotel arrangements, etc. for myself and my [native Englishspeaking] companion), I realized that if I was to achieve any ‘real’ success (developing relationships in which I really learned something about the people and their culture), I needed to unlearn almost everything that had led me to my prior academic ‘success’. So I set about doing that, not focusing on grammar and structure in order to carry on non-formulaic conversations. I did achieve a relative degree of success, and after two to three




months I realized that the formal instruction I had received had not been totally useless: I did have in me the knowledge of the structure that I could use in Krashen’s sense of ‘monitoring’. However, my experience with formal class instruction left me somewhat bitter and distrustful of foreign language classrooms. Interpretation: As a high-achieving, flashcard-wielding undergraduate student, Flavia had no problem learning Spanish non-communicatively. Her teachers and/or the Spanish Department had set all the (grammar-based) learning objectives, which she followed blindly without establishing any additional (communicative) objectives of her own. By accepting others’ goals unconditionally, she ceded power to the authorities and demonstrated extrinsic motivation. Flavia went to Spain after graduation to develop cross-cultural relationships and learn about Spanish culture. There she was shocked and dismayed to discover that grammar knowledge had not prepared her for L2 communication. Having an English-speaking companion in Spain probably limited communicative options, on top of Flavia’s predictable, upsetting, largely silent period. Her high expectations of herself were not met, and she was in crisis. The crisis helped her grow. She decided to unlearn almost everything that had led me to my prior academic ‘success’ and started developing cross-cultural relationships. She revealed autonomy, competence, and relatedness with others. The intrinsic motivation she showed in Spain was related more to cultural development and less to L2 learning and use; she never mentioned any L2 enjoyment. Problemsolving skills and a sense of purpose made Flavia rather resilient, so she reached a reasonable degree of success and stayed longer than intended. She grudgingly admitted a minor benefit (‘monitoring’) of the grammar-translation method, but she remained bitter about traditional classroom learning. We now turn to Ying, who was resilient like Flavia, but showed greater growth. Ying’s story Ying described her emotional roller-coaster ride of learning English as a foreign language in China. When I began my English study in middle school, I felt so at home with English. That passion was ignited by my sister before. My English was best even in the key high school in the county.




First setback. My first blow was at college, located far away from my county. I participated in an English speech contest. After I recited the article I chose, the judge asked me a question which almost embarrassed me to death. She (a native English speaker) asked what the title of my speech meant. Can you imagine how my ‘speech’ was? The judge didn’t catch anything!!! My pronunciation was very poor. Another time when my phonetics teacher approached and squatted down trying to correct one of my strange pronunciations, I produced even weirder sound and the whole class was actually laughing. Many of my classmates were from cities or at least towns, and their pronunciation was better. I was, for a while, so sad and isolated. I even felt shamed of being from a remote village, being a farmer’s daughter. My mom had always taught me to be humble. In that period of time, I was really ‘humble to the earth’. Actually I didn’t have any confidence about my English pronunciation. I doubted for the first time my so-called ‘good English learner’ skills. Resilience. But deep in heart, I never lost my interest in learning English. I needed courage to speak, and the courage was somewhere I could not see until one time at end of the semester. I still remember one time when my Intensive English teacher was having her supervisor observing her teaching. She wanted to have some interactive activities and asked for someone to go to the front to say something. We hadn’t had that kind of activities before. It was silent. Nobody else helped her out, so I decided to. I stood up and went to the front telling the class a story in English. I didn’t know what my teacher thought, or whether my classmates understood my poor pronunciation. One thing was very sure: no one laughed. I thought they were just surprised by my courage. I felt so good after that!!! New self. Realizing my problems, I got up very early every morning, reading English articles and books aloud in the gardens on campus even when the sky was not so bright enough. I seemed to be able to gain strength from the nature, the grass, the trees, flowers and the morning air. I felt I was myself there and I gradually created a ‘new me’. I made sure I could read the articles fluently before I went into the classroom so that when asked to read, I would not have any problem like stumbling or weird pronunciations. I often volunteered to read for the class. I was so happy when one of my roommates said my English sounded like American English. In the Graduate Album, a classmate wrote: ‘I was surprised to find in the past 4 years, you were more and more beautiful’. That beauty mentioned by my classmate, I think, was from confidence. I participated in a speech contest again in the third year held for English major students. I won the second [place] award.




Interpretation: Before college, Ying was a competent EFL learner, best … in the county. In college, this identity was threatened by the speech judge who couldn’t understand her and by classmates’ derogatory laughter. Instead of rejecting the negativity, she internalized it. Her deep shame – humble to the earth – suggests she believed others had more power and were superior to her and that she offered nothing. However, only Ying bravely spoke in English when the teacher needed help to save face in the eyes of a supervisor. Ying’s compassionate action was transformative, resurrecting her former competence and leading to new learning strategies, greater beauty, a speaking award, and a self-determined, resilient, ‘new me’. Ying gained strength through adversity and became a more skilled L2 learner. The next story also reveals an L2 crisis and its resolution. Ji’s story Ji learned and taught English in Korea and came to the US for graduate studies in her early thirties. Below she described her early months in the US. I should have predicted how difficult it would be to live in a small, farsoutheastern US town and to study in a foreign language [English]. I returned to a baby in physical, psychological, and linguistic aspects. I needed the others’ help for almost everything: from using bathroom to writing an academic paper in English. Because I by myself dealt with most things in Korea, it was so uncomfortable for me to ask for some help of others who were busy studying in a graduate level (for example, to give me a ride to Wal-Mart and to move my stuff to a new place). I got to doubt, ‘Am I really a dependent person like this?’ … [W]henever I missed what American people spoke and had to repeatedly say, ‘Pardon?’, and failed to make me understood, I felt so small that I asked myself, ‘Am I stupid like this?’… and/or ‘Hey, you were an English teacher, weren’t you?’ As I criticized myself, I shrank more and more. I sometimes pretended to understand what I heard because I was afraid of seeing others’ faces change from smiles to wooden faces. When I sometimes understood what others told, I felt like expressing myself, but by then the topic had already changed. My hesitation might be resulted, more or less, from my individual and cultural backgrounds. Because I am a closure-oriented and analytical person, I prefer accurate things and I tend not to speak something vague. In addition, we Koreans, who have been greatly influenced by Confucianism, generally educate children to be moderate and humble … Also, most native English speakers looked so busy studying and working





I meet with doubtful eyes At Wal-Mart, On the street, And in a bus. The eyes say, ‘You are different …’ I feel like a baby … From an extraterrestrial planet. … … I am really like you. I feel pleasant, inspired, exulted, proud, Sad, embarrassed, Angry, hurt, Lonely … How much alike you and I are … ! Your eyes remind me Of my eyes in Korea. I wondered where The foreigners came from … My eyes must have made them Lonely. We close quickly our doors Against people Who look different from us. Let’s wear special glasses To see through The same things We all share. Let’s open our eyes wide And keep patience Until we find a similarity … We will not fail.

[Next she described a dream in which her mouth is an English speaking machine and in which there were many people … ]



that we could not meet easily outside classroom, and I was busy, too. The lonely and painful moments led me to review what I did in Korea and who I am. The process of reflections on myself inspired me to write a poem.

Speaking in Korean Like cute babbling babies. With them … I laughed heartily So long a time That my heart was filled With warmth. Interpretation: No longer a competent, powerful EFL teacher in Korea, Ji was now an anonymous foreigner in the US, where she faced stares, negative comments, and social exclusion. Overly humble, accuracybound, and paralysed by rejection, she hesitated to speak English and condemned herself for being stupid and a baby from an extraterrestrial planet. She experienced ‘tribulations of Self’ (Roth and Harama, 2000: 757). However, she made a major transformation through prose and poetry. She wrote that in Korea she had looked at foreigners suspiciously, the same way she was viewed in the US. This made her much more understanding. In the poem she described her mouth as an English speaking machine and saw people learning Korean as babbling, happy babies. She called for a shared vision in the first person plural. Let’s put on special glasses / To see through / The same things we all share. / Let’s open our eyes wide / … Until we find a similarity. The poem’s closing revealed deeper humanity, compassion, courage, and maturity than Ji had shown earlier. Crisis had helped her recognize that she had inner resources of competence, autonomy, intrinsic motivation for L2 learning, and relatedness. Self-determined, resilient Ji left her isolation and drew herself into the universal human family. We have presented four stories of different learners who faced L2 crises in diverse ways. We now turn to a discussion that explores the stories in greater depth.

Discussion Our research question was this: To what extent and in what ways do autonomy, resiliency, and other factors synergistically contribute to an individual’s transcending an L2 crisis in a specific socio-cultural situation? Dörnyei states, ‘The L2 domain is the area of education that is, I believe, most often characterized by learning failure: nearly everybody has failed in the study of at least one language and it is not uncommon for someone to have failed in two or three languages’ (Dörnyei, 2001a: 145). Perceived public failure (lack of competence),




social rejection or isolation, and powerlessness were triggers for L2 crises in the stories of Ji, Ying, and Flavia. Their crises were overcome by gaining greater self-knowledge, increasing competence, reducing the sense of failure and social rejection, and regaining internal control, or changing the external power situation. In contrast, Eerik never ‘invested’ (Norton, 1997, 2000) himself enough to experience either failure or success. Relatedness, a contributor to self-determination, also helped Flavia, Ying, and Ji transcend their crises. Flavia sought cross-cultural relationships in Spain, Ying wanted and thrived upon social approval in China, and Ji sought acceptance in the US and linked herself with larger humanity. In contrast, Eerik was not motivated by relatedness; he wanted to study by himself, if at all. We wondered whether gender differences, along with maturity, played a role (see, for instance, Smart and Sanson, 2003). Ying and Ji showed intrinsic motivation regarding English and English-learning. Ying loved the sounds of English, even when she could not say them well; she enjoyed speaking and reading aloud. Ji’s love of English was revealed in her poetry writing, which was musical, imagistic, and symbolic. Flavia’s cultural-relationship-building might have been intrinsically motivated, though she never showed an intrinsic love of the language. Eerik showed only extrinsic motivation to avoid poor L2 grades. Ying and Ji exhibited self-determination, involving the synergy of autonomy, relatedness, intrinsic motivation, and competence. Flavia might also be described as self-determined if her passion for cultural relationships was intrinsic. Flavia, Ying and Ji were resilient in a time of crisis through problem-solving skills, goal setting, and attitude. In comparison, Eerik was neither self-determined nor resilient in his story. In these stories, an interesting factor in self-determination and resiliency was the severity of the threat. Ji’s crisis was the most severe, involving threats to competence, a sharp drop in social status, negative judgements, and social rejection. Repeated threats to Ying’s core identity as a competent EFL user came from others’ judgements, resulting in deep shame about herself and her family background. Flavia’s crisis was less severe but very important to her, involving initial inability to communicate or form cross-cultural relationships and continued bitterness about prior instructional methods. Eerik’s struggle was the least severe, though significant in its own way, centering on a style clash with an L2 teacher whose pressured, traditional mode conflicted with his relaxed mode. Perhaps Ji’s and Flavia’s presence in a new culture




and Ying’s presence in a new educational setting (the college) exacerbated their issues and motivated them to face their demons sooner, while Eerik in his home culture might not have felt the urgency to struggle for solutions. Usually the affective side of L2 learning is ignored, or failures and crises are hushed up and made to seem shameful. Open discussions about L2 crises would help struggling learners recognize that they are not alone and that they can transcend crises. Many L2 learners who shared their stories with us at different times remarked that talking about L2 crises and difficulties was revelatory, helpful, and a huge relief. They had never been asked or allowed to share their language learning experiences in the past. Imagine how much more helpful it would be if all L2 learners could share their stories, including struggles and successes, and could receive moral support and practical advice from teachers, other mentors, and peers. The fear and anxiety surrounding L2 learning might be reduced, and higher rates of L2 success might emerge. Under such circumstances, L2 crises would be viewed very differently. Such crises, although painful, would be understood as testing grounds on which learners can develop or recognize their autonomy, motivation, competence, and sociability. Under these circumstances, sweet are the uses of adversity, the powerful teacher.

Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank the editors of this volume, as well as Mike Nix, for their wonderful insights, many of which have been incorporated into this version of the chapter.




12 Mike Nix

Introduction Teaching in the Law Faculty of a Japanese university, I have come to think that one crucial contribution I can make to my students’ overall development as autonomous, academically literate, learner-users (Little, 2000: 15–16) of English, is to help them develop their note-taking skills. I am aware that suggesting a specific skill is key in the development of learner autonomy may seem rather ‘technical’ (Benson, 1997) and downplay its broader psychological, socio-cultural and political dimensions (Benson, 1997; Oxford, 2003). However, for students who, like mine, have mostly studied about English, in preparation for university entrance exams, at high school, note-taking does seem to play a vital role in enabling them to use English for their own academic purposes at university, particularly in helping them to self-direct investigation of issues of interest and coconstruct their understanding of these with other students. In this chapter, I draw on research with students from an intermediate-level class and set out to explore the connections between the ‘technical’ skill of note-taking and the psychological, socio-cultural and political aspects of those students’ transformation into more academically-literate and autonomous learner-users of English. This exploration also implicitly raises the question of whether skills for language learning and use can be adequately understood purely in terms of technique or individual cognition: does skills development happen in isolation from, or prior to, changes in the socio-cultural and political relations of the classroom? One other area of concern in this chapter is how narratives can inform, and also deform, our understanding of how autonomy develops. But these are rather abstract questions; perhaps a story about one student will help make them more tangible. 143



Telling Tales of Transformation

144 Telling Tales of Transformation

Haruka, like many of the students in my 2005 Basic Discussion Skills class, was in her first year at university. In senior high school English classes, she had mainly studied how to translate English texts, sentenceby-sentence, into Japanese, as preparation for university entrance exams. She recalled that when we began the first research project of the class, about the life and times of Martin Luther King, she ‘didn’t understand the way of note-taking at all’. It was ‘not think, just write’. After reading an article about King carefully to understand every word, she ‘just wrote from the top’, basically copying a part of each paragraph, in the same order as the article. Like many of the other students, Haruka’s first ‘notes’ looked more like a short essay than a text to help her organize her ideas and discuss them with other students: ‘There were no main points, just sentences. When I tried to talk about my research, I could only read my notes, and it was very difficult to explain.’ During the next few weeks, Haruka did more research about King, racial segregation, and the US civil rights movement. She also looked at near peer models of different ways of taking notes, discussed these with other students, and reflected on how to develop her own note-taking.1 Midway through the semester she observed, ‘I have developed my ability to organize my research and make key points and connections clear. I write my notes in simple words, not sentences, and focus my note-taking on topics that interest me.’ A few weeks later, she reported: ‘Now, I read many webpages quickly to find information that interests me. I mostly decide the order of my notes, and make connections between ideas from different articles, in a picture in my head before writing. And I use more visual signs, such as arrows, to make it clearer.’ In the second half of the semester, Haruka chose to work with Yuki to research Helen Keller, whilst other students investigated other ‘famous people’. This project was more interesting than the King one: ‘We decided to research different aspects of Helen’s life based on our different interests. Yuki researched about Helen’s relationship with Anne Sullivan and I researched about Helen’s life after she left college, and we exchanged the information. This way, you can understand the person you are researching better. Explaining to other groups about Helen was more difficult than the first project, but it was also interesting because other students were looking at different people.’ ‘The most interesting thing was finding information I didn’t know. I wanted to learn more about the condition of blind people today. And I focused on Helen’s campaigns because I knew the story of her childhood



Haruka’s tale

and maybe other students did too. I wanted to know and talk about what Helen did in her life.’ Reflecting on the development of her English over the whole semester, Haruka explained that, ‘English becomes interesting when I can speak freely what I want to say and when other people can understand what I say. So it’s real communication’. I have carefully constructed Haruka’s tale from fragments of her reflective writings and from interviews with her at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. It is a narrative ‘re-description’ (Ricoeur, cited in Bruner, 1986: 7) that suggests a way of understanding Haruka’s development of autonomy as transformation. Indeed, it is perhaps a meta-narrative of transformation that is also relevant to many other Japanese university students who have had little chance to use English at high school. I would like to continue by looking in more detail at the characteristics of this transformation and then at the role that note-taking plays within it.

From studying about English to learning and using English Haruka’s tale echoes Little’s (2000: 15–16) point that autonomy in language learning involves autonomy in language use. As Benson notes, autonomy in ‘the domain of language use’ implies ‘learning how to communicate one’s own meanings and purposes’ (2002: 15 and 17). However, we also use language to learn with – to construct understanding for ourselves, or co-construct it with others (Barnes, 1992; Mercer, 1995) – not just to transmit meaning, as Haruka’s characterization of ‘real communication’ recognizes. And so autonomy in language use further implies learning to use language to learn, with other students, about issues of interest. Benson also suggests that the development of this kind of autonomy requires not just the capacity to use language to express one’s own meanings and purposes but also ‘a conception of the second language itself as a medium through which these meanings and purposes can be expressed’ (Benson, 2002: 17, emphasis added). Let’s look now at what kinds of conceptions of, and capacities for, using English students like Haruka come to university with. Beginnings: ‘not think, just write’ … The Basic Discussion Skills course began with a research project on Martin Luther King. In the first note-taking activity, in which students read one of two different simplified, introductory articles about King’s



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life and work, Haruka’s ‘not think, just write’ approach seemed typical of most students’ note-taking. Despite having already discussed what interested them about King and made a list of starting research questions, hardly any students focused their note-taking on the points that they thought were important or interesting. Instead, like Haruka, they mainly reproduced sections of the article in their ‘notes’, sentence for sentence, something from each paragraph, in the same order as the original. This kind of ‘copy-delete’ summarizing strategy has been associated by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987: 225) with a ‘knowledgetelling’ mode of thinking, as opposed to a knowledge-transforming one in which students interpret and re-organize information in terms of their own questions and interests. Another student, Taro, explained that he used this copy-delete approach to make notes just because it was ‘normal’, suggesting that he could not yet conceive of another way to engage with an English text when reading. At this early stage of the course, most students made ‘notes’ that resembled the formal, ‘finished’ type of discourse that Barnes (1992) calls final draft. This suggests that they saw ‘note-taking’ as a task for demonstrating knowledge to the teacher rather than as part of a process of constructing understanding with other students. Ryo, for example, thought he ‘had to include everything [in his notes] because that’s what the teacher would want.’ Many students also seemed to lack a capacity to read in a way that brought their questions and interests into focus. Or, perhaps, habits of bottom-up reading, appropriate to sentence-by-sentence translation in high school English classes, made it difficult for students to now read in a more top-down way. All the students I interviewed said they first read the text, word by word, from start to finish, checking each unfamiliar word with an English-Japanese dictionary, in order to understand it all in Japanese. Only then did they consider what to include in their notes. Ryo explained later that, on reflection, he thought this word-for-word way of reading was close to the process of translation in high school and produced a ‘thin, surface’ understanding of the text, rather than a ‘deep’ understanding of the ‘social background’ and the ‘issues’ in it. Discussing their experiences of studying English in senior high school, students said that they had little opportunity to use English. In most or all of their English classes, students had been taught, in Japanese, how to translate English texts into written Japanese, reflecting the predominance of translation-reading classes at this level of English education in Japan (Barfield et al., 2004). They thought this approach had been useful for university entrance exams, and for




reading ‘complicated sentences’, but not for communicating in English. And even if they had ‘oral communication’ classes, they generally practised textbook drills and had no chance to express their own ideas in English to other students. Given this lack of opportunity for students to use English at high school, it does seem reasonable to describe the development of autonomy in language learning and use by university students like Haruka, as a transformation. So how does this development happen and what role do note-taking skills play in it? Developments: shifting to ‘real communication’ Tetsuya’s account of the development of his English indicates some of the characteristics of the transformation to self-directed engagement with academic issues. In the first project on King, he had just read through one article a week and copied sections from it. However, for the second project, in which he decided to research Albert Einstein, he scanned up to 30 articles each week for interesting information, and then made connections in his mind between points in about five articles, before writing notes. Tetsuya, and other students, also started to use dictionaries to understand only the sections of a text they had already decided were important, rather than to check every unfamiliar word. Significantly, they had not been taught these new reading skills in any English classes, which suggests that they developed them as a result of becoming more purposeful in their orientation to English. These changing approaches to reading and note-taking indicate that one important part of the transformation is a shift from a knowledgetelling to a knowledge-transforming approach to organizing information and ideas (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987). Tetsuya, and some other students, started to choose sub-headings from different source texts as main points in their notes and use these to re-combine information in themes that interested them. Thus, note-taking helps students to select information from source texts, and deconstruct and reconstruct them, according to their own analytical frameworks. Reading and note-taking becomes an interpretive process (Dam, 1995) rather than an act of merely reproducing information from a text. Note-taking also helps students to move between genres, another important aspect of knowledge-transformation, transferring information from, say, a newspaper report into a mind-map network, where it can be organized visually and combined with other information, and then back into the linear form of point-by-point presentation notes. Note-taking, then, seems to be a mechanism for students to appropriate ideas and language, encountered in the research process, into their own understanding of an issue.



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Students also described a second shift, from a focus on communication as transmission of meaning to communication as a process of constructing understanding (Barnes, 1992; Mercer, 1995), as they became more concerned with explaining their research clearly. Haruka remarked that students became much more active in helping each other to understand in English during the semester. This constituted a much greater challenge in the second project when they started to investigate and explain to each other about different ‘famous people’. But Ryo seemed to speak for most students when he described this as yarigai ga aru – ‘something worth doing’. It was this challenge that also prompted Kyoko to make the connections between information visually clear in her notes in order to ‘explain orderly to listeners’. And it led many students to use English-English dictionaries more and make notes that would help them explain and paraphrase vocabulary in English. Underlying these shifts is a development in the techniques used by students for making their notes. As they reflected on their note-taking and became aware from near peer models of other ways of taking notes, most students moved from final draft discourse to the kind of notes that encourage exploratory talk (Barnes, 1992). This is a more provisional form of discourse that enables the collective exploration of ideas and relationships, and thus co-construction of knowledge. The development of note-taking supports this exploratory talk in two ways. One, as I have already noted, is by enabling students to re-organize information from research in terms of their own interpretive frameworks. The other is by helping students to explain research verbally rather than to read, verbatim, chunks of copied text. The ‘technical’ developments in students’ note-taking include: • making notes in words and phrases, rather than sentences and paragraphs; • using visual devices such as bullet points, boxes, arrows, underlines, and colour; • organizing notes graphically, in terms of key points, levels of importance, and the relationships between ideas. As Kyoko put it during the second project: ‘the information is visualized, not in my mind literally’. The discussion so far has suggested that when note-taking becomes a purposeful, but exploratory, re-organization of information from source texts, it can be the catalyst for a number of other shifts in stu-




dents’ learning and use of English. To recap, these are a move from a reproductive act of knowledge-telling to an interpretive process of knowledge-transforming, and from communication as transmission of meaning to communication as construction of understanding. It is these shifts that enable students to become more autonomous, collaborative, and academically literate learner-users of English. Put in terms of the different approaches to autonomy identified by Benson (1997) and Oxford (2003), the development of the technical skill of notetaking enables a transformation in students’ psychological orientations to English – from something they study about, to something they use to learn about and interpret the world – and in the sociocultural and political relations of the classroom, as students self-direct their engagement with academic issues, become the authors of their own ideas, and coconstruct knowledge with other students in English, rather than simply demonstrate knowledge of it to teachers and examiners. As I draw these conclusions, however, doubts are emerging about whether the skill of note-taking really is the catalyst of this transformation. One of my main reservations is that the ‘technical’ development of note-taking seems to be the least stable of the shifts identified. After an initial development in the visual quality of their note-taking, many students return at times to more ‘final draft’ ways of recording their research, even as they become otherwise more transformatory, interpretive and constructivist in their use of English. Often they settle on an approach to note-taking that combines exploratory and final draft elements, especially when preparing to present their research to other students. This suggests that it is not always the act of writing notes, or specific note-taking skills, that enable students to read interpretively, to transform knowledge, or to co-construct understanding. This impression is reinforced by noticing that, for both Tetsuya and Kyoko, the key acts of interpretation and transformation occur in their thinking about texts prior to actually making notes. Indeed, there are relatively few occasions in the students’ accounts when a development in note-taking skills clearly precedes and enables other shifts in their use of English. Perhaps we need to see, as Rebecca Oxford suggests in her comments on this chapter, that learning of skills and strategies ‘starts operating simultaneously at the psychological and the sociocultural level’ and can in itself be transformative. If so, it makes little sense to separate the development of the ‘technical’ skill from the psychological, socio-cultural or political aspects of the process. This is especially the case when these skills are learnt through peer-modelling and peer-sharing by students previously used to teacher-directed,



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transmission-based classrooms, as is the situation here. Or perhaps we should see the changes in students’ psychological orientation to English, and the emerging collaborative relations of knowledge construction, as creating both the conditions and the need for students to develop their note-taking skills. It was, as I suggested earlier, those psychological and socio-cultural changes that led students to develop top-down reading skills themselves and to start scanning articles for the information that interested them. By now, the idea of a simple shift in note-taking, from final draft to exploratory talk that enables a broader transformation in students’ use of English, seems too clean and linear. Rebecca asks me why I didn’t shift, alter, or enlarge my original interpretive frame earlier, in response to what my students were saying about the development of their English, and I now wonder why myself. Maybe my reading of the students’ development had become trapped within the meta-narrative of transformation. I realize that it is time to rethink my initial narrative interpretation of that development.

Losing the plot (and finding some new ones) Bruner’s (1986) distinction between a narrative mode of knowing (based on the verisimilitude of connections between events in a story) and a paradigmatic mode of knowing (based on verifiable causal connections within paradigms) helps me in this rethink. But rather than see my meta-narrative of transformation as a purely narrative mode of knowing, I find it useful to deconstruct Bruner’s distinction and to characterize my interpretation as a paradigmatic narrative. This narrates the transformation from one paradigmatic condition (studying about English, knowledge-telling, and so on) to another (learning to use English, knowledge-transforming, and so on). It seeks to make connections between the elements within each paradigm, between the development of note-taking skills and the ability to co-construct knowledge, for example. Finally, this paradigmatic narrative seeks to explain the development of autonomy in a geometry of binary shifts – from final draft to exploratory talk, or from reading as reproduction to reading as interpretation – that now seems too neat. Viewed in this way, my earlier meta-narrative of transformation forced a paradigmatic interpretation of the development of autonomy too firmly onto the students’ own interpretations of their development. Perhaps I was acting as the kind of top-down researcher that Bruner (1986: 10) has memorably characterized: ‘armed with an




hypothesis, the top-down partisan swoops on this text and that, searching for instances (and less often counter-instances) of what he hopes will be a right “explanation”’. Perhaps narrating the development of autonomy as transformation has also made me mythologize it, in Barthes’ (1993) sense of myth as deformation. For Barthes, myth is made of ‘stolen language’, which is returned but always in a distorted form. It operates by seizing on a particular, individual, tangible instance of something and using it to signify an essence or archetype, thus draining the original instance of its historicity. In these terms, it seems as if I stole Haruka’s own story of her development and made it represent a more archetypal narrative of how autonomy develops. I deformed it by detaching parts of it from its overall narrative context. I made the start of Haruka’s tale coincide with the beginning of the meta-narrative, in the figure of the first-year university student, just out of high school, who still needs to develop her academic literacy and learner autonomy. Perhaps then we need to re-read Haruka’s tale in a more narrative mode of knowing, one that restores it to its specific context in her learning history, and that follows the connections she makes within her story, not the connections required by the meta-narrative of transformation. New beginnings The version of Haruka’s tale presented earlier emphasized her initial inability to read and note-take purposefully or to interpret the source text in terms of her own questions. Haruka, herself, later succinctly characterized this as a ‘not think, just write’ approach. I suggested that this approach was conditioned by her experience of studying reading as sentence-by-sentence translation in high school English classes, and that this led her to produce a final draft type of ‘notes’ that did not help her to organize and explain her research or co-construct understanding of it with other students. This still seems a fair interpretation of how Haruka actually does her first reading and note-taking itself, in accord with her own subsequent reflections on it. But that is only part of the story. If we look at what Haruka says, just before doing the first notetaking, about learning and using English, a more complex beginning to her tale emerges. Firstly, we see that she starts university with a very positive orientation to using English in terms of her own interests and purposes. Although she had no chance to speak English at high school, she has taken some conversation classes at a private language school and, after only one Basic Discussion Skills class, is already excited



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about using English with other students. Having done self-directed research in a Japanese history class at high school, she also sees how she can learn about topics through research in English. And Haruka asks if she should look for information on King in sources other than the introductory articles I have provided, suggesting that she already wants to use English to pursue her own interests and not just to complete tasks set by the teacher.2 Moreover, despite finding it difficult in practice to transform, rather than tell, information at this initial stage, Haruka does already think that interpreting texts and transforming knowledge are important. She says that it is better to change the order of the original text when making notes, putting the most interesting information first, so she can explain to others what she thinks about her reading. A desire to coconstruct knowledge with other students is also evident when she says that she will choose information that they don’t know, and that she will change, as much as possible, the language in the source texts into easier language so other students can understand it. Perhaps we can say then that, at this stage, Haruka’s conception of English, as a medium for expressing ideas and constructing knowledge, runs ahead of her actual capacity for using it in this way. This is probably why she is quickly able to develop her note-taking into a much more exploratory form and is, by the next class, already focusing her research on her own interests. Restoring to Haruka’s tale the context of her individual learning history, with all its particular connections and disjunctures, and relieving it of the burden of being archetypal, now makes the meta-narrative of transformation, with its starting point in her lack of learner-user autonomy, seem much less appropriate. Different developments In contrast with Haruka’s success story, Yoichi’s development seems much more uneven and ultimately unsuccessful, at least when read against the meta-narrative of transformation. By the end of the Basic Discussion Skills course, Yoichi was actually making notes in longer, more complex sentences and paragraphs than at the start. This appeared to be why he did not develop his fluency for explaining his research, or for engaging in discussion and co-construction of knowledge, as much as most other students. In terms of the meta-narrative, Yoichi failed to become a collaborative, autonomous user of English because he didn’t develop his note-taking skills. However, Yoichi himself told a very different version of the story that I have just presented. He explained that before the Basic




Discussion Skills course, he had never spoken in English, let alone used it to learn about the world. But, during the course, he had become able to do research in English and had learnt, for example, about the civil war in Sierra Leone, a country he had chosen to look at because he knew nothing about it. Yoichi was most proud, though, that he had become able to write his ‘notes’ in precisely the sort of long, syntactically complex sentences that characterize final draft discourse! Like Tetsuya, at the start of the course he had simply copied from articles, but had become able to combine information from four or five different source texts, summarizing, simplifying and re-arranging it in very carefully written sentences and paragraphs. This development of his ‘note-taking’ ability had, he thought, helped him to express his ideas more clearly and confidently, though he still found it very difficult to contribute to discussions. In the terms of his own narrative, then, Yoichi had made great progress, appropriating the skill of note-taking for his own uses, and transforming himself into an interpretive reader, a knowledge transformer, and a clear constructor (if not co-constructor) of meaning, as well as a writer of impressively dense final draft discourse. But why was Yoichi so committed to writing this final draft type text, even when he was using it to explain his ideas to other students and not to impress a teacher? A possible explanation emerges, not from reading within Yoichi’s story, in a connected, narrative mode of knowing, but by returning to the paradigmatic connections with the story told by another student, Mayumi. Her senior high school education, Mayumi explained, had been based on transmission, memorization and reproduction of knowledge in preparation for exam-taking. In contrast, when she arrived at university, she expected to have to think for herself and demonstrate her knowledge in well-written compositions. Mayumi, therefore, saw the production of good final draft discourse as a defining feature of the move to a higher – and more autonomous – level of academic work at university. If this was the case for Yoichi too, it would explain why he saw his way of ‘note-taking’ as embodying the development of a kind of autonomous academic literacy that the meta-narrative of transformation obscures.

In the end … So what, in the end, are the morals of these various tales? One is that the relationship between the development of note-taking and the other dimensions of autonomy is clearly more complicated than the



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simple causal link I started with. Perhaps Rebecca Oxford’s view of learning skills and strategies, and indeed of learner autonomy more generally, as simultaneously developing on the technical, psychological, socio-cultural, and political levels, is more useful. I nevertheless feel that it is also helpful to have a sense of a dialectic in the relationship between skills like note-taking and the development of a broader orientation to using English in a collaborative, autonomous way. A focus on the development of a skill such as note-taking may be useful for students when their conception of English as a medium for learning about academic issues is ahead of their capacity to use it in this way. At other times, talking and thinking about different ways of taking notes may help make the interpretative, transformative and coconstructive possibilities of language use clearer for students. At a more epistemological level, recognition of a dialectic, between modes of understanding research into the development of autonomy, also seems useful. As Bruner (1986) acknowledges, we need to move between the paradigmatic and narrative modes of understanding to make adequate sense of experience. In doing so, we need to be critically aware of how different ways of representing, or narrating, our research and teaching can produce different accounts of how students become autonomous language learner-users. A narrative of transformation usefully highlights some of the developments or shifts that students make in their language use as they become more autonomous and academically literate. But over-writing individual students’ learning histories with a meta-narrative of the transformation to autonomy risks essentializing them by assuming that they ‘start the story’ completely lacking in autonomy (cf. Holliday, 2003). Re-reading individual students’ stories again, in their own terms, reminds us that these students are, to paraphrase Bergen (1990: 102, cited in Dam, 1995: 1–2), already interpreting and setting goals for their learning in terms of what they already know. In that sense, they are already autonomous learners.

Notes 1. For more discussion of this peer-modelled and -mediated approach to developing note-taking skills, see Nix (2006). 2. Haruka’s question raises an important issue that is not dealt with here for reasons of space: does the ‘scaffolding’ of learner control over content and process in Basic Discussion Skills, in which the teacher decides the topic for research and the skills for development at the start of the course, actually support the students’ development of an autonomous academic literacy, or restrain it?




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Acknowledgements


Many thanks to all the students who participated in the research for this chapter.


Commentary on Part Two: Narrative, Struggle, Reflection and Autonomy Michael Carroll and Sara Cotterall

Introductory remarks A number of themes resonate in this section of the book for us. Amongst these, the notions of storytelling and voice are pre-eminent. All the authors tell stories – in one way or another – of individuals who are struggling to manage their learning. Many of the chapters present the voices of learners and teachers alongside each other. Some tell stories of transformation – notably those of Hugh Nicoll (Chapter 10) and Mike Nix (Chapter 12), where events are first recounted from one perspective, and then retold from another. But, as Flávia Vieira reminded us in a web-based discussion of the completed research chapters in this book, ‘Of course, all the voices are filtered by us …,’ to which Leena Karlsson added, ‘The researcher does not have the full story …’. So, one of the invitations these chapters extend to us all, as readers, is to listen to the stories told by the authors, construct our own interpretations, and thereby play our own roles in re-telling them. Of the various themes touched on in this section, three stand out for us as central to effective learning and teaching: firstly, the role of narrative; secondly, the notion of struggle and its relationship to learning and teaching; and finally, reflection. In what follows, we attempt to identify some of the ways in which these themes are articulated in one chapter and echo in others.

Narrative In Chapter 8, Huijuan Shao and Zongjie Wu set out to capture the innovative pedagogic practice of one of their respected colleagues – Huanglaoshi. To do this, they decided to choose ‘narrative inquiry, out 156



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of our belief that truthful knowledge is born within the intuitive, pre-interpreted understandings of story’. Their chapter is rich in stories told by Huanglaoshi and her students. Not only is narrative the authors’ research tool, but it is also the vehicle for recounting Huanglaoshi’s experiences, and the means by which Huanglaoshi connects with the experiences of her learners. When Huanglaoshi impulsively shares with her students a deeply personal anecdote about her time in Cambridge, one of her students reflects – ‘Now I am so glad because I find you are the same as me.’ Shao and Wu use the term ‘renaissance’ to describe the impact that the telling of this experience has on the learner. In this recognition of shared experience and emotions, the communication between learner and teacher becomes authentic in the sense that it reflects meanings they had not previously thought of. This kind of dialogue is vastly different from textbook- and curriculum-driven discussion of imposed topics. As the writers say, ‘Dialogues had spontaneously started in which the students truly had something to say.’ While it was true that the teacher, Huanglaoshi, initiated the topics, it was the learners who decided when and whether to take them further. Creating opportunities such as these, making the ‘spaces’ that Nicoll and Nix also talk about, is surely one of a teacher’s most important responsibilities. The central place of dialogue and mutual respect between teachers and students in Shao and Wu’s narrative brings to mind Paulo Freire’s (1972) view of teachers and learners as working together and influencing each other, rather than the teacher acting upon the student. The way in which the dialogue in the language class is closely intertwined with the social world and is not only influenced by it, but also has an influence on it reinforces this impression. Recalling Freire’s notion of praxis – dialogue which leads to changes in the world – reminds us that language learning, beyond simply being a technical skill, is inextricably connected with the learner’s position of power or powerlessness. This lyrical account of an inspirational teacher and her learners may sound distant from the classrooms that some of us teach in. However, the chapter highlights a principle that holds true in any educational setting. If we wish to encourage our learners to raise their voices, we need to provide the opportunities – time, space, encouragement – for them to do so. Musing on freshly-cut grass or forsythias may not be part of the curriculum, but the episodes recounted by Shao and Wu represent opportunities where the learners were encouraged to connect with their feelings and express their own meanings not about pre-selected ‘topics for discussion’, but about things they themselves thought worth saying.



Michael Carroll and Sara Cotterall 157

Narrative is a pre-eminent theme in Nix’s chapter too, which tells stories on at least three levels. First, it tells the story of his attempt to investigate the development of note-taking skills amongst his students. Secondly, it tells the stories of individual learners as they report on their experience of developing these skills. Finally, it tells the story of Nix the researcher, interpreting the learners’ stories, questioning his interpretation and eventually retelling those same stories in new ways. His tale is a cautionary one: we should be wary, he advises, of making assumptions about our learners. We can tell their stories as we see them, but learners can tell their own stories too. While narrative is the vehicle also for Rebecca Oxford, Yaru Meng, Zhou Yalun, Jiyeun Sung and Rashi Jain (Chapter 11), part of their account appears somewhat at odds with Nix’s cautionary message. In their chapter, the authors present the stories of four learners whom they characterize as being ‘in crisis’. But the narratives of two of these learners strike us not so much as stories of learners in crisis, as stories of autonomous behaviour of a different type. While the writers carefully define the terms in which they interpret the learners’ stories, the interpretation is firmly theirs, rather than that of their learners. In discussing this chapter, we noticed, for example, Eerik’s ability to express himself in a second language (English in this case, unless the text has been translated from Finnish, not German). While he may have decided he did not wish to learn German in the way that his teacher taught it, we did not infer from reading Eerik’s own words that he considered himself a failed language learner. Indeed, his story could be retold as that of a learner rejecting the style that Oxford describes elsewhere as an ‘autocratic’ teacher (Oxford, 2001). Although the authors interpret Eerik’s behaviour of skipping class and avoiding homework as a kind of ‘negative autonomy’, this would only be true if it were his intention to ‘change the classroom power balance’. We suspect this was not his goal. It seems to us that he, like many learners in compulsory language classes, was not particularly interested in learning German and simply wanted to get through the class as painlessly as possible. Similarly, Flavia’s story strikes us as a story of considerable autonomy. She displays a selective, engaged, thoughtful autonomy, repositioning herself as a language user in the community rather than a language student in the classroom. We believe it is to Flavia’s credit that she responds to her situation, not by expecting natural language use to resemble her classroom experiences, but by deliberately ‘not focusing on grammar and structure’. We wonder if, given the oppor-



158 Commentary on Part Two: Narrative, Struggle, Reflection and Autonomy

tunity, Eerik (and Flavia) might tell their stories differently to the readings given them by the authors. However, Eerik’s and Flavia’s stories and the interpretations they receive in this chapter highlight for us the richness of narrative as a means of discussing learning. By presenting the learners’ voices alongside their own perspectives on the learners’ experiences, the authors allow us as readers to create our own interpretations. Naturally, our interpretations may be at odds with the learners’ perspectives, and indeed with the interpretation advanced by the authors of the chapter. But in a way, that is the point of narrative inquiry: no single perspective is privileged. As readers, we are free to construct our own interpretations, without being ‘railroaded’ by the authority of the authorial voice. Nicoll’s chapter also uses narrative as both a vehicle and a metaphor for learning. He frames his chapter as a reflection on the previous academic year, and on his role as teacher. The questions he asks himself raise the possibility that one outcome of storytelling can be transformation – the realization of new understandings. Indeed, Nicoll’s story is a story of transformation, not only in his account of changes made to his course, but also in terms of the way he tells his story. Through multiple iterations of, and reflections on, experience, Nicoll’s thinking about what he was doing in his lecture course changed. While he was encouraging autonomy in his learners, he too was developing autonomously – in his teaching, his understanding of his learners, and in the creation of his text.

Struggle For us, these narratives highlight how grappling with obstacles and overcoming difficulties is a significant factor in gaining control over one’s learning path, whether as a language learner or as a teacher. All of the teachers and students in these chapters find themselves facing and dealing with some kind of difficulty. Shao and Wu and Oxford et al. tell the stories of students working through their inner struggles to overcome feelings of failure, humiliation and loss of self-respect; and Natri describes the kind of engaged reflection that is essential if students are to continue learning throughout their lives. Nix, on the other hand, and Nicoll too, show that this notion of the struggle, questioning oneself, dealing with uncertainty, as much as it is a part of learning, is also a crucial part of good teaching, of professional development, and of teacher research.




Shao and Wu paint a vivid picture of the students who feature in their chapter as weighed down by the enormity of their task. English as a subject of study and as an unfamiliar social world intimidates them, but no more so than do their perceptions of judgement by their peers. They are afraid of both failing and standing out. But these fears are precisely what lead them to the breakthroughs they make in re-orienting themselves. Ying and Ji, described by Oxford et al., similarly experience their perceived success or failure in learning English as inseparable from the way they see themselves, at a deep level, as individuals and members of society. These kinds of acutely felt psychological anxieties are presented in both of these chapters as essential catalysts for the immense effort and courage students need in order to transform themselves into successful learners and users of the language – into different people. For both sets of writers, language learning is not principally the technical skill that, say, Natri and Nix start from. Yet in this anxiety-as-catalyst view, success requires not just hard work, but also ‘opening your heart’, investing something of your fundamental self. The struggle, for Shao and Wu, as for Oxford et al., is the psychic struggle to let go of who you are and become someone new. A corollary of this perspective would seem to be that not everyone can achieve success: for every success story there must be failures, those who are not ready or willing to let go of who they are. Nicoll has a slightly different psychological slant on the dilemma of the language learner. Characterizing the learner’s struggle in terms of tolerance or intolerance of ambiguity, he reassures his students, and himself, that ‘it’s OK to feel confused’, and that learning essentially rests on the ability to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. For him, it is not just his students who are navigating their way through unmarked territory; he is in the same position too, as the teacher struggling to find a way to reconcile conflicting demands on him. Underlying this idea of autonomy as something hard won and only achieved through struggle is the crucial realization that autonomy, like power, can’t be simply handed over, but must be claimed. Students and teachers alike have to ‘struggle to become the authors of their own worlds’ (Pennycook, 1997, as cited by Nicoll) – to create their own meanings. It is surely precisely those moments when we, as teachers, become aware of our own students doing this that give us the greatest satisfaction, even if that satisfaction may sometimes be tinged with disapproval, disbelief or surprise at the worlds they create. Creating their own meanings is precisely what Nix sees in his students when they come to the realization that they can use their




new language for their own purposes: whether those purposes are to learn about the world through English, or to interpret their own experiences in their own ways. But just as Nicoll lets go of his desire to cling to his teaching points, Nix realizes he has to give up the interpretation he at first imposed on Haruka and Yoichi. Teachers, and teacherresearchers, are not infrequently faced with the dilemmas that these two chapters deal with. How many of us, like Nicoll, feel ‘a[n] almost overpowering urge’ to teach, or like Nix, find ourselves trapped by myths of our own creation? When we take up more class time than we realize with our own talk, at the expense of time for our students themselves to talk, or to think; and when we jump to conclusions about the reasons for our students’ successes as well as their failures, we would do well to read and re-read these chapters and remember, as Nicoll points out, that to underestimate our students is ‘exactly the wrong direction to take’.

Reflection The third theme reverberating in these chapters is that of reflection in the broad sense, and self-assessment in the narrower, more technical sense. In Shao and Wu’s chapter, reflection – in the sense of internal dialogue – is more salient than the evaluation of linguistic skills. In Natri’s chapter, the opposite is true: technical linguistic self-assessment is central. Yet this is linked to individuals’ consideration of the broader question of their own sense of ‘fit’ with the task of learning a language. Nicoll too is fundamentally concerned with reflection in the sense of interrogating ‘what I assume learning and teaching to be’, and consideration of his and his learners’ roles in those processes. In Oxford et al.’s chapter, the focus shifts between these two perspectives, for whereas Eerik’s narrative reveals a harsh technical assessment of his teacher and her teaching methods, the narrative imposed on him implies a deeper kind of reflection – on the state of his autonomy as a learner. Finally, for Nix, the learners’ reflections are fundamentally disconcerting, for they reflect a different conception of learning to his own. However, ultimately, he finds his learners’ reflections and their confidence liberating since they signal their readiness to take responsibility for their own learning. In Shao and Wu’s chapter, as discussed previously, a number of the learners reflect on their feelings of inadequacy in the face of the task of learning English. Likewise, Ying, in Oxford et al.’s chapter, speaks of being ‘humble to the earth’ after she assesses her English language




skills as being significantly inferior to those of classmates. These experiences of reflection are in stark contrast to the discussion in Natri’s chapter, where the positive potential of comparing oneself with others is described. Natri’s self-evaluation system provides each learner with a concrete measure of performance (the mean for their group) with which to compare their own performance. As she explains, learners who perceive their performance to be inferior to that of classmates may opt to move to a class at a lower level. Such a decision is a highly autonomous act in that learners are evaluating the evidence thoughtfully, and using it to take charge of their learning pathways. So, the examples in Natri’s chapter on the one hand, and Shao and Wu’s and Oxford et al.’s on the other, illustrate the potentially empowering and paralysing effects of self-assessment. Teija Natri’s account (Chapter 9) of her evaluation system – designed to enhance students’ ability to reflect on their language learning ability – highlights the fundamental role of self-assessment in autonomous learning. Her thesis is that if ‘part of the evaluation is carried out by the students, they become more responsible about their own learning’. The ‘active learnership’ her learners engage in relates both to selfassessment and peer-evaluation tasks, which oblige them to hone their understanding of specific language skills. If we take learner autonomy to be all about decision-making in the learning process, Natri’s evaluation system represents an excellent model. The examples she provides in her chapter reflect the growing sophistication of her learners’ assessments of their skill levels, and of their increasing motivation to learn independently. In Natri’s setting, as in most formal learning contexts, a number of external factors impact on student performance. However, for educators committed to learner autonomy, a system which promotes reflection on learning processes rather than outcome-related testing needs no justification. Learners committed to lifelong learning are well served by such a system. The theme of reflection is rich too in Nicoll’s chapter. As mentioned earlier, his chapter implies that reflecting on experience – identifying shortcomings in one’s practice and seeking solutions – is crucial both to learning and teaching. In telling the story of his lecture course, he reflects on his need to ‘let go’ of control, in order to allow his learners to negotiate the syllabus with him. However, he comments that this ‘letting go’ is achieved at a cost – the ‘necessary price of co-creating a more truly collaborative learning environment’ is acceptance of the inevitability of shortcomings on the part of both teacher and learners.




Yet, Nicoll asserts that it is in this very act of letting go that the potential for real learning exists. He argues that ‘It is in the gaps, misunderstandings and mistakes that we can find the space to negotiate the curriculum.’ This space for negotiation is what unites not only Natri and Nicoll, but all the writers in this section. They all find themselves somehow stepping back to create the spaces for learners to make decisions about their learning. Nix’s commentary on his learners’ reflections adds another dimension to this theme. As discussed above, when ‘retelling’ both Haruka’s and Yoichi’s stories, he reports instances where the learners’ reflections reveal significant understanding of their goals and skills. However, those understandings are somewhat at odds with his. Clearly, one of the challenges inherent in providing ‘spaces’ for learners to narrate their own stories is that they may tell stories that are at odds with our assumptions about what constitutes good learning.

Closing comments So what have we discovered in our reading of these five stories? One idea is that the three strands – narrative, struggle and reflection – that we saw as binding the stories together may be useful when we think not only about research in teaching and learning, but also about how to encourage autonomy in our students. The three cannot, of course, be easily separated. Only through narrative, the telling of stories, can we document the struggles we and our students go through, or the kinds of reflection that lead to the transformations that constitute learning. And the struggle, of course, only becomes an aspect of learning when we reflect on it, think about what it means for us, and formulate plans for changing our learning behaviours. We have also come across powerful ideas about good teaching in these chapters. Effective teaching requires listening to and trusting learners, letting go of fixed ideas, and tolerating uncertainty. All of these aspects play a role in the idea that learning occurs in the ‘spaces’ between the formal elements of curricula. Such instances of learning could be thought of as accidental or serendipitous. But, as these stories illustrate, the role of the teacher is precisely to engineer these spaces, to create the opportunities that may or may not inspire in learners ‘things they really want to say’. And beyond that, our job is surely to build the kind of safe, trusting, tolerant classroom atmosphere that allows learners to take off in their own directions and really speak for themselves.




All learning starts from the realization that there is something we do not know and wish to find out. Admittedly, this is a somewhat idealized account of the situation in formal learning settings, as Eerik’s story so eloquently reveals. But that realization alone is not enough. In each of the stories presented in this section of the book, learners, or teacherlearners, somehow find the space and the strength of purpose to question their assumptions and experiences, their learning stories, and this leads them to new understandings. In that sense narrative, struggle and reflection represent a powerful means of reconstructing autonomy in language education.




Self-access Learning and Teacher Collaboration



Part Three




Developing Student Support in Self-access Centres Pornapit Darasawang, Wareesiri Singhasiri and Sonthida Keyuravong

Introduction ‘All learners are capable of learning and self-development and are regarded as being the most important in the process of learning and teaching.’ (Office of the National Education Commission, 2000). ‘Our students are not able to learn by themselves yet. We need to help them, to give explanations and to correct their work.’ (A teacher working in a Students English Access Room in a province in Thailand) At the beginning of 2004, the Thai Ministry of Education established 80 self-access centres called SEARs (Students English Access Rooms) in secondary schools across the country. These SEARs are designed as a resource for students to help train them in how to learn according to their own learning styles, develop ability for self-directed learning and become independent learners based on their needs, interest and potentiality: in other words, to develop learner autonomy (Office of the Basic Education Commission, 2004). Despite central government funding and careful planning, many teachers and students are uncertain about how to gain the greatest benefits from SEARs. In this chapter, we explore from different perspectives what specific problems teachers and students face in making the best use of SEARs. Our goal is to understand what future support in such limited environments will best help the beneficial development of learner autonomy within SEARs in secondary schools in Thailand. 167



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168 Developing Student Support in Self-access Centres

The setting up of SEARs in 2004 was the culmination of different education reforms from 1999 onwards: the National Education Act B.E. 2542 (ONEC, 1999); the Secondary Education Quality Improvement Project implemented by the Office of the Basic Education Commission (OBEC), Ministry of Education (2000); and the Curriculum of Basic Education (2001). The overall aim of these reforms was to support a learner-centred approach in English education by providing facilities where learners could experience learning based on their own individual styles. Learners would be trained to engage with English, develop their ability for self-directed learning and become independent learners based on their needs, interest and potential (Office of the National Education Commission, 2000). SEARs were to be the structured learning environment in which teachers would help learners to have more choices and make more decisions about their learning. The 80 schools chosen to participate in the SEAR project were mostly those regarded as the best schools in the province, or schools that were ready to adopt this project since they had enough facilities and staff. Equipment in the SEARs included audio cassette players, televisions, and video players. Computers were also budgeted for, but unfortunately the purchase was cancelled, although some schools were able to allocate some of their own school budget to buy them. Paper-based and computer-based materials in the SEARs included both published and specially-designed materials for self-access learning. Equipment and materials are just one part of the puzzle, however. Setting up any kind of self-access centre involves a change of roles for both learners and teachers. Facilitators/helpers/counsellors were provided in many self-access centres to give consultations when needed, and there was also documentation to help students structure their learning, such as learner contracts, record sheets, and needs analysis questionnaires (Dickinson, 1987; Gardner and Miller, 1999). Providing learner training in class as a preparation for using a self-access centre was also considered necessary (Dickinson, 1987; Wenden, 1991; Sinclair, 1996). Three workshops were organized by the Ministry of Education to prepare teachers for the use of SEARs with their students. The first workshop, lasting ten days and run at the beginning of the implementation of SEARs in schools, aimed to introduce self-access, learner training, use of IT, and self-access for four skills. Two teachers from each SEAR school were invited to participate. The second training was organized when the SEARs had been operating for eight months. This



The design and initial preparation of the SEARs

two-day workshop was designed for SEAR managers and focused on the materials and their classification and cataloguing systems. The third workshop, eight months later, aimed at administration and systems of use. It was organized over two days and provided further support for areas identified as problematic from the monitoring procedures, including administrative support for SEARs and certain key systems. Three teachers and a vice principal from each school were invited to join these workshops (Watson Todd, 2005).

The context of our study The introduction of the SEARs was detailed and well-planned, but their implementation in individual schools posed some problems of use for teachers and students, so we wanted in our action research project to look more closely at such questions. We were interested in focusing on the start-up of a SEAR in a school typical enough to help us understand more generally the problems that other schools might face. Based in Bangkok, we also needed to use a school that was not too far away and with which we had already established a relationship by providing certain materials for self-access learning. Samut Sakorn Burana School is about 30 kilometres from Bangkok and has a student population of about 3200. It is a provincial secondary school (Grade 7 through 12, or age 13 to 17) where the best students of the province come to study. The school had already been operating its own self-access English Language Learning Centre since 1999, which acted like a resource room with collections of commercial and in-house English language materials for practicing English outside class. When SEARs were set up in June 2004, the school converted the existing Self-Access Centre. The school was willing to allow us to observe the SEAR in use and interview teachers and students individually. We interviewed two teachers who were actively using the SEAR and two who were involved in the development of the previous selfaccess centre. We also interviewed eight randomly-chosen students. The Samut Sakorn Burana SEAR is not officially integrated into the English curriculum. Each individual teacher holds the responsibility for linking their classroom with the SEAR. However, it turned out that there are only two teachers (the SEAR manager and one classroom teacher) who integrated such self-access learning into their teaching. They did this by giving an orientation about the SEAR to their students and assigning students to practice particular language points in the SEAR in their own free time. Siriluck, a 16-year-old female student,



Pornapit Darasawang, Wareesiri Singhasiri and Sonthida Keyuravong 169

described this initial orientation in the following way: ‘The teacher takes us into the room, introduces us to the concept of self-access learning, and shows the materials and how to use them.’ During the orientation, teachers gave students assignments for the whole semester to spend extra time outside class practising more English. There were both open materials in the SEAR such as short stories, magazines, newspaper and specially designed self-access materials provided by the Ministry of Education. ‘We have to work on any ten tasks during the whole semester, and each one is worth 0.5 %. The teachers check our work and give marks,’ explained Siriluck in a matter of fact way. The two teachers assigned different levels of material to different age groups, but the choice of specific materials and activities mainly came from the students’ preferred skills rather than from the areas where they decided they were weak or proficient.

Support given to students As we were interested in seeing how and whether the students developed their learner autonomy through the support provided, we first looked at the kind of support they received and then at how this affected their use of the SEAR and their working processes and behaviour. We found that there were two types of support: direct teacher guidance and indirect guidance through worksheets. Direct teacher guidance The teachers gave support in various roles as a guide, a facilitator, an assessor and a counsellor. As a guide, the teachers introduced the SEAR to the students and explained how to use it. The teachers informed the students of the importance of self-access learning, the purposes of the SEAR, the location of materials, and the system for borrowing and returning materials. They also explained the documents used in the SEAR, such as the self-study plan and personal record sheet. The teachers tried to encourage the students to learn by themselves, by training them to make a plan and record their study regularly. However, from looking at how the students learned, our investigation shows that they organized their learning in a rather mechanical way. One student mentioned that she wanted the teachers to give more suggestions about strategies and techniques while tackling different tasks: ‘I did not want the teacher to check whether I have completed the assignments or not. I prefer to have her suggest that if I had the same problem next time, what I should do. I would like to know how to do it. For example, if




I don’t understand a grammar point, I’d like her to tell me what the most effective way to learn this grammar point is.’ As a facilitator, the teachers walked around and checked whether the students had problems or not working in the SEAR. The teachers would also help manage the room, help students find materials and answer questions. From our interviews with the teachers, we learned that the students rarely asked any questions. As the teachers assigned the students work to do in the room, they also acted as assessors of student work. They gave feedback and asked questions to check whether the students had really worked. Then they would give marks and sign the students’ worksheets. An ideal self-access centre normally provides a counsellor for the users. Although our observations did not reveal teachers taking such a role, the students reported that the teacher would occasionally give helpful suggestions when they had problems: Sanya: The teacher tries to motivate me to work in the SEAR. Sometimes she asks me to find out materials about grammar and explains how to learn from it. She gives feedback right after I submit my work at the front desk. Somchai: She normally walks around and helps explain if we have problems such as on grammar usage. From our interviews with the students, we learnt that students normally asked two main types of question – about the use of the SEAR and language problems. Questions about the use of the SEAR concerned where the materials were located and how they could use the materials and equipment in the SEAR. Otherwise, students were concerned about language (mainly grammar) rather than strategies or other skills. One student mentioned that she would like to be taught how to use learning strategies, but most students did not seem particularly curious about seeking any such advice. They felt that grammar was their top priority for learning English, and without it they could not read, write or speak. Indirect guidance through documents and worksheets In addition to signs telling the students what to do step by step in the SEAR, the teachers provided a Self-Study Plan and a Personal Study Record, which were introduced by the teachers in the classroom. The students used the Self-Study Plan to fill in the number of hours they planned to self-study within one week, what they wanted to learn and how long they would spend learning it. It seems that filling in the




study plan was only one step in using the SEAR, but it was not particularly meaningful to the students as less than half of them could understand its practical purpose. Our research revealed that some students wrote plans which did not correspond with their study records. For example, they set one goal, but the materials they chose to study did not match that goal. The students used the Personal Study Record to fill in what activities/exercises they had done, the dates they worked on the materials, materials codes and their level of satisfaction. The two forms were prepared by teachers on the main committee of the project at the Ministry of Education. Both were quite formulaic in asking the students to fill in information about what skills they would like to practise and what activities they were planning to do. The forms, however, did not ask the learners to reflect on how they had learnt, problems they had encountered, or alternative actions they could have taken.

Students’ uses of the SEAR and their working processes and behaviour Based on our interviews with students, we developed a more detailed questionnaire. It had four main parts: personal details, training, the use of the SEAR and the students’ attitudes towards it. The questionnaire was distributed to 73 students who had been trained to use the SEAR. We learnt that on average the students used it 2–3 times per week, spending about one hour each time. Normally, they came in a group but worked individually, with many using specially-prepared materials for the four skills, English magazines, books about grammar usage, graded readers, and self-study student-generated materials. We could summarize the students’ working processes as follows: • • • •

Sign their names. Plan what to do and fill in the Self-Study Plan. Choose the materials that they were interested in. Do the exercise, if there is one. If the materials are more open, such as a book, or a magazine, note down new words instead. • Record what they have done in their Personal Study Record. • Ask the teacher to check their work. While checking, the teacher might ask questions to see if the students had really done the exercise and understood the content. The students might ask the teachers questions if they had any problem.




Even though the students reported that they knew what the Self-Study Plan and the Personal Study Record were, it was quite surprising to learn that only 39% of them used the study plan when they started working, and only 45% used the personal record. It seems as if the students did not really see the need to use these forms.

Attitudes towards the SEAR and the support provided Students’ attitudes The questionnaire data reveal that more than 65% of the students had been trained to use the SEAR, do self-study, fill in the study plan and write a Personal Study Record. In the students’ opinions, the SEAR was where they could learn English by themselves. It provided them with useful materials. Some students saw the SEAR as similar to a library for learning English and doing other activities. Even though the students revealed that they understood the concepts and objectives of the SEAR, it was quite interesting to learn that 69% of them reported that they came to use this room as it was a course requirement. Only 27% said that they used it because they wanted to. We also found that just 50% of the students thought that the SEAR was useful. As for difficulties in using the SEAR, 86% of the students reported that they did not have any problems, while 36% of them mentioned that they needed more training in grammar, speaking, vocabulary and reading. If possible, they wanted the teachers to train them to use other resources such as videos and tape recorders. Some students said that they were not clear what the SEAR was. None of them reported that they had problems in using a study plan or a Personal Study Record. It seems, then, that the training or support the teachers gave might not have been enough to enable the students to learn on their own. This may help explain why the majority of the students (69%) explained that their main reason for using the SEAR was that they had been directed to by their teachers. Teachers’ attitudes As mentioned earlier, only two teachers (the SEAR manager and one classroom teacher) integrated use of the SEAR into their teaching. These two teachers were very positive about the SEAR. They each had about 30 years of teaching experience and had attended two of the three Ministry of Education workshops on self-access learning. However, they seemed quite exhausted by their SEAR responsibilities:




Laddawan: This is a really big responsibility for us. We have to run the SEAR without much support from other teachers. The responsibilities include manning the room, training students to use the room, giving consultations, producing materials, and so on. This is on top of our teaching load. Apart from that, we have to go beyond our regular teaching responsibilities to keep the SEAR open after school to accommodate our students’ needs. We are very tired. If we did not think of the benefits our students will get from the SEAR, we might have quit a long time ago. Somsri: Even though the students are assigned to come to use the SEAR, some of them are not motivated enough to come. We have to think of ways to encourage them to come. This is extra work. Apart from this, weaker students need a lot of teacher support and encouragement. As a result, we have to pay much attention to these students when they are in the SEAR. Our initial visits and familiarization with the school let us see there were many factors that would limit the effective teacher-led introduction of the SEAR. The first limitation came from the school administrators who, blind to the benefits of the project, simply adopted the project because it was a top-down government policy. Without genuine administrative support, the English Department could not force the involvement of every teacher in the project. The second limitation was the teachers’ overwhelming workload. They were not only responsible for teaching about 15–20 classroom contact hours per week, but also had to help with the administration of the SEAR. To make it work for the students’ benefit, they had to go well beyond their normal teaching and administrative responsibilities. Working long hours on their own really had an effect on their attitude and efficiency. The last limitation was that the teachers did not have a clear understanding of the principles of learner autonomy and what its development involves. They simply believed that students can do selfstudying by themselves, once the teacher has told them what to do. The teachers did not truly understand the importance of students setting objectives for learning, choosing appropriate materials to achieve their goals, and monitoring and evaluating their own learning, so these components were not highlighted in the training they gave students. This also had a clear effect on how both teachers ran the SEAR. What they were trying to do was push as many students as possible to work in the SEAR, because they believed that it would help increase the students’ proficiency and make them autonomous learners, as Somsri explained: ‘We have noticed some improvement in the





Discussion and suggestions Whether or not the use of the SEAR through support from teachers and documents enabled the students to develop their learner autonomy is not clear from the students’ attitudes and the development of their self-directed skills. What we did find interesting was that there were more students who seemed extrinsically motivated to use the SEAR (69% used it because it was imposed by the teachers and was gradedriven) than those who were intrinsically motivated (27% wanted to use it and see its benefits). So most students did things because they were told to, not because they wanted to. The problem is that learner autonomy tends to develop best when learners are intrinsically motivated (Dickinson, 1995; Noels et al., 1999, cited in Dörnyei, 2001b: 104). Why were the majority of the students extrinsically motivated, driven only by teacher pressure and grades? We found four main factors at work. 1. The development of learner autonomy was compromised by the focus on grades Perhaps because the two teachers managing the SEAR project were under great pressure, they compromised by linking students’ grades with work in the SEAR: they assigned specific tasks, required students to report on what they had done each time, and based final grades on this work. Students were not left alone to make decisions about their own learning. Alternatively, the teachers could have designed a more autonomous project which made better use of the SEAR, such as using it as a resource or giving more choices in the materials than they did. A good example would be project work. The teacher could give the students a theme such as fashion, youth and drugs, environment, etc. and then ask students to come up with a specific title for the project under the theme they are interested in. After that, the teacher discusses the process with the students, which might include finding, organizing, analysing and synthesizing information before presenting it orally or in writing. With a full understanding of the process, students can be left on their own to do the project in the SEAR. Two stages of the process where students can make full use of the SEAR are:



students’ grades. We think that SEAR has a part to play in this. In the next semester we will do a pre- and post-test to check for evidence of students’ improvement.’

• Looking for content: If there is not enough information on paper, they can always turn to the Internet. • Preparing their presentation: This is when they can focus on the language; there is plenty of material on grammar and writing, which they can access with the teacher’s help if necessary. This kind of approach would allow students more freedom to plan their project, choose materials, and make their own decisions in the process. This would definitely help to lead students to learner autonomy more effectively than being assigned specific learning tasks by the teachers, where their only choice was which exercise to do. 2. Students were following teachers’ directions rather than their own needs and interests Since the teachers had to give the students a grade for their work, the activities they assigned were quite closed, which naturally affected how students used the SEAR: most of them tended to use materials which could easily be completed and checked, to meet the requirement set by the teachers. This question is connected with the attitudes of the teachers. If teachers accept that a key principle underpinning learner autonomy is the freedom to learn, it becomes easier for them to set up supplementary activities which enable them to assess students’ genuine engagement in independent learning. However, because the activities of the SEAR were score-oriented, students had to follow what their teachers directed them to do if they wanted to get a good score. They were not thinking of learning to fulfil their own desires, interests or needs. 3. Conflicting teacher roles created a confused perception about the purpose of the SEAR Students were also deterred from developing their learner autonomy because of confusing teacher roles in the SEAR. The three roles the teachers played, namely guide, facilitator and counsellor, were supportive. However, when they acted as assessors, checking whether the students were studying or not, it created the perception that learning in the SEAR was compulsory. 4. Teachers saw the SEAR as a place to practise work done in class Teachers seemed to use the SEAR to practise skills learned in class and to check the right answers. However, the SEAR was set up as a place where learners can engage with English and explore learning styles




which work best for them, through working with various materials and, as a result, developing a self-directed mode of learning (Sturtridge,1992). We felt that the students were not really making genuine choices in their learning, and this affected their motivation to use the SEAR and the development of their autonomy. For these last two points, the root of the problems lies mainly in the teachers’ lack of understanding of their roles, learner autonomy and the purpose of the SEAR. Their belief that the SEAR was set up to provide supplementary English practice outside class affected how they designed the tasks for students to use in the SEAR, their roles in the SEAR and their evaluation of the students’ learning. Teacher development is very important here because, and, if done well, it will open them to new ideas. The excessive influence of extrinsic motivation on the development of students’ self-directed skills was very apparent in the way the students planned and monitored their learning. Their use of the study plan and Personal Study Record was superficial in that they completed the documents only because they were required. The contents did not really help them to set genuine learning objectives, as their plan and the materials they chose did not correspond. Many students clearly did not understand the concept of a study plan or how it could help their study in the SEAR, and they recorded only facts in the Personal Study Record. Moreover, every time they used the SEAR, they recorded the same information: there was no step forward from the previous time, no sense of development in their study. The study plan and the Personal Study Record forms are quite formulaic. They focus on facts such as what day of the week students study, what skills they would like to practise and what activities they are planning to do. The forms do not ask learners to reflect on how they learnt, problems they encountered, or alternative actions they could have taken. We believe they have made the learners mechanical in their learning, because they do not require them to consider alternative ways of reaching their goals. Our concern here is that these two supports simply reinforce what learners already do, rather than help them to develop their own learning. So we see a strong need to adapt the form to include more of the ‘how’ of the learning process – how they plan to learn, how they solve problems, how they evaluate their learning – in order to encourage them to think more about their learning. The Samut Sakorn Burana SEAR did not really develop learner autonomy, especially in those students who were not motivated to learn




English. It is clear that support from every party – the Ministry of Education, school administrators, colleagues – needs to be provided for any innovation like this to be successful. However, we believe that what is more important is the real understanding of the concept behind the innovation. In the case of this study, although workshops were provided for the teachers involved in the project, they still did not use the SEAR to really develop their students’ learner autonomy. This partly comes from their trying to deal with an innovation while keeping their regular routines: because of the restrictions of the gradeoriented curriculum in the secondary school, making project work a requirement for students was the safest way for them. Another factor we felt contributed to the teachers’ decisions was their beliefs. In order for learner autonomy to develop, students need to experience freedom in learning, an intimidating concept for teachers, in that it challenges long-held beliefs and well-established teaching approaches. This is a challenge which is not easy for teachers to accept completely. Student support in the SEAR was also a concern. Merely providing support was not enough: how it was provided was more important. Developing self-directed skills needs time and consistency, as students need to do it continuously and learn how to change to a more reflective role. The support given has to be meaningful, and students need to see it as real support, not just a compulsory part of their grade. Furthermore, students should also have the chance to choose the kind of support they need in order to develop their learner autonomy. For a self-access centre to become an environment in which learners can effectively develop autonomy, it needs to offer the users choice, to be open to them and promote their creativity and self-criticism (Benson, 1994).

Final thoughts All three of us have been involved with the SEAR project, Thailand’s largest self-access innovation, at various stages. Doing this study has helped us see the complete picture of the project from the starting to the end of its cycle – from establishment to evaluation. It has helped us to gain insights into how a self-access centre is run in a particular school, how students work in the SEAR, how teachers and students are trained, what students think about learning in a SEAR, and a lot more. This is very useful for us as both classroom teachers and teacher trainers.




We have also been personally enriched in the process of conducting this study by exploring how to write and explain our research. We started out with a formal style in which as researchers we viewed things from the outside and followed a certain formulaic pattern in our writing. We have tried to move from this to talking to the reader in person where we have been challenged to include the voices of different people in our study. For non-native speakers like the three of us, a formal report style seems easier, but the alternative multi-voiced approach has challenged us tremendously. We were blind at the beginning, but the pictures became clearer and clearer through the editing process. We are proud to see how the work came out at the end. The different layers of collaboration in this project have been interesting for us here (the first layer, among ourselves at KMUTT; the second layer, with our partner project in Hong Kong; and the third, with the editors). And we have come to realize that real understanding cannot be reached without moving reflectively through such collaborative layers. That movement has enhanced our professional and career development.




Support Structures for Self-access Learning Sarah Toogood and Richard Pemberton

Opening Figure 15.1 is an example of a diary form that has been filled out by a first-year Engineering student as part of the assessment for her selfaccess language learning (SALL). The course requires her to: • create a language learning plan using VELA (Virtual English Language Adviser ) • fill out at least three diary forms over a six-week project period • meet with peers and her teacher to discuss the content of her diary, consider feedback and advice on learning she’s carried out, and negotiate her planned learning. There is nothing new about creating language learning plans and filling out diaries for SALL. What is different here is the implementation of Sarah’s ideas for structural elements, designed to support SALL in an institutional context. These elements consist of: • dividing language skills into ‘General’ and ‘Fundamental’ skills and limiting choice to one of each • describing learning planned and carried out in terms of ‘Focused’, ‘Transfer’ and ‘General’ Practice • providing course customized detailed prompts in the left-hand column of the diary to help both learners and teachers maintain awareness of expectations and stay on track. How we came to develop these support structures and become critically engaged in promoting and defending the provision for SALL within one particular course is the story that we will explore in this chapter. 180



15

181 Diary number:

3

Objective

In this week, I would like to revise and review the word list that I have

What did you aim to

done last time. It is because I still have the s ame problem on

do within this period of

checking the meaning by using online dictionary. But the meaning

time?

that I have checked is still not suitable for the post -test because it would be so easy to know what is the word is checking for as the dictionary that I used will explain the meaning by using the word that I wanted to check

Time Allocation

Length of time intended

Consider how you

Mon

spend your time on

1

Tues

Wed

affect your progress

Fri

Sat

Sun

Sat

Sun

1

different materials and strategies as this may

Thur

Actual time used Mon

Tues

1

Wed

Thur

1

0.5

Fri

0.5

How time was used Indicate number of

Focused

Transfer

General

hours, when or how

1

1.5

0.5

time was used. Strategies and

Focused Practice

Materials

I have read 6 pages of the Harry Potter book. I collected 20 words

Show what you did –

from these 6 pages. Then, focused on these 20 words by checking

include evidence of

meanings and examples from online dictionary. I’ve stored the

your vocabulary

meanings (English and Chinese)

learning strategies

As I listen to what my advisor said, so I change my reference sourc e

Figure 15.1a

Example SALL diary of first-year engineering student



This diary covers my learning from 04/04/05 to 10/04/05

and materials for each

to another online dictionary. Words that Iíve collected: (with

type of practice.

reference meaning from Collins Cobuild Compact English Learners’

Include:

Dictionary, Cambridge Online dictionary and Yahoo dictionary for

*details of the steps

Chinese meaning)

for each strategy Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (pp. 21–25)

*details of

Wristwatch

Glove Puppet

Slug

Shrunk (shrink)

Ruins (ruin)

Chimney

etc.

Snarled (snarl)

Maniacs (maniac)

*samples of reading

Wailed (wail)

Reptile

materials (with

Sobs (sob)

Slithering (slither)

words/phrases

Grin

Cobras (cobra)

highlighted)

Frantically (frantical)

Glistening (glisten)

*lists of vocabulary

Baggy

Knuckles (knuckle)

learned with

Sellotaped (sellotape)

Moaned (moan)

dictionaries/reading material used e.g. titles, pg number, urls

meanings, examples

Transfer Practice

etc.

I finished reading 6 pages on this week and I still have 20 words to

*your usage:

work on next week. As I know I do [not] have so much time left, so I

sentences/writing you

might just study more example sentences that find on the online

have produced

dictionary instead of making sentences by my own word. But if I still have time I will try to make m yself. General Practice This time I changed the way of doing general practice, I tried to read the story first for a page and then told my friend that what is that

Figure 15.1b




182

183

page taking about in Chinese to see they understand or not and maybe as them to check the Chinese version of Harry Potter book to

Assessing Progress

Focused Practice

Evaluate your learning

I checked meanings of the words that I collected and revised the

in detail, and explain

word list I have done before. Tried to remember it.

clearly any problems

Transfer Practice

you had.

I tried to remember the meanings of the words and study more example sentences on different online dictionary.

Comment on what

General Practice

you liked/disliked

My friend and I were quite enjoyed to do this practices even he/she

about the strategies

is not reading the English version of Harry Potter book but they can

and the materials.

also study the English words with me.

Provide evidence to support your selfassessment and reflect on: *notes you’ve made *examples of words/phrases you found it easy or difficult to learn *scores for tests *comments from

Figure 15.1c




see I am right or wrong.

184 Support Structures for Self-access Learning

others * your own feelings

What next and why?

I will keep on study the next 20 new words that I left for the post -test

Based on what you’ve

and study more words in the text book.

written above, state what plan to do next,

I will still using the same strategy on general practice cause it is a

giving reasons why.

good strategy for a lot of things like getting confidence to talk even in

Consider if you need

Chinese and English.

to modify your objective/strategies/ materials/time for your learning

Figure 15.1d


Introduction We’ve been supporting SALL not only through our Self-Access Centre (SAC) but also in elective and mainstream courses at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) for many years (for example, Toogood and Pemberton, 2002, 2006; Toogood, 2005). Acting on student and teacher reactions at the end of each SALL course, we’ve integrated structural innovations into our provisions to better scaffold SALL for both learners and teachers. However, having conducted most of our previous investigations with a small group of dedicated teachers directly involved in the development of the provisions and the research itself, we began to realize that we had a rather blinkered view of how these innovations were working. Over the years, frequent changes to teaching personnel meant that we could not assume that other teachers shared our belief in the aims of the courses or in the structures we had devised. We also realized that if we wanted a clearer picture of how both teachers and students were approaching SALL and what their understanding and responses to the structures were, we would have to go beyond end-of-semester feedback. So we decided to focus on one course and examine approaches and reactions throughout its duration.



about your progress

Sarah Toogood and Richard Pemberton 185

We focus here on a compulsory first-year English for Engineering course called ‘Lang 106’. It’s a pass-fail, 56-hour, one-credit English Language course catering for approximately 600 students and taught by 10 teachers. Many of the long-serving teachers on the staff opt not to teach the course for a variety of reasons: they don’t believe in SALL; SALL is new to them and may involve extra work; or they are working on other courses and prefer to stick to the tried and familiar. As a result, most teachers are new short-term (maximum 11-month contract) members of staff ‘allocated’ to the course. Many are not SALL advisers and may have no previous exposure to the concept of encouraging learners to take control of their own learning, or to materials and strategies which might match learners’ needs and wishes. They may even be unsympathetic to a philosophy which promotes SALL. What often seems to happen is that teachers begin to take control and teach what they feel comfortable with or believe is ‘right’ – which can, in turn, cause conflict between the teacher and the learners. These kinds of problems were raised in a recent talk at the Hong Kong Association for Self-Access Learning and Development (HASALD). Charubusp and Sombat (2006) reported on challenges they are facing in integrating SALL into courses. One of the main hurdles was dealing with teachers who are unsupportive or ignorant of the concept of SALL: I didn’t learn anything from the SALL this term. I used to do it with SAC staff during the summer, and I think I understand the process of SALL very well. But now, the teacher confused me because she didn’t get what SALL mean. (Student quoted by Charubusp and Sombat, 2006)

Support structures To combat such problems in Lang 106, we developed the kinds of scaffolding structures we believed would help teachers guide learners easily and at the same time help learners guide themselves. We integrated Sarah’s innovations into the course and into VELA. VELA helped learners plan, while the course gave learners the opportunity to practice and reflect on their learning. We also devised diary forms that mirrored the format of the VELA plan and contained a great deal of prompts so that both learners and teachers could easily discuss progress, as well as process. The final development was to formulate a set of open assessment criteria which could be used by both learners and teachers alike.



Background


Below we describe in detail the structural elements used to create such SALL scaffolding.

A key element to SALL orientation is finding out what is causing learning difficulties and then narrowing the scope for learning. Sarah discovered that by making the relationship between particular language learning skills clear, it was easier for learners to understand not only the problems they were having with the language, but also to recognize some of the solutions. Table 15.1 shows this relationship. Table 15.1

The relationship between general and fundamental skills

GENERAL SKILLS Problems with …

FUNDAMENTAL SKILLS Caused by lack of knowledge in …

Listening

Pronunciation + Vocabulary

Speaking

Pronunciation + Vocabulary + Grammar

Reading

Vocabulary + Grammar

Writing

Vocabulary + Grammar

Because we are able to predict the type of language problems the firstyear Engineering students have when they come to HKUST, we decided to fix the choice in our Lang 106 course for each of the two semesters. In the most recent versions of Lang 106, although learners were totally free to choose their own materials and, largely the way they practised, we restricted their choice of General and Fundamental Skills: they focus on building their vocabulary through reading in the first semester and their ability to understand fluent/native English through discovery of suprasegmental pronunciation features in the second semester. This appears paradoxical in a course that aims to develop learner autonomy, but it seemed to us to have a number of advantages in that the restriction: • eliminates the need for lengthy orientation sessions where learners have time to identify and prioritize a wide range of problems and solutions for themselves; • makes it easier for advisers, teachers and peers to give feedback as they do not have to be experts about every language-learning problem;



General and fundamental language skills


• enables learners to set achievable objectives within the framework of a short course.

The Focused, Transfer and General Practice Framework One of the most frustrating aspects of a SALL course can be when a learner is practising in a way which is obviously not going to show results in the short term and which can lead to frustration and boredom in the long term. In the early years of our SALL courses, we saw two distinct types of learners: those who expose themselves to the language as much as they can in the hope they will improve, and those who believe that the only way to improve is to struggle through as many grammar exercises as possible and memorize as many words from a dictionary as they can. For some, these methods work, but for many they lead to boredom, frustration at lack of progress perceived, and often a sense of innate failure. In an attempt to address this issue and at the same time make it easier for teachers and learners to see and judge progress, Sarah came up with the idea of dividing practice strategies into three distinct types: Focused, Transfer and General (FTG). Table 15.2 shows how the concept is introduced to learners. The framework allows learners to see the relationship between strategies they can use and the materials they have chosen to work with, and helps us cut down on the need for lengthy complex orientation and support sessions. As can be seen from the example diary in the opening of this chapter, learners are required to document their learning in terms of the different practice types. This enables them to reflect on which strategies and materials are the most appropriate to pursue at any specific time during their project. The intention is also to make it easy for teachers to give appropriate guidance and feedback on the learning. In VELA Plan, learners are introduced to the concept of General and Fundamental Skills as well as the FTG Framework as they go through the steps to help them create a language-learning plan. In Step 6 (Personalizing your plan) learners are shown their choices from the previous steps in the layout of a form. At this point, the plan is easily tailored to the learner’s specific needs, but it still shows a logical set of solutions to the language learning problem the learner stated he/she wishes to tackle. Again, while the choices may be logical and can be personalized, they are initially made from a closed series of options. The room to innovate original solutions is necessarily limited in the



Would learners and teachers agree with us, though?


Type of language practice

Description

Example

focused

This is what you do to teach yourself something in the language.

If you don’t know the meaning of a word/phrase or you don’t know how it’s used, find out through checking meanings and examples in dictionaries and asking fluent/native speakers.

transfer

This is where you make a conscious effort to use what you have learnt in Focused Practice.

If you have collected and checked the meaning for a list of vocabulary, you can practise the words/phrases to see if you know how to use them correctly. You can see if you now know the meanings when you read, you can use them in a conversation, writing sentences or in an essay. You can see if you’re correct by checking in dictionaries again or by reactions you get and you could also check with an adviser, teacher or friends.

general

This is what you do when you just expose yourself to the language.

Reading, watching movies, listening to the radio, to songs and chatting with friends on the same or a similar topic, even singing in the shower, are all great ways to keep up with the kind of vocabulary you are working on. There’s no need to worry about mistakes or misunderstandings or knowing everything in detail – just have fun!

first five steps so that the learner can create (and learn how to create) a balanced and systematic plan that is appropriate for a short-term SALL project. Once the learner begins to personalize his/her plan, the opportunity to innovate is bound only by the need to ensure logical links between different types of practice strategies and materials, time for learning, objectives and assessment strategies. 10.1057/9780230596443 - Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education, Edited by Andy Barfield and Steve Brown


Table 15.2 The FTG Practice Framework as presented in the first-year coursebook


In a SALL course there can be tension between learners and teachers if the way work is assessed is not transparent or clearly linked to the overall objective of helping learners take effective control of their learning. By effective control, we mean that they have demonstrated the ability and willingness to take control of their learning, the capacity to critically reflect on choices made and feedback they received, and have shown improvement in understanding and awareness of the language skills being worked on. Our attempts to promote greater transparency and interconnected learning involved making the assessment criteria for all work carried out in Lang 106 explicit and based on questions related to the degree of critical thinking that a learner could show in their fortnightly diary documentation and during regular teacher/peer consultation sessions.

Investigating the support structures Having incorporated these structural elements into the course, we were interested to see whether or not teachers and learners did in fact find them helpful in terms of supporting learners in taking effective control of their language learning, enabling them to meet the course requirements, and ensuring teachers were not overloaded and were able to support learners. We investigated student and teacher reactions through: • student and teacher questionnaires • interviews with teachers • recording teacher–student consultations at weekly intervals. Initially, we planned to collect data in both Spring and Fall 2005. Sadly, however, some of the teachers who were on short-term contracts did not have their contracts renewed at the end of our Spring semester in 2005. At a time of reduced education budgets in Hong Kong universities, new contracts over the last several years have worsened considerably in terms of pay, leave and benefits: teaching colleagues on these contracts in our department have been the first to go, when cuts have to be made and the budget for the coming year has not been approved. In Spring 2005, all of the new teachers on the course knew that their jobs were under threat, and several of them were informed towards the end of the course that they would not be re-employed. These employment security and continuity problems made it impossible to obtain the feedback we had hoped from all teachers at the end of the course. We have therefore decided to focus on the data collected from Fall 10.1057/9780230596443 - Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education, Edited by Andy Barfield and Steve Brown


Assessment criteria


2005 and look at reactions to the scaffolding structures we have developed, namely: VELA Plans, diaries and consultations, the FTG Practice Framework, time spent on learning, and attitudes to SALL overall.

Nine out of 10 students stated that it was helpful to create a VELA plan when doing a SALL project. The many positive comments included the following: • I can solve the problems I have through VELA. • It is user-friendly, systematic, well-organized programme which saves us time to make a learning plan. • We can have a clear target and clear guidelines to achieve that target. • VELA serves as an advisor, it gave me valuable suggestions. • Save a lot of work, and give u an idea of what you should do if you want to achieve it. However, negative comments included the following: • I have my own plan. • We do not need to made a complex plan as our goal is just to select useful vocabularies from a book. This can be simply carried out. • Even though it helps us to understand what to do in the SALL, I didn’t refer to it after handing it in. The positive comments indicate that the structuring in the plan seems to be meeting its aim very well. Learners seem aware of the benefits and understand the fact that a structured plan is a starting point, something which can guide and give ideas. Vicky (a young teacher, new to the course) gives a similar viewpoint: I said, ‘These are good ideas and if you can think of others you know you’re free to use other ideas as well but this is just a good guide.’ So I don’t think that they thought as they were forced to do it, but just as a good guideline to follow. Despite this majority viewpoint, we see from the negative comments that not everyone is of the same mind. Although many who voted ‘No’ didn’t give any reasons, one message seems clear: for a few the plan is not seen as a guide or starting point but rather something which hinders learning. Reasons for this could be related to a reaction against any restrictions on the learners’ freedom to carry out and control their



VELA plans

own learning. However, as the course makes clear and the teacher should emphasize, the aim is not to give learners total freedom but rather structured choices, and to encourage them to take responsibility for, and some control of, their learning. From listening to the teachers, we also found that some initially worried that VELA would allow students to produce a plan without having to do any thinking of their own. However, if teachers understand that the plan is a starting point for negotiation, then they will pick up and discuss any plans that are not personalized or are not feasible within the course constraints. As Frances (a teacher with experience of teaching on SALL courses) puts it: I don’t think that the initial planning is really the key use we made of it – the later reconsidering of goals and redevelopment of their plans in consultation following initial IL [Independent Learning] work was more key I think. Quite a few students went back to VELA for fresh strategy/materials suggestions following the recognition that e.g., jokes were not so good to work from as they’d thought. Diaries and consultations In Lang 106, learners must complete a total of three diaries during a 6week project period. Although a few teachers encourage learners to write a diary for each week of the project period, we were not surprised to see students telling us that writing diaries was time-consuming. In fact, we expected a number of negative reactions to the procedure. Generally learners like to spend their time studying what they have chosen to focus on and don’t tend to like filling out forms to prove they have been studying in the ‘correct’ way. However, we were extremely encouraged with the overwhelmingly high number of positive responses, for example, • Diaries are very useful in my English learning because I can consider what I have done in this time period and what I should do next when filling out the diaries. • They are really useful, because they help to checking my learning progress. • It’s a good way of communication between the teachers and students. Negative comments included the following: • It is time consuming and didn’t help me to improve my English skill. • Just fill in what you do in the previous week. • It is useless because this diary does not mean anything.




When compared to the positive comments, these comments are discouraging because they indicate these learners have not understood the purpose of filling out the diary. We may assume the teacher has not been successful in picking up on this throughout the duration of the course. As a result, the teacher would not have been able to discuss learning in depth or negotiate future learning. This brings into question how the consultation times were being treated and whether or not the learners were receiving effective guidance for their SALL. It suggests that some learners were left to sink or swim rather than being guided to take good control of their learning. The key purpose of the diaries is to serve as a record and a prompt for the weekly consultations between teacher and learners. Student responses to the usefulness of the consultations were again overwhelmingly positive. This is a good indication that the structures we provided were aiding focused communication between students and teachers. Comments included: • By consultation, it helped me to know more ways of learning. • It is a chance to ask for and listen to. • It gives good suggestion but still freedom for myself. However, there were other comments that give cause for concern: • [Teacher’s name] can totally point out what’s wrong of my way of practice. • [Teacher’s name] told me what to do next. • No chance to speak. We can see from these last three comments that learners’ reactions/ interactions are very dependent on the way in which the teacher gives feedback and directs the consultation session. The first two comments indicate that the teacher might be overly directive, although it is difficult to tell without recordings of the actual consultations. The third comment, though, is disturbing as the purpose of the consultation is for discussion and negotiation – naturally a two-way communication. It may be that the teacher is not fully on board with the spirit of SALL. If this is the case, there would seem to be two solutions to the problem. One is within our control as course writers and coordinators: to increase the support that we provide, particularly to new teachers. This is a short-term solution and should work as long as committed staff are in charge of the course, and staff allocated to teach on it are




not fundamentally opposed to the principles of SALL. The other solution, essential if innovations like ours are to have any chance of longlasting success, is for management to try to promote a departmental and institutional culture in which learner autonomy is highly valued and SALL is integrated into all language courses. The Focused, Transfer and General Practice Framework The FTG (Focused, Transfer and General) Practice Framework is a new concept for both learners and teachers alike. Understanding the concept is crucial if both learners and teachers are to benefit from the scaffolding and flexibility it brings to the learning process. Asked how useful the idea of Focused, Transfer and General practice was in helping learners learn more systematically, the students’ responses were extremely positive: • These practices really help me learn things step by step. • They help us keep my project goes smoothly. They give clear guideline for us so that I could learn English more systematically. • The three stages are clearly divided. This provide us a clear objective of what we are going to do in each stage. • It gives me a systematic and effective way to practise and enhance what I learnt during reading the material. The few negative comments from students (such as I don’t know what they are really) tended to suggest that, despite our efforts to make transparent the structures that support SALL in the course, a very small number of learners were still unclear about what to do and teachers may not have been following up on misunderstandings documented in diaries or discussed during consultations. Nevertheless for the most part, teachers are positive and enthusiastic about the Framework, calling it ‘very important’ (Winnie, a teacher with some years experience of teaching the course) and saying that it helped students to ‘break down … steps that they actually need to follow when they learn’ (Vicky, a teacher new to the course). Time spent on learning At HKUST, class time for English courses is set at just under two hours per week. There is also an expectation that learners should put in one hour for homework. It is generally felt that most of our learners are extremely pragmatic with their time and tend to calculate time spent on a course in accordance with the credit rating. Lang 106 has a paltry




one-credit status, so no one had great expectations that the students would put in more than the minimum time requirement for the course. We were pleasantly surprised to see, however, that this was not the case. In calculating the amount of time spent/useful for the course the vast majority of learners stated more than two or three hours. Quite a few suggested that more than four or five hours was best. This in itself is encouraging but what is interesting is that they don’t seem to be counting class time into the equation. This is supported by the kind of comments students made: • At least 2 hours in the weekend, one hour in Sat and one hour in Sun. • It won’t have a big burden on other important subjects and it will have higher efficiency on learning English through this course. • The time control is flexible, but 4 hours should be the minimum. • The more time, the more effect. Attitudes to SALL overall Both teachers and learners responded positively to the course and to the support structures we introduced. Teachers said that VELA, the FTG framework and the diary/consultation procedure were helpful and in the end-of-course meeting all agreed that the students liked the freedom of the course. In every investigation we have conducted, the number of students wanting an element of SALL in Lang 106 has consistently been over 90%, while the number of those wanting to have half of the course or more devoted to SALL has consistently been over 70%. Those who are not so keen explain that this is due more to SALL being taxing and time-consuming than it being a bad idea per se.

Conclusion Despite the discovery that both teachers and learners are generally positive towards the course and its structural provisions, there are inevitably negative comments on both sides. We have not been able to identify a common cause for the negative reactions, but we suspect that teacher approaches and beliefs are central. In one case in a previous semester where a teacher complained about the constraints of the course requirements and structural elements, it seemed to us that the teacher felt upset by perceived constraints on her own teacher autonomy rather than focused on the positive effects on the development of learner autonomy. Where teachers are unhappy with a course, this is bound to transmit itself to the students. We are also aware that in pre-




vious semesters a few teachers have used the freedom involved in a SALL course to do their own ‘thing’, perhaps providing a fun classroom environment for students, but in turn undermining the principles of the course. This may not be a problem exclusive to a SALL course, but one which is possibly more sensitive merely because there are no standardized assignments to ensure that teachers are in fact following the course. All this means that finding the right balance between freedom and structural support for both teachers and students is never easy. To discover exactly what teachers’ beliefs and approaches to Lang 106 are and how they affect the learners, we need to do further research. Sadly, however, it has been decided that the course will be completely rewritten, despite the overwhelmingly positive responses from both teachers and learners on the course. Richard is now no longer course coordinator and Sarah has been moved to a different work-team. In their talk at HASALD, Charubusp and Sombat (2006) concluded that effective teacher training was the best means to ensure teachers were onboard with the concepts of SALL. Our story tends to suggest that teacher training is important but will not by itself ensure the success of an innovation over the long term.




Shifting Sands: Supporting Teachers in Facilitating Independent Learning Jean T. Young, Christoph A. Hafner and Dean W. Fisher

I’m experimenting with it to see … how far I can leave them alone … because I was just wondering whether they actually have independent learning already inside or they actually don’t have the independent learning inside … if they don’t … next time I need to give more support. If they do, why are they not using it … that’s what I’m trying to figure out … (A teacher developing their awareness of the facilitation of independent learning)

Background We feel that teachers can play a crucial role in developing the independent learning abilities of their students. However, this may involve considerable changes in teaching practice, so support for teachers facilitating independent learning is essential. This chapter is the story of how we have explored our understanding of how teachers develop their ability to facilitate independent learning and how we can support this process. The setting is the English Language Centre (ELC) at City University of Hong Kong (CityU), a teaching department which focuses on the support and enhancement of undergraduate students’ English for general academic purposes. In September 2003, the ELC implemented broad changes in its course structure, primarily to give students greater flexibility and choice. At the time, teachers felt that this would be motivating for students. Specifically, the changes included moving from a system of five compulsory courses to two compulsory courses (Written Language and Spoken Language) and a range of electives. In addition, both compulsory courses include an independent learning component, allowing 196



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students to choose their own aims and learning activities. By introducing independent learning as an essential element of the curriculum, we hoped to involve learners in decisions about their learning, encourage them to take responsibility and promote reflection on the learning process. The approach taken in both courses is essentially similar. Students taking the courses are required first to assess their language needs, then plan, complete and evaluate 12 hours of independent learning activities outside class time. During the course, students have one on one or small group consultations with their teacher, during which they discuss their learning plan, learning style and appropriate learning strategies. By the end of the course, students compile a portfolio which demonstrates learning processes and outcomes. The aim is to encourage the development of a range of skills and awarenesses, including metacognitive skills for language learning (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; Cohen, 1998) and a deeper understanding of their own learning styles and what works for them (Willing, 1988; Ehrman, 1996). We feel that by going through this process with adequate support, learners will be able to develop a capacity for ‘detachment, critical reflection, decision-making and independent action’ (Little, 1991: 4). Incorporating independent learning into the curriculum has provided staff and students at the ELC with several critical challenges. As course designers and co-ordinators, a key issue for us is what kind of support staff feel they need in order to be effective facilitators of the independent learning process.

Initial reflections: the Spoken Language course For the purposes of this chapter we will focus on teachers of the Spoken Language course. This is a natural choice for us given that we have all been involved in the design, co-ordination and teaching of this course. When it was first introduced, we were aware that the independent learning component would be new to teachers and we were therefore concerned to provide adequate support. We took the view that promoting independent learning would involve a different role-relationship with students and therefore a different set of professional knowledge and skills (Dickinson, 1987; Voller, 1997). The course itself contained some teacher support (which was essentially in the form of a unit devoted to independent learning), a booklet for students describing aspects of independent learning (such as learning styles) and a number



Jean T. Young, Christoph A. Hafner and Dean W. Fisher 197

of templates that students could use to create learning plans, reflections and their learning portfolio. Other forms of teacher support were also offered, including an all-day staff development seminar, regular teacher development sessions and course inductions. Initial teacher support focused rather heavily on providing information about different elements of independent learning. We also felt that experience of learning independently would offer teachers valuable insight into the process (Little, 1995; McGrath, 2000). Teachers had the opportunity to experience independent learning through an online support system called ‘WIILD’ (Web-based Induction and Independent Learning Development1). As part of this process, teachers had to produce a learning plan and reflect on their learning, in other words to go through the same process as their students. Several teachers commented that this had given them a better understanding of the problems learners face, as well as of themselves as learners and of the facilitator role (Hafner and Young, 2007). Over the first two semesters of the course we collected feedback from teachers and students in the form of interviews and questionnaires. When considering the issues raised, we concluded that the aims of the independent learning component could be more effectively achieved if they were integrated into every aspect of the course – in other words, if teachers took on the role of facilitating autonomy generally rather than simply supporting students through the independent learning project. We felt that teachers could use classroom time to, for example, model possible learning strategies, ask students to reflect on aims and outcomes, demonstrate resources, motivate their students and so on (Fisher et al., 2007). Seen from this perspective, the question of whether ‘doing independent learning’ will promote autonomous learning in students depends, at least in part, on the quality of support that teachers provide students and how well integrated it is with other course aims. In this action research, we wanted to establish: 1. whether teachers were integrating independent learning with their classroom teaching; 2. what support teachers might need in order to do so.

Investigating teacher perceptions We followed six Spoken Language teachers, including two of us, over one 13-week semester. Because of limitations of space, we will consider



198 Shifting Sands: Supporting Teachers in Facilitating Independent Learning

only three teachers here; we chose to exclude ourselves and one parttime teacher from the discussion. Participation was voluntary, with teachers free to take part in the research project if they wanted to. For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, we have adopted the pseudonyms Erica, Anne and Sarah to refer to the three teachers in the project. Erica was a part-time teacher while Anne and Sarah were full-time teachers. All had taught on the Spoken Language course previously as well as on other ELC courses with independent learning components. We interviewed them at the beginning and end of the semester, to find out: • • • •

how they defined independent learning; how they implemented independent learning in the course; how their practice was changing over time; what challenges they felt students and teachers faced with regard to independent learning.

We also asked them to audio record the lesson(s) in which they introduced the independent learning project to their students and to record one other lesson later in the course. After the lessons, we met with the teachers to compare our perceptions of what had happened with theirs. Overall, we collected a large amount of data. In this chapter we will concentrate on a single aspect, that of how teachers reported their practice changing over time. We will also confine our focus to teachers’ self-reports in interview, rather than an analysis of what happened in the recorded lessons, although our insights were formed from a consideration of the whole range of information that we had collected and transcribed.

Shifting sands Erica: training and giving responsibility In the initial interview, Erica said that when she first encountered independent learning she had felt rather overwhelmed with so many new concepts. Now, however, she was more familiar with the resources available and was better able to help students identify learning strategies. She also felt that she knew more about learning styles, and was encouraging students to apply their knowledge of their own styles in their planning.




• When I was originally involved with independent learning … I felt completely at sea … it was all totally new to me … we all just swam our way through it. • I’ve familiarized myself with the resources but not enough. • I think I have a slightly better ability to help students identify different learning strategies. In the second interview, Erica was able to identify many more changes. These included: • having been forced to think about learning styles and strategies; • becoming more aware of the effects of learning styles and strategies on classroom learning; • giving students options in class; • planning to give less support and less feedback on portfolios; • being more able to give help with needs identification and how to use the Self Access Centre. She felt that her attitude had always been positive, but her understanding of what independent learning could involve was changing: Even in the classroom the kind of thing that I’ve done recently that I wouldn’t have done before we had the independent learning consciousness is to offer them the option of carrying out an activity in one way or another … in the past I would have tended to offer the materials as they’d been written in the book … now … I’d say is there anyone who would like to see the transcript while you’re checking the answers … and then hand out to those who want to see it and some don’t want to. They want to do it differently and that’s fine. I’m going to try and do less hand-holding with the independent learning … it was a bit of an awakening for me to be asked that question [How do you help your students become more independent?] last time because I find it difficult to answer. And I realized that the enormous amount of effort that I put into explaining everything to them was actually a little bit contradictory. Erica has clearly taken up the idea of learner training and consciousness raising and moved from an initial stage of feeling that she lacked background knowledge to a more confident sense of having the ability to develop learners’ skills. She has started allowing students to exercise a degree of autonomy in the classroom as well as outside and is grappling with the issue of how much guidance and support are appropri-





Anne: advising and recommending resources In the initial interview, Anne felt that, since the first time she had dealt with independent learning, she had become more organized and more aware of course requirements. Over time she had become more knowledgeable in terms of resources available and more focused on breaking independent learning into stages and helping students develop the skills needed for each stage. She also reported being more innovative: I think I have become more organized. The first time … I really did not spend too much time on dividing things into stages … but I think as I become more aware of the various possibilities, the various resources, I think I have become more organized. In the second interview, Anne felt that she had been able to come across to students as more prepared. In a reversal of her previous reported change, she was considering not focusing so much on skills and strategies, but instead concentrating on a more holistic approach guided primarily by student interest. She felt that her practice changed depending on the course and students she was working with. She was aware that she had become more conscious of her practice and reported that this was developmental in itself: I believe all this involvement in … finding out about learner strategies, finding out about resources … did help me look a lot more prepared when I … introduced the concept to the students. And that helped a lot, definitely. I might want to actually look at it from a more holistic point of view rather than … asking them to identify their needs, their problems, I might actually be working from the other end … encouraging them to do something which they’re genuinely interested in. Anne has moved from an initial position of feeling that she was not knowledgeable about the details of learner training to feeling much more capable of dealing with it. As she reports, she initially dealt with independent learning very holistically, and then as she became more confident in her own knowledge, she entered the semester of this study planning to break down and present various learning skills. However,



ate. For her, independent learning seems to be about taking responsibility, and this is something which she stresses throughout her teaching. She appears to see the teacher’s role as providing opportunities and pushing students to take on more responsibility.

by the end of the semester, Anne found herself swinging back to the idea of presenting independent learning holistically and focusing on getting students interested. By the time she was asked to read and comment on what we had written about her, she reported that she had swung back again to focusing on skills. Anne appears to see the teacher’s main role as advisor and resource recommender. Her initial concerns related to not knowing enough about various aspects of independent learning; it often appeared that she felt it was the teacher’s role to take information about learners, such as preferred styles and strategies or test results, and give specific recommendations for learning activities based on these. Fulfilling this role requires the teacher to have a lot of background knowledge and familiarity with each student’s individual strengths, weaknesses and needs. By setting such a challenging and time-consuming goal for herself, Anne may have put herself under increased stress, which may have contributed to her decision to move to a more holistic approach. Sarah: directing In the initial interview, Sarah reported that she had become more directive, more theoretical, and more oriented to getting students to narrow down their aims and had spent more time talking with them about skills and learning styles. She felt she had had to make these changes to prepare students for the course assessment requirements, but she didn’t believe that these were best for students. Commenting on her changing practice, she said: • I don’t know why, I’ve spent more time talking about skills. • It’s ironically gone more theoretical than practical. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. In her second interview, Sarah said that she was now trying to keep independent learning as simple as possible. For her this meant: • not using theoretical language and keeping it practical; • keeping the time spent on learner training to a minimum; • integrating independent learning more into lessons by raising student awareness of the aims of activities. [To make it more practical] I … focus more on … you know the learner quiz? We only did the easy one … they can do the other one and stick it in their portfolio but I’m not going to go into the detail of it. So it’s all very simple. It’s are you active or are you reflective and keeping it there.




Her attitude to the independent learning component had not changed from the beginning of the semester; in the end-of-semester interview she still didn’t feel that pushing students through the process of carrying out an independent learning project was helpful in developing their autonomy. [I]f you’re guiding it it’s not independent learning … I think we should be encouraging students to learn by themselves … but I don’t think [what we do in the Spoken Language course] is independent learning. I think it’s something else. Independent learning is when you set your own goals, you set how many times, you know, the time that you want to spend on something, you integrate it into your life. At the moment we’re not integrating it into their lives at all … I think, for most students it’s seen as homework. It’s not an integration, at all … And it goes on for a long time … It’s for all those people who don’t have access, really, to language learning. Language classes. It’s for all those people who work in tourism and need to improve their English. It’s for all those people who’re dealing with people. It’s for all those people who’ve got a dream to go to a foreign university or to emigrate. It’s those people, I mean, you know, who really see a need for it. On one level, Sarah remained the same over the period of the semester: she had a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the approach to independent learning which was being taken. For her, the key element of independent learning appears to be that the motivation to undertake it comes from within the learner; it is not something which can be changed by teacher action. She clearly felt constrained by the course requirements, mentioning them 20 times in her interviews, compared with a range of two to nine times for the other teachers, and she appears to feel that she has little power to influence what happens. There is a sense that Sarah felt controlled from outside in her initial interview: she regularly used ‘I don’t know why’ to qualify what she said and said that the course had ‘gone more theoretical’, as if it had done so by itself, rather than because of any conscious choice by her. This appears to have changed by the second interview; she has taken control of the process in the classroom, providing students with a lot of support and guidance to achieve the final product, the portfolio. There appears to be relatively little focus on process, consistent with her belief that teacher action will not make students independent learners. From that point of view, the value in the independent work lies in the language practice obtained, rather than in the development




of learning skills, and this seems to be reflected in the type of focused guidance given. Sarah seems to have found a way to exercise her own autonomy in the classroom. She is still not happy with the constraints imposed on her, but has taken steps to minimize the impact of these by keeping the process simple and focusing on getting the required work done as quickly as possible. She feels her students are not motivated to do independent learning, and by giving very clear instructions and focusing on the course requirements, she helps them complete the assessment task efficiently and on time. In doing so, she perhaps creates a selffulfilling prophecy; what her students are asked to do may indeed be more like homework than independent learning.

Discussion As one would expect, the teachers in this study differed greatly in the way and extent to which they integrated independent learning into their classroom practice. What struck us was the broad range of issues that teachers raised in the interviews, regarding the way they conceptualize autonomy and the way they try to develop it in their students. In this regard, Sarah’s philosophical disagreements highlight the affective dimension: teachers developing the skills necessary to promote autonomy are likely to question or re-evaluate their own teaching philosophy to accommodate independent learning. Such re-evaluation is likely to take them out of their comfort zone and spur them to find ways to become confident and competent in the new situation. The discomfort may also lead to resistance as a coping strategy. While this was particularly dramatic with Sarah, the other teachers also showed signs of feeling frustrated or insecure at times. Breen and Mann (1997: 145–6) comment that teachers of autonomous learners exhibit a number of ‘deeper attributes’, including: self-awareness (of the teacher’s own self as a learner); belief and trust (in each learner’s capacity to assert their own autonomy); and desire (to foster the development of learner autonomy). We believe that such deeper attributes may be developed over time, as teachers have opportunities to engage with independent learning and reflect on the process. This is supported by our observations that teachers’ beliefs and attitudes were changing over the course of this study. In addition to the affective dimension highlighted here, teachers also felt challenged to develop the appropriate skill-set to effectively facilitate independent learning. This led to widely different classroom prac-




tices between Erica, Anne and Sarah. Erica tended to get her students involved in classroom decision making, while Anne focused explicitly on independent learning with a view to suggesting resources and motivating her students. In contrast, Sarah appeared to limit her involvement with independent learning to the recommended number of learner training sessions. Yet, all three teachers were teaching the same course, covering the same syllabus, using many of the same classroom materials and preparing students to complete the same assessment task. Another key point is that all of the teachers in this study reported that their beliefs and practice were changing, and they reported more changes in their second interview than in their first. The changes reported do not progress in a single direction; rather, there is a sense of swinging backwards and forwards in an attempt to accommodate learners’ needs and to respond to the teachers’ own changing concepts of autonomy. This oscillation seems to involve a number of common dimensions, as illustrated in Table 16.1. This constant change suggests that teachers are engaged in an ongoing evaluation of their individual practices as they seek to articulate and understand their roles in the process of promoting learner autonomy. The dimensions identified here involve both teacher action and teacher beliefs. As Thavenius (1999: 161) suggests, teachers must reflect on questions like ‘What do I do to encourage independence and responsibility?’ In addition however, teachers appear to engage in a deeper, more critical reflection involving questions such as ‘Are my students capable of taking responsibility?’ In addressing these issues, we Table 16.1

Dimensions of change

Providing guidance

↔

Allowing freedom

Focusing on learner training

↔

Focusing on counselling/advising learners

Focusing on independent learning skills in the classroom

↔

Focusing on spoken language skills in the classroom

Viewing autonomy as a negotiated, classroom process

↔

Viewing autonomy as the independent learning project

Believing in learners’ capacity for autonomy

↔

Doubting learners’ capacity for autonomy




can see the elements of competence, confidence and control emerging as interrelated themes in the way that teachers re-construct their beliefs and actions. Initially teachers may feel incompetent and lacking in knowledge about independent learning, and may therefore lack confidence. In this study, a number of the teachers interviewed referred to their initial lack of knowledge and the increased confidence which comes from feeling knowledgeable, of being able, as Anne put it, to ‘look more prepared’. One teacher said: I have an idea now what I’m doing … that’s why I can experiment more. Because I know … roughly what independent learning is supposed to be. However, the struggle to gain competence, or at least the appearance of it, may lead the teacher to try to control the learning process, by restricting what students can do or by providing excessive guidance or learner training. Another teacher commented explicitly: before I wasn’t so sure so I put lots of hands on. … that maybe was a … safety device It is only when teachers begin to feel both competent and confident that they can move towards giving up some of the control of the process to learners. On the other side of the coin, it is only when learners feel both confident and competent that they are able to take control of their own learning effectively. This change in competence and confidence does not seem to us to move in one direction. Rather, teachers appear to shift between ‘conscious incompetence’ and ‘conscious competence’ (Underhill, 1992) as they redefine their role along the dimensions outlined above. All participants reported some degree of active experimentation. It is clear that facilitating independent learning challenges teachers to rethink their teaching practice, not just in the initial stages, but over an extended period of time. Two years after the introduction of the independent learning component, even those teachers who had been involved from the beginning were still experimenting to find what worked best for them. This seems to us to differ, at least in degree, from our experience of other changes in teaching practice. Teachers are often exposed to new ideas and techniques, and if they choose to do so, typically seem able to integrate them into practice smoothly, developing from a feeling of initial uncertainty to confidence. It may be that




most such changes do not involve the kind of restructuring of basic teaching philosophy that facilitating autonomy does. The fact that teachers reported more experimentation at the end of the semester is in itself interesting. It suggests that the process of putting their beliefs and practices into words may have stimulated the process of change. Providing teachers with stimulus for reflection – ‘reflective space’ – may, in this sense, be supportive of the development of a pedagogy for autonomy (see Vieira, 1999b, on the benefits of collaborative action research).

The way forward In order to develop the confidence and competence necessary to allow teachers to give up control, three factors may be instrumental: experience, knowledge and reflection. Teachers need experience of facilitating autonomous learning, going through the learner process, and exercising autonomy as a teacher. It is through experience that teachers develop technical skills and integrate externally-provided knowledge into their own practice. Initially, knowledge about independent learning guides teachers in deciding what to do and gives them a feeling of competence; later this knowledge informs the reflection process. Reflection contributes to the refinement of skills and the construction of a personal understanding, but more than this, it is only through reflection that teachers can engage with their attitudes, values and beliefs. We initiated a process of collaborative action research because we wanted to understand how teachers were approaching independent learning and what additional support we could usefully provide. We found that the reflective space provided by participating in the process itself appeared to be supportive of change and development. The challenge then is how to provide this type of experience on an ongoing basis for a wider group of teachers. Our current support for teachers includes the provision of information and the opportunity to experience independent learning from the learner’s perspective; teachers also clearly have the opportunity to experience facilitating independent learning in the classes they teach. We are now considering how to encourage collaborative reflection into course support on a more systematic basis in a way which focuses not just on the technical aspects of facilitating independent learning, but also on attitudes and beliefs, and on the experience of being an autonomous teacher. This could be done perhaps by including group




discussion of beliefs and attitudes into our course induction meetings or by encouraging teachers to undertake their own collaborative action research projects. In supporting teachers facilitating independent learning, we face the same dilemma as in supporting learners: we must provide sufficient structure to promote confidence and promote initial competence, while at the same time allowing space for the teacher to take control of the process. Course design must allow sufficient flexibility for teachers to experiment and explore their own practice. This not only provides the substance for the reflective process, it also leaves space for teachers to exercise their own pedagogic autonomy. This freedom for teachers is an explicit element of the ELC teaching philosophy, but teachers, like Sarah, may still feel constrained, and we as administrators may have concerns about whether students are being given genuine opportunities to exercise their autonomy. Just as with learners, we hope that by requiring teachers to go through the process of facilitating independent learning, they may develop an increased awareness which may change their future practice. Some will do this more than others, and we swing between providing guidance and allowing teachers the freedom to ‘fail’. Critical collaborative reflection is a key element in bringing about change, and providing opportunities for teachers to reflect collaboratively may be one way for us to be supportive. However, we must also accept that reflection may not lead to the clear answers that teachers initially feel they want; rather, it may increase awareness of different possibilities and increase uncertainty. We would all agree with the teacher who said: I think I’ve changed my view of it [independent learning] from something that’s quite simple to something that’s a lot more complex.

Note 1. WIILD is an online support system which aims to help teachers new to the ELC learn about a) independent learning and how it is implemented in ELC courses, and b) general administrative information. Teachers can go through a process of creating a learning plan, choosing learning activities and writing reflective reports, which parallels the process we ask students to go through. WIILD can be accessed at .




Developing Teacher Autonomy Through Teamwork Judith Kennedy and Annamaria Pinter

Introduction … awareness raising and practice in relation to the evolution and design of learning materials can stimulate the kinds of critical thinking that may ultimately lead to more fully developed teacher autonomy. (McGrath, 2000: 110) The whole process of materials development did not only help me to make sense of what I read, what I teach and how I teach, but also widened my horizon to understand the context, teaching culture and constraints of other countries and helped me to become more mature to cooperate with others. (Team member) Inspired to look at how working in materials design teams promotes teacher autonomy, we became interested in exploring team processes of group collaboration between teachers. Over the years that we have been teaching this course (the Professional Practice in ELT module on our MA in Applied Linguistics programme), we have noticed that those teachers that opted to develop materials in a team, that is, in collaboration with others, have always produced high quality materials and benefited more than those who did it individually. We were interested in finding out what exactly happened in these design teams and what processes effective teams used and why. In 2005 we started to collect data from the team participants during their design process. In this chapter, we share some initial insights from our ongoing action research into developing teacher autonomy through teamwork by focusing on group interviews and our participants’ reflective writing. 209



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210 Developing Teacher Autonomy Through Teamwork

Without teacher autonomy, it would be difficult to promote learner autonomy in classrooms. We recognize that in order for teachers to promote autonomy in their own learners, they need themselves to become critical and reflective researchers of their own practice (Little, 1995) before they can hope to develop the qualities of autonomy in their learners, or indeed evaluate whether such qualities are effective or relevant for their learners. We see teacher autonomy as demonstrating itself in professional independence of action which develops out of social interaction. It depends crucially on the teachers becoming selfregulated individuals, motivated, flexible and self-determined in their approach to teaching, both professionally independent and interdependent for, as Little stresses, ‘our independence is always balanced by dependence; our essential condition is one of interdependence’ (Little, 1991: 5). Collaboration can perhaps be seen as assisting participants to behave individually in ways which are beneficial to the development of this autonomy, but it depends crucially on the behaviour of those individuals within the group. Teachers collaborating on a materials writing project have the opportunity to exchange ideas and opinions. To reach decisions on materials, members have to be able to see and understand different points of view, justify their stand, and acquire an understanding of the theoretical bases of pedagogical practices. Each participant can learn from the other, only if they are able to engage in different tasks at different times, for example, challenging, questioning, negotiating and compromising – all qualities which are conducive to the growth of a shared understanding. The development of teacher autonomy naturally involves developing a capacity for change. Teachers need to have the capacity to respond, react and change their practice in response to different contextual realities, and, for such a change to be effective, it needs to have some kind of conceptual justification. Analysing the processes of collaborative knowledge construction in teams, Tillema points out that in effective learning communities ‘professionals discuss, study and construct conceptual principles and ideas … and above all share insights’ (Tillema, 2005: 82) and through such processes individuals transform their own understandings of their subject. Previous research on collaborative



Collaboration and transformation of the knowledge base of participants

inquiry in teams (Hargreaves, 1992; Huberman, 1995; Kelleher, 2003; Wenger et al., 2003) shows that a focus on a clear product (in our case the design and creation of a syllabus and accompanying teaching materials) leads to a close analysis of new ideas, experimentation, and the critical scrutiny of ideas in the group, all of which can lead to knowledge transformation for the individual team members and the development of ‘disciplinary expertise’ (Gardner, 1993). We were quite aware that simply putting people in a group may not necessarily lead to effective collaboration. However, we anticipated that experienced teachers who themselves organized group work in their everyday teaching were going to be in a good position to negotiate effective procedures in their groups without much intervention from outside. The groups were also self-selected ones, which meant that all participants were in a group they really wanted to be with.

Our context This phase of the project involved 15 ELT teachers from different cultural backgrounds (south-east Asia, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Europe) who were in their second term of completing an MA in Applied Linguistics at Warwick University (CELTE). All the teachers had more than three years teaching experience in mainly state secondary schools or higher education institutions; a few were teaching in private establishments. The participants worked together (3 pairs and 3 threes) for three months on a materials and syllabus design project which was formally assessed. The teams had to design a syllabus, teaching materials and teacher’s guide for both a specified group of learners and a particular context of their own choice. They were encouraged to be both innovative yet realistic, because for most participants the materials would be ones that they used on their return to their own teaching contexts. The course input was both theoretical and practical, but the actual design of the team materials was carried out outside class time. There was some support available from us as course tutors for consultation, but teams mostly spent time working together on their own, with our support related to the content and structure of the materials rather than team processes and collaboration. Most participants had never designed course materials before or even contemplated doing so. We do not know how many participants had experience of collaborative group work before.



Judith Kennedy and Annamaria Pinter 211


Our teacher participants, when asked about the benefits of the team experience at the end of the project did indeed talk about change or transformation. Some teachers became aware of their own lack of understanding of principles in course design, thus adding to or fine tuning their knowledge base (Loughran, 2003), and often it was other group members who were crucial in helping individuals identify problems. Susie, Team C (interview): It was important having others look at draft materials. You can’t see the weaknesses for yourself easily. But sometimes, an outsider will see the materials in quite a different way. Claire, Team A (interview): I realized my mistakes when I made public what I’d done. I saw it myself through explaining it. Conceptual understanding and change were helped by participants realizing through collaborative discussion that they didn’t really understand a particular area, so they would go away and personally research it. Through reading, participants were able to validate their choices by using their new knowledge as a way of supporting their particular view: Edith, Team E (reflective writing): I think when we worked in teams, the help from the literature and the journal became the justification for introducing new ideas or convincing others of what we wanted. In the process, participants showed a gradual change, or subtle shifting of previously held perspectives. For some, the key lay in the actual process of producing materials which others in the team scrutinized. Others, such as Tina below, came to understand a particular approach to writing through the experience she herself went through during the project: Tina, Team A (interview): I now have a much better understanding of process writing in the classroom. Designing materials in groups is like process writing because we go through different stages: brainstorming, generating ideas, planning for the writing; writing the first draft; revising and producing the final product. Finally, participants reflected on their own changed conceptions of their capabilities when they saw their final product:



The teachers’ views

Susie, Team C (reflective writing): Certainly my views changed. I would never have thought I could write materials. As a teacher I taught the materials. Now I can see that this is something every teacher can do; and in a way already does because we do change our materials intuitively as we teach. Not all responses were so upbeat, however. During these interviews, it became evident to us that some teams learnt more than others and, even more importantly, they evaluated their experiences more positively than others. One issue that we suspected may have been a factor was time, that is, how much time the team devoted to working together outside class.

Issue of time Whenever people are working together, they need time to get to know each other, find out about each other’s strengths and weaknesses and generally bond with each other. An understanding and appreciation of each other form the basis on which good working relationships can be built, and there is no way that this initial process of ‘bonding’ can be short-circuited. Tuckman (1965) identifies different stages to this process emphasizing the long-term nature of group development – from the initial ‘forming stage’ where participants are overly polite with each other, to the final stage characterized by acceptance of each other and a strong sense of cohesion and high task orientation. Such cohesive groups have higher levels of satisfaction, self-esteem and security and lower levels of anxiety. Our teachers were themselves very aware that building mutual trust and group cohesion was a time-consuming process requiring a great deal of personal investment from everyone. Some teams devoted much more time than others in getting to know and working with each other, and there seems to be a very clear link between how much time and effort teams invested into the materials writing project and how positive they felt about the outcome. For example, Tina in her reflective writing explains just how much time her group spent on working together: Tina, Team A (reflective writing): Referring to the record of meetings, starting from January, our group has met more than twenty times, spending more than 200 hours in discussing, negotiating and compromising the content and teaching approach of the syllabus and teaching materials of Intensive Writing.




Although Team A’s 200 hours seem to be excessive, for some team members three months was insufficient time to get to know another person and to learn to work well with them. In addition to the time that was required for trust building, each team also had to sort out their time management with regard to who should do what by what deadline in order to produce a final draft that the team was happy with. Ray (Team B, reflective writing) said that his group ‘wasted three weeks’ and that caused problems later. Edith (Team E, interview) said that ‘we sort of started early but still we do not have enough time’. Whilst participants recognized the value of interactive discussion and debate, they could also see that it was not a time-efficient process: Mary, Team B (reflective writing): I have also found that I am creative and inspired in selecting materials and designing reading tasks. But due to the limitation of time, experience and energy we have not taken our potentials into whole play. The link between time and successful collaboration in education is an important issue. In higher education learning contexts, students are often put in groups and teams to do joint projects, but with insufficient time allocated to the process for it to be truly effective. Of course, some individuals are naturally better at time management than others; nevertheless, we found that whatever the team, participants found time to be a critical factor. Course design is creative work which embraces a range of activities such as understanding theoretical principles, applying them in practice, practical classroom knowledge, and creative design. It may be that for novice designers it takes a long time to learn to incorporate all these aspects of the task in a balanced way. Collaborative partnerships do not happen overnight but develop slowly, with not all participants willing or able to give the same amount of time and energy to the project. It is difficult to understand why some groups spent so much more time together working on the project than others. Some groups may simply have misjudged the amount of time it takes to negotiate, plan, draft and edit materials, while others perhaps realized it was going to take a long time but were less committed to frequent, long meetings. It is noticeable every year that different students on the MA programme want different things from their degree. Some just want to pass, while others want an excellent grade so they are prepared to push themselves to the limit for every grade in every assignment. Some groups may have enjoyed working together that they did not mind spending time on the project. In fact, some teachers said that they felt they found





Contrasting the teams In addition to the time spent on the project, there were other factors that influenced a team’s overall success. We would like to focus on two teams that have reported very different experiences. Team A were very positive in their evaluation of the team processes, while Team B found the experience at times frustrating and disappointing. Nyikos and Hashimoto (1997) showed in their study of teachers working collaboratively on a term paper that there can be wide variation in the degree of mutual support and scaffolding that team members afford to each other. This variation reflects the differing range of personalities in a team. Here we will highlight the sometimes fragile nature of group interaction and how different team ‘climates’ contribute more or less to the development of self-regulation in the participants. Team A was multicultural (teachers from Hong Kong, Syria and Vietnam) and Team B comprised three Chinese teachers. We will simply compare some processes: initial trust building and working out ground rules, constructive arguments, decision making and regulating/monitoring the process of materials design. We found that the two teams differed in all these areas.

Team A Team A were open and fulsome in their appreciation of their teammates, whilst recognizing that building trust and confidence in each other meant making compromises at times. Talking about the need to have ground rules, Claire said: Claire, Team A (interview): Conflicts are a natural part of working together and we have to handle disagreements constructively and reach a compromise. We have felt comfortable and relaxed with each other. Explaining ground rules, this team agreed that they did not have a leader: Sue, Team A (interview): We did not have a leader at all, we took on different roles at different times, or sometimes I was the leader, sometimes someone else.



their true interest and were going to look for a job that involved materials writing, perhaps with a publishing company. Yet others may have felt that it was a ‘just’ another assignment and wanted to finish it as quickly as possible so that they could move on to the next assignment.


Tina, Team A (interview): We were arguing all the time which was strange at first but then we got to enjoy it really. You need to feel secure with your group members to do this. There is argument and there is conflict. The positive climate in this team was perhaps due to their readiness and willingness to devote time and effort to meet and discuss things together. However, Team A also handled the process of decision making very effectively. Forsyth (1999) discusses different decisionmaking processes in effective groups and concludes that consensus is the preferred option in the case of sensitive topics, even though it might take longer to reach. This team clearly opted for consensus. Claire, Team A (reflective writing): When we worked together we discussed and agreed on everything before we moved onto writing our chunks. The process of materials design involves making decisions about what context will be appropriate, who the materials are for, what the focus will be, what kinds of activities are needed and why. Team members’ original input reflects their individual beliefs and principles regarding language teaching, and these beliefs will all have to be justified for any decisions that are made. To do this, team members had to be able to articulate and make their thinking explicit and public. Team A showed an awareness of how important it was to manage the communication process. It wasn’t something which would necessarily happen naturally, but they were prepared to take risks and be ‘true to themselves’, showing an awareness of the subtleties and difficulties involved in communicating with others. Claire, Team A (interview): Sometimes it was difficult to change something because we had decided that this should be a unanimous decision. However, we tried to give our opinion straightforwardly. It was important not to see criticisms as criticism of the person. And if you did have a good reason for something, then others could be persuaded. Pintrich (2000) posits that regulatory processes such as planning, selfmonitoring, control and evaluation are all necessary parts of successful learning processes. Team A clearly showed from the beginning that planning was something the participants realized was very necessary:



Tina recognized that there is a difference between constructive argument and conflict.


Team A also monitored each other’s performance as well as their own to ensure not only the quality of the product, but also the more technical management of the project. For Team A, this was perhaps the most satisfying and interesting part of the project. Claire, Team A (interview): We developed a checklist to check the content, the textual structure and the grammar and then we make these adjustments and then we think it is much better. So the unit would be more complete. The team’s ability to metacognitively reflect on the actual process of materials design was important in developing their own selfconfidence and motivation. Sue, Team A (interview): I was very pleased when I showed the materials to others who gave me better suggestions. I thought the materials were getting better and better! Overall, Team A’s experience was very positive in all respects. In contrast, even though the end product of their effort gained a good mark in assessment, Team B remained much less enthusiastic about their experiences. Team B Team B showed that there was little agreement from the start on roles, goals or plans. For one member, the problem was the lack of emergence of ‘a leader’: Linda, Team B (interview): At the very beginning people were assuming very different things, but we never quite spelt that out so as a result nobody actually acted as the leader or monitor. So I think our group hasn’t worked quite so efficiently. Teachers in Team B found it almost impossible from the start to reach any agreement with each other. They found it hard to decide on their own group structures and roles, and this led to increasing frustration as expressed by Ray:



Sue, Team A (reflective writing): I have learnt that I am a person who always leaves things till the last minute. This working in teams showed me that others don’t. I was forced out of this habit because I had to contribute to the different stages of the process.


Whilst socializing is an important part of any team endeavour, members need to agree early on the balance between this and the project goals. It is necessary to air differences before any consensus can be reached, but in this team members internalized grievances and, although they recognized that this was counterproductive, they felt powerless to resolve the issue. They were frustrated and angered by the tensions in the group, although later they could reflect on some of the causes. Mary, Team B (interview): Harmony was achieved at the expense of efficiency, as when some team members wanted to take a break, others would also rest. The initial plan was stranded after the first two weeks and nobody was bold enough to push it. It seemed important to preserve the external impression of good relations amongst team members, even if this meant avoiding debate that might lead to debate, possible disagreement and a re-consideration of different personal beliefs and principles. Some of the negative experiences of Team B can be related to issues of group development. Struggle and adaptation are critical and difficult but necessary parts of team development (Robbins and Finley, 2000). Initially teams may be over polite; bending over backwards to be pleasant, not to offend and ruffle feathers (Robbins and Finley, 2000: 145) and showing concern over ambiguity and self-disclosure. But as the group starts to tackle important questions regarding goals, group norms and procedures, and managerial aspects such as meeting times, there are bound to be disagreements and misinterpretations. These conflicts can have positive consequences in that goals can be clarified, and differences more clearly understood as with Team A. In the case of Team B, however, the three individuals did not seem to move forward from the initial phase of surface politeness. The teacher’s written reflections also indicated that they were aware of their problems with decision making. Linda, Team B (reflective writing): There was some confusion in the later stage of the project due to the inexplicitness in the division of the work. If I were given the chance, I would insist that decisions be made earlier with clear leadership in our team.



Ray, Team B (interview): When we did meet, the first hour was spent chatting about dress, food, etc. and then the important bit to do with materials was rushed through in the last 15 minutes. It was very frustrating.


Linda, Team B (reflective writing): When a disagreement occurs, we don’t want to say a lot of face threatening things so we ended up with just scratching the surface and never touching the essence of things Ray, Team B (reflective writing): Our overriding concern to be a good team player deprives us of a team leader. Harmony is achieved at the expense of efficiency. When some team members wanted to take a break, others would also rest. In the case of Team B, in fact, the overall lack of agreement and progress led to one individual submitting her own materials. Linda, Team B (reflective writing): Due to the unsuccessful cooperation and communication among the three of us, a different version of material on my own is submitted. Overall, even though all participants said they learnt from the experience, Team B found the process frustrating and difficult to manage. In order to illustrate that our teams had very different experiences (and this is something we did not expect to happen), we have chosen here very contrasting teams, but it is essential to add that there were many other teams that shared certain characteristics with Teams A or B. Some teams were successful but in different ways compared to Team A. Other teams, despite evaluating their processes in positive terms, still mentioned problems and issues that were experienced by Team B. In other words, our Team A and B are two ‘extreme’ examples in our data set. One obvious explanation for these differences could be related to the teachers’ differing cultural backgrounds, and indeed these may have played a part. However, it was interesting for us to see that the multicultural group (Team A) was so successful, while the group of Chinese teachers had more of a problem managing their group processes. There were other teams equally successful where members shared the same cultural background and less successful teams where there was a mixture of different nationalities. So, the members’ background on its own is no indicator of success.



Group B found the processes of monitoring and evaluating each other’s work very difficult and viewed the collaborative process more as one in which individuals’ work was edited or checked by others rather than actually questioned.

Reflecting on these team processes further has made us see that some issues in teams are obviously crucial such as communication or managing time efficiently. However, on the whole, it seems that the single most important factor in success is the creation of a positive, happy group climate shared by everyone because this climate can foster creative work, fire enthusiasm and allow members to take risks and resolve disagreements in a positive environment. With regard to actual procedures and routines, different teams tackle the job differently: some split the work while others share everything; some elect a leader and some do not; some have longer but less intensive meetings; others go for shorter but more intensive discussions.

Final thoughts Our most immediate conclusion is about the need to establish support systems for our teams so that we can help them to deal with group processes and facilitate the collaborative growth of every group. In this first phase of the project, we found that varying individual expectations, unresolved conflicts and a general lack of experience of working in teams before meant that some teachers did not benefit as fully as others. We will use insights from this study to prepare teams for the processes and challenges more effectively and monitor their progress more closely in the next phase of our ongoing research. When we met the new group in January 2006 and introduced the idea of the team project work, we implemented some changes based on our reflections about the groups in 2005. We recognized the need to support group processes much more proactively and offered special consultations to the groups where group processes could be discussed rather than the content of the developing materials. We also showed the teams the previous year’s participants’ reflection notes and quotes from the interviews in order to raise awareness about the types of decisions that other teams found useful in the past. We offered a short bibliography on managing group processes so that teachers could read relevant literature in this area. We furthermore prepared a set of readymade tools that teams could use to manage their meetings, such as checklists and grids to help them keep record of who said what, what action was taken and why. Most importantly, however, we emphasized to groups one of our most important findings that each group would have to work out what procedures suit them as individuals and that there were many possible routes that can lead to success.




We started this study from the premise that teacher autonomy as a socially constructed process embraces both interdependence and independence: characteristics which can be developed through the synergy of group activity. Conceptual change and transformation, and self-regulatory characteristics necessary for enhanced professional understanding, critical to teacher autonomy, can flourish in collaborative knowledge production situations. This development of a ‘product’ enables teachers to transform their own conceptual understandings by providing a justificatory basis for their own decisions and granting them an awareness of their own capacity to both change and be changed. However, the tensions that can rise in such groups point to a greater need to try to understand the important of social climate in groups and the issue of time; as Tillema (2005: 95) emphasizes, the social arena of collaborative inquiry and knowledge production is indeed a lengthy process. As course tutors, we have gained a great deal from doing this research. First of all, we have arrived at a much better understanding of the processes that our students go through during the course, and this understanding will help us improve the course in the future. Through our discussions and joint writing, we have also explored each other’s thoughts and interpretations about teaching, learning and materials design. Many new questions have arisen for us from the first phase of this action research project that we will continue exploring in the next phase.




Commentary on Part Three: Teachers, Transitions and Time: Learning for Educational Change Alan S. Mackenzie

Introduction We cannot expect our learners to be reflective and autonomous if we are not ourselves. Being autonomous as a teacher is partially a personal choice which can be either supported or stifled within our working contexts (Mackenzie, 2002). The way in which teachers and learners deal with the situations examined by the authors in this section constitute in part the end result of a series of decisions made by their ministries of education, institutions, departments and administrators. These decisions have led to new issues of autonomy for individuals within these systems of learning. As such, these chapters represent a lesson for national or local powers-that-be on what happens when you decide to implement new forms of teaching and learning, aimed at nurturing autonomous practice by teachers and learners, but which are at odds with what has gone before. When educational administrations put into action policies that seem ‘best’ at the time, or take decisions that affect teachers and learners who have never before experienced such approaches to language education, there are inevitably a number of consequences. Whether these are perceived as positive or negative by the stakeholders involved, it will take time, effort, will and a range of tools to render the change processes easy and agreeable.

The trauma of transition We can categorize the general approach taken by educational administrators and course directors in these papers as top-down. Decisions were made at a higher level than the class or staffroom to reconstruct the learning environment. The common problem then became how to 222



18

enable the teaching staff and students to deal with this new situation, whether it were the introduction of a new self-access centre (Pornapit Darasawang, Wareesiri Singhasiri and Sonthida Keyuravong, Chapter 14), independent student learning (Darasawang et al.; Sarah Toogood and Richard Pemberton, Chapter 15), a new tool to enable teacher development (Jean Young, Christoph Hafner and Dean Fisher, Chapter 16), or the fulfilment of a Master’s course requirement (Judith Kennedy and Annamaria Pinter, Chapter 17). By examining the reactions of the participants in the change process, the authors explore how individuals deal with the consequences of these changes. They then suggest improvements for supporting teacher and learner change. The results can be summarized as: • introducing monitoring tools, or adapt existing tools to scaffold learning and make the transition process smoother; • providing reflection and learning opportunities for teachers as well as learners; • explicitly defining processes of learning, as well as teacher and learner roles and relationships within those processes; • improving the materials used for learning. No one can argue with these conclusions. They are almost a given in education. We always want better tools and materials for learning; teachers and learners should always know what is expected of them; and we cannot expect our learners to be reflective if we are not so ourselves. Top-down process changes inevitably incur a bottom-up response. The introduction of new systems that promote learner autonomy can challenge teacher and learner identities and involve changing deeply held beliefs. This can be a traumatic experience as some of the voices from these research studies indicate. Luckily, the field of psychology has already defined the stages of human transition processes for us, so we have a map that can guide us and lead us to expect certain individual responses to systemic change (Figure 18.1). Looking at the case studies in this section, we can recognize the stages and paths that individual teachers and learners have taken. In Darasawang et al., there are two different reactions. The majority of teachers in the Thai school appear to have followed the lower dashed line (initially characterized as numbness-disbelief-minimizing or denial) and ended up ignoring the change initiative of SEARs by taking the quitting route. In contrast, the two teachers who have kept with the



Alan S. Mackenzie 223

224 Commentary on Part Three: Teachers, Transitions and Time

Feel Good

First shock Excitement (a)

Inner crisis

Inner contradictions

Provisional adjustment

Re-construction & recovery

Honeymoon New confidence, transformation Testing

Uncertainty Losing confidence OK Depression

(b) Distress /despair

Disbelief Numbness

1

2

Accepting

Crisis

(a) positive events Life event

Exploring

Confusion

Minimizing or denial

Letting’ go

4

5

Extended crisis

Quitting

(b) trauma or loss 3

Partial recovery

6

7

8+ months

Figure 18.1 The transition cycle – a template for human responses to change (Williams, 1999)

initiative may be seen to be in a partial recovery phase: after an extended period of confusion, they are dealing with the situation as best they can, and they may, with guidance (potentially as the result of this study), be able to enter an exploratory phase. In Hong Kong (Young et al.), Erica is initially ‘overwhelmed with so many new concepts’ and was ‘completely at sea’ (indicating uncertainty and loss of confidence). Yet, having swum through the crisis and started to accept her situation, she has entered an exploration and testing phase, which will likely lead her to new levels of confidence and transformation. Recognizing that these are natural stages of a change process can liberate teachers and administrators from feelings of guilt that ‘it didn’t work’ and help them take a more pro-active stance in supporting the individual through the change process. For me, there is an important distinction here between the potential for autonomy (that is, an innate ability) and how the realization of that potential needs to be socially/educationally structured in specific contexts, for it is this structuring that facilitates the change in learning modes from teacher-fronted classes to more independent learnerdriven choices. While everyone may have the potential to become an autonomous learner, previous educational experiences lead to different individual expectations and reactions to current educational change. Those experiences need to be carefully understood and managed to enable as many participants as possible to benefit from the new processes. Training sessions by themselves may be necessary, but are not sufficient, as the leaders of the SEAR project in Thailand discovered.



Well Being

Neither are form-filling exercises (although some forms are more useful than others as Toogood and Pemberton show). Sadly, most administrations I have worked in, whether as a teacher or an administrator, seem to deny the human element in educational change and focus more on utilitarian solutions that seem most efficient. Result? Lack of full understanding of theory behind and practices associated with the project, leading to minimal teacher buy-in; a few committed professionals working against huge apathy to the initiative; a watering down of the original aims; lack of administrative support, and a need on the part of most teachers to find ways to ‘get by’ in a stressful working environment. Young et al. illustrate a typical reaction to educational change where longer serving teachers lack belief in SALL and prefer to stick to the familiar. Within their curriculum, this is possible, and newer teachers can be assigned to the newer initiatives. Teachers who resist the change, rather than expressing their own autonomy, are asserting their independence from the change process and their right not to change based on what they might perceive as an administrative whim. I have seen this in many staffrooms as a normal response to imposed top-down change. Teachers are frequently jaded from having gone through a number of seemingly fruitless changes in the past. They are often not consulted and may feel that they have better solutions or ways of doing things than the planned changes. Whatever the reasons, the desire not to participate in a new system that turns teaching on its head is a common and natural response to the trauma of transition. We need to help teachers act as agents of change. Making the development paths in Figure 18.1 explicit to change agents so that they can take them into account in the planning process may better prepare them for responses to the initiative. Similarly, a consultation period that precedes the actual change process, perhaps with particular indicators or temperature-taking actions at an institutional level, might better help define for all stakeholders in the implementation a series of personal choices: choices that would enable everyone to better deal with the innovation.

The pickaxe or the toothpick? Clearly, the authors of these chapters are committed to developing tools to enable choices to be made in a more informed manner as they deal with these more autonomous forms of learning. Kennedy and Pinter make references to future provision of checklists and grids for




recording group processes and decisions, and Toogood and Pemberton provide a detailed framework for learners to record and reflect on their self-access work. Careful consideration should go into the development of these tools to see if they have the desired effect on learning processes. Otherwise, there is a danger that such tools become simple administrative recording devices (as Darasawang et al. describe). Even where Toogood and Pemberton explicitly state that the framework was to be used as a starting place for negotiation of learning choices, the ways in which it was used by a minority of teachers worked against this ideal. It is not only the students that need support in adapting to a new autonomy-focused system: teachers need help too. What some of the authors (Toogood and Pemberton; Young et al.) refer to as scaffolding needs to be in place for learners, teachers, administrators – and the organization as a whole – at the start of the change process. The explanations of the scaffolding tools and their development in these chapters will hopefully stimulate readers to go through similar explorations of their own practices. By questioning how we can enable learners and teachers to creatively engage in their own learning, and lead them to greater understanding of learning processes, we should also be widening learners’ and teachers’ horizons about the choices available to them. In order to do this, we need to encourage a culture of questioning what we are doing, why and how we are doing it, and how we can do it better. WIILD may hold some keys (Young et al.). Providing an ongoing forum for reflection, airing of issues and sharing of ideas, live or online, may aid personal reflective processes as well as group collaboration, and avoid some of the more negative issues raised by Kennedy and Pinter. However, there is also a danger in over-scaffolding. Relying on the tools to structure learning, rather than the learners themselves, may lead to an over-mechanization of educational processes. Equally, understructuring the choices available to teachers and learners will likely lead them to feel ‘at sea’ (Darasawang et al.; Young et al.), and they are more likely to follow a negative developmental path without careful guidance. In both teacher and learner development, the restriction of choice (Toogood and Pemberton) to a limited number of options that increase as you develop, rather like a gradually widening funnel, may be a more effective method of broadening views of what is possible. It would enable us to see that development can be achievable and make us more likely to want to take the first steps to changing our ways of learning and teaching. Only when we have been




introduced to the different options available to us in an informed way can we make fully informed choices as to what we like, or what is best for us. What these chapters highlight, then, is the need for the investigation of teaching and learning processes to be ongoing and embedded within course and programme structures. Ideally, integrating some form of course/programme evaluation should be part of the initial design process (Alderson and Beretta, 1992). However, again, as is normally the case, these investigations have been designed after the course/programme has been implemented. This is the nature and value of action research. It deals with situations, problems and questions that arise from experience gained in practice. As such, it is a valuable tool for the committed practitioner. Concrete, well-defined programme evaluation assists teacher and learner autonomy by providing checks on the system and creating opportunities for open and honest dialogue with programme designers, as well as regular opportunities to adjust the programme processes to better fit the needs of the users. Too often, research is limited to pre-test, post-test (for example, the teacher-designed evaluations in Darasawang et al.). The teacher-researchers in this section demonstrate that much deeper information and understanding can be gleaned from widening the funnel of research tools with well-designed analyses of records of work, reflection journals, interviews and other qualitative methods.

Individuals coming together become organizations Case-study approaches backed up by surveys, both qualitative and quantitative (such as the papers in this section), are useful in explicating individual responses and identifying those that differ from the majority. It is natural for teachers, after the implementation, to want the new system to ‘work’ for everyone. It is also natural to focus on what works for the majority and why it doesn’t for the minority. Most often these judgements are made at the ‘chalkface’ by teachers in the smallest organizational unit of an educational institution, the classroom. However, as educational change agents, we should be aware of the larger systemic nature of these change processes as they relate to the individual. When we do this, a different set of questions arises that precedes the on-the-ground ‘dealing with the implementation’ level that the researchers in these chapters look at:




• What previous experience, if any, do teachers and learners have that they can bring to and help inform the change process? • What forms of consultation with teachers and learners can we implement so as to best meet their learning needs and desires and ‘buy into’ the new way of doing things? • How can we cater to individuals who cannot/do not want to exploit this new way of working? In examining their own contexts, the authors in this section partially answer these questions. Their answers might act as recommendations for other educational organizations facing change. In all of the chapters, researchers engage in real dialogue with the participants, not oneway communication, in order to understand the impact of the organizational change from the perspectives of teachers and learners. When we take this larger organizational view, and have appropriate monitoring systems in place, it is easier for us to see individual differences in teachers’ and learners’ capacities to cope with extra changes. If we recognize these, we can ensure that we are not disciplining or overcontrolling individuals who may be in a transitional crisis – an approach which could tip them into a negative development spiral. Instead, we can encourage counselling and support groups like the WIILD system for those having difficulty coping, as well as concentrate upon providing adequate induction processes, training, mentoring and coaching for people entering the new learning situation. In this way, we might better develop change processes and support for autonomyfocused approaches to become successful and sustainable. In turn, this might better enable individuals to survive and thrive while developing the personal and leadership skills to manage such change and transition for themselves (see Herriot et al., 1998, for a full discussion).

Yes, yes, but where is the time for all this? Time was noted by some authors as an element that is essential to development. Kennedy and Pinter found that three months was not enough for group development and Young et al. found that, even two years after the initial implementation, teachers involved from the beginning were still experimenting to find out what worked best for them. Time is ‘critical’ in teacher development, and the myth that selfaccess saves teacher time is blasted away by Darasawang et al.. Figure 18.1 shows that it takes six to nine months to become comfortable with a transition in our lives. All of this suggests that administrations need to figure longer timelines into project development.




The institutional desire to have staff quickly come into line with changes inevitably leads to over-reliance on training. In the same way that teachers cannot abrogate responsibility for learning processes to worksheets (Darasawang et al.), and we cannot assume learners know something because we have covered it in the book, or done an induction session (Toogood and Pemberton), teachers cannot be assumed to have developed simply because they have had training in a certain area. Post-training, it is too easy for administrators to blame teachers and learners for not making a system work when it is the administrators themselves who have this responsibility. Perhaps this is because ‘Admin’, by its very nature, is more used to changing the surface of a situation and demonstrating with statistics and paperwork that it has changed, rather than dealing with deeper changes in the substance of the process. The nature and quality of the training aside, development takes place back in school, on the ground, and this makes it absolutely essential to have built-in, long-term ongoing support as part of the change process. Because of its complexity, large-scale change, such as implementing a self-access system, takes more time than most educational processes. Administrators, then, should be preparing teachers for the transition well in advance of the actual procedural change itself. Teachers need to be aware that it could take some learners a very long time to become used to new ways of operating. Priority needs to be given to researching what is happening in the system: individuals need to have the time to work out how to deal with these transitions. Administrations that ignore the importance of time in educational development and don’t make time for these developments to happen are likely to doom their initiatives to failure.

Learning to be a learning organization Administrators’ motivations for an innovation can vary from just doing it because they are told to; doing it because they think it will be perceived as the right thing to do by higher authorities; knowing that it is the right thing to do but delegating the work to teachers as extra workload; or giving real administrative support to a change that they believe will enable learners to learn more, and more effectively. This is a question of good leadership. Choosing either of the first two options is likely to make more miserable the lives of those affected as they deal with teacher complaints and the initiative fails due to lack of buy-in by others within the system.




In order for educational programmes to develop autonomous learners, they need first to foster autonomous teachers. To develop autonomous teachers, administrators need to have taken the time to develop their own autonomy to the point where they can understand fully what their choices for change are and why they are making these choices. They also need to develop the skills to lead their faculties effectively, while being fully aware of the impact that their choices are going to have on teachers and learners. Also, taking the time to build in consultative and monitoring processes to ensure open and honest dialogue within the system, and constantly refining those evaluation tools and processes, will likely lead to greater buy-in by all of the stakeholders in the system (see Senge et al., 2000, for a full discussion of learning organization theory in educational contexts). Buy-in by administrators, teachers and learners is essential for any learner-centred system to succeed. Self-interest should be guided so that students are not simply going for the highest grade, but learning what they need to learn in order to improve their language ability. Likewise, teachers have to be able to make the ‘right’ choice: to change their teaching practice in a way that enables their learners to take control of their own learning. Administrators must take ultimate responsibility for the change process and enable the whole system to go through transition with as little trauma as possible (though some is inevitable!). This takes a range of tools, great effort, strong personal and organizational will, and most importantly, time. However, as many of the individual learners and teachers in these chapters show, the results are worth it.




Conclusion: Autonomy/Agency through Socio-cultural Lenses Kelleen Toohey

Elsa Auerbach (Chapter 7) points out many of the contradictions that are involved when we say we are committed to increasing learner autonomy in our teaching. As I read the volume, I was alert to the wide diversity in the ways authors used the term autonomy. As predicted by Benson (1997), some of the authors of these chapters see learner autonomy as the development of skills that allow learners to learn ‘a language outside the framework of an educational institution and without the intervention of a teacher’, or at least to make steps toward this goal (Schmenk, 2005: 110). Although there are overlaps and no ‘pure’ exemplars of the categories Benson identifies, the chapters by Leena Karlsson and Felicity Kijsik (Chapter 3), Akara Akaranithi and Suriyan Panlay (Chapter 4), Peter Brown, Richard Smith and Ema Ushioda (Chapter 6), Teija Natri (Chapter 9), Pornapit Darasawang, Wareesiri Singhasiri and Sonthida Keyuravong (Chapter 14), Sarah Toogood and Richard Pemberton (Chapter 15), and Jean Young, Christoph Hafner and Dean Fisher (Chapter 16) seem good examples of conceptualizing learner autonomy as self-directed learning. Benson notes that others see autonomy as an individual capability, trait or accomplishment – and see it as a goal that can empower learners in other aspects of their lives. Rebecca Oxford, Yaru Meng, Zhou Yalun, Jiyeun Sung and Rashi Jain (Chapter 11) exemplify this approach. Another version of educational autonomy sees learners and teachers as critically co-constructing the processes and content of learning (Benson, 1997). Flávia Vieira (Chapter 2), Maria Alfredo Moreira (Chapter 5), Mike Nix (Chapter 12), Hugh Nicoll (Chapter 10), Huijuan Shao and Zongjie Wu (Chapter 8) and Judith Kennedy and Annamaria Pinter (Chapter 17) in various ways articulate this approach.

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19

The approach I have taken in conceptualizing autonomy is perhaps different and, in some ways, contradictory to those of some of this volume’s authors. Based in a socio-cultural perspective on learning, Bonny Norton and I (Toohey and Norton, 2005) conceptualized learner autonomy as socially-situated agency, while describing two learners’ trajectories of learning and increasing participation in communities that use English. We argued there that these learners were located within particular communities that both constrained and enabled their access to desirable identities, resources and practices. We saw the tension between learners’ efforts to appropriate voices for themselves in English, and the social constraints they experienced as learners of English, as necessary but too-often neglected considerations in language research. Learners were not agentive or autonomous on their own; rather, we argued that the social settings in which they participated both imposed constraints on, and enabled their agency. In commenting on the chapters in this book, I would like to consider again how the notion of socially-constrained and -enabling agency might provide a useful lens with which to analyse particular educational innovations designed to foster autonomy. I situate this investigation by describing a socio-cultural theoretical model that I think offers a way to synthesize some of this volume’s interesting and important work. I then illustrate its use in a more detailed analysis of Chapter 14 (Darasawang et al.) and briefly analyse other chapters in this book through this model. I discuss how classroom interventions are situated in larger social worlds, and conclude with an argument for a particular understanding of autonomy in language teaching and learning. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s (1991) influential Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation was one of a set of germinal texts that stimulated the ‘social turn’ taken in studies of second language learning. These authors suggested that learning could be characterized as an interaction among three factors: the ‘sociopolitical organization of practice’, and ‘the artifacts engaged in practice’ and third, the ‘identit[ies] … generated as newcomers move toward full participation in communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 91). James Wertsch, another socio-cultural theorist, similarly argues that to explain adequately human action in its cultural, historical and institutional settings, one must ‘use the notion of mediated action as a unit of analysis and the person(s)-acting-with-mediational-means as the relevant description of the agent of this action’ (1991: 119). David Little (Chapter 1) also sees persons, resources and practices as paramount in coming to understand teaching for autonomy, noting, ‘[There are]



232 Autonomy/Agency through Socio-cultural Lenses

three areas of practice and research on which the successful implementation of learner autonomy depends: learner and teacher development, classroom practice, and the development of self-access materials and systems.’ Diagrammatically, these relationships might be shown as in Figure 19.1. No element in this model is isolated from the others. From this perspective, persons’ access to and action on resources and practices in their community is linked to how individual persons are constructed (and construct themselves). In other words, the resources and practices to which persons have access both enable and constrain their possibilities for identity (or personhood) construction. Similarly, resources (including language) are not abstracted (or autonomous) objects that can be investigated without consideration of persons and

Resources (material, linguistic, social etc.)

Persons (identities, positions, investments, desires etc.)

Figure 19.1

Practices (action, communication, behaviours)

A socio-cultural perspective on learning



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their practices, but are seen as material and symbolic tools with which particularly-constructed persons act on their diverse social worlds. These resources, then, constrain and enable certain kinds of situated identities and practices. Practices can be seen as accessible to certain categories of persons acting with certain constellations of resources, and participation in specific practices will have effects on persons as well as their tools. Those practices affect the persons and their resources, but they are also shaped by them. As an example of the elements’ connectedness, it may be that in a particular community, an immigrant can only claim (and be granted) an identity of belonging in her host country if she has access to the tool of the national language and to participation in activities of the host country. At the same time, the immigrant ‘acts on’ the national language, using it in particular ways, to participate in community practices that she also has effects upon. The graphic shows that persons, their resources and their practices are situated in a particular community, but what it does not show is that persons, practices and resources are located in a variety of overlapping communities, all with specific (and more or less different) arrangements. As Bonny Norton (1997) masterfully showed, the immigrant women in her study used different tools, engaged in different activities, and claimed (and were granted) a variety of identities as persons in their homes, their workplaces, and their other social worlds. Persons have perhaps received more theoretical attention in educational literature (than practices and resources), and many educators have found helpful a post-structural view of persons that shows them as situated in multiple and shifting communities, influenced by the given enablements and constraints of resources and practices within those communities, as well as by the shaping of human agents on those practices and resources. Community has become an overused and confusing term, and while I have used it in the graphic, I have come to find Holland et al.’s (1998) notion of figured world more helpful in understanding the situated nature of persons, practices and resources. Having some parallels with Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of field, Holland et al. define a figured world as a horizon of significance, a particular frame of reference, in which persons attribute meaning to their experiences and interpret relationships between people, acts and resources. Figured worlds ‘take shape within and grant shape to the co-production of activities, discourses, performances and artifacts’ (Holland et al., 1998: 51). The ‘same’ resource in one figured world may mean or count for something differ-




ent from what it might mean or count for in another figured world. The ‘same’ person may embody radically different identities (and desires, investments, positions) in the various figured worlds in which they live their lives. In my 2000 ethnography of child English language learners at school, I noted that a child might be seen as a talented artist in the figured world of his family, but as a ‘daydreamer’ and timewaster in the figured world of his classroom (Toohey et al., 2000). Equally, practices live varied lives across figured worlds. With this smaller unit of analysis than ‘culture’, we can see collectivities of people as engaged in myriad figured worlds, and nations (or cultures) thus embodying a great deal of diversity as their members participate in other frames of reference. There is also no necessity within the notion of figured world to assume persons involved share the same values, beliefs, histories, competencies, activities. Rather, the notion discourages characterizing any national group, or even smaller groups, in essentialistic terms. But it does encourage us to ask how particular arrangements of persons, practices and resources might be linked to larger social arrangements – as Rogoff et al. (1993: 233) observe, for example, ‘For middle-class US children, the skills and patterns of social interaction practiced in school may relate closely to those necessary for eventual participation in the economic and political institutions of their society.’ This graphic is, for me at least, a resource that enables questions like: what specific identities, practices and resources are available to learners and teachers in particular learning situations; with respect to autonomy or agency, how do learners and teachers accept but also act on the identities, practices and resources available to them? It also makes it clearer to me that educational ‘truths’ for example, are socially constructed in particular circumstances and that such truths may appear incontestable because of the congruence among the other elements of the learning triangle. The following examples of application of the model might illustrate this point. Hypothetically, there may exist a particular learning situation (a figured world) that is characterized by stratified identity roles for teachers and students such that teachers are regarded as authoritative and students as respectful of that authority; we might expect to see in such a figured world that the learning resources used consist of the culturallyagreed-upon canon of important works by authoritative authors (or in language learning, perhaps, the ‘standard language’ as reflected in grammars and dictionaries). Finally, we might predict that learning practices in such a community would allow learners opportunities to



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appropriate the knowledge of authorities through memorization, perhaps ‘rote’ learning, and reproduction in a variety of ways. I take it that such a figured world might be situated in a larger environment that reproduces practices of deferral to authorities in a variety of ways, that supports stratified identity positions for its members, and that energetically passes along its cultural resources to its younger members. However, because the larger environment will encompass a variety of overlapping figured worlds with different arrangements, relationships are not simple or direct and cannot be essentialized. I presume that educators who see autonomy as important would be interested in a rather different arrangement of identities, resources and practices from those I have just described. With respect to identities, this volume’s authors tell us that developing autonomous learners requires that teachers become more like ‘counsellors’ than teachers; that students are empowered, self-regulated, resilient, intrinsicallymotivated individuals who can and will direct their own learning as well as construct knowledge on their own or with peers; that resources would include a variety of text types that learners can freely choose, as well as computers and computer-mediated instructional packages so that learners can learn individually without direct, in-the-moment teacher input; and finally, that teaching and learning practices would promote students’ abilities to self-regulate, self-assess, and design productive learning pathways for themselves (and peers). And for others who see learner autonomy as having a critical dimension, autonomy would include the practice of critiquing the educational processes in which learners are engaged and of creating, with others, more appropriate and empowering learning experiences for themselves. This model of learning is, of course, as normative as the previous ‘nonautonomous’ one, and is situated in a particular ideological position with respect to how persons should be conceptualized, and what worthwhile educational practices and resources are. When all the elements cohere, articulating non-contradictory positions on learning and teaching is enabled. But what we find with many of the situations described in this book is a non-coherence among the elements and resulting troubling of educational assumptions and practices. A closer analysis of one of the learning/teaching situations described here might show what the model might bring into clearer focus. In Chapter 14, Darasawang et al. describe the implementation in Thailand of a Ministry of Education initiative to develop Students English Access Rooms (SEARs) in secondary schools across the country. Supporting documents for the centres and for education reform in




Thailand explicitly state that learners should become independent, self-directed and autonomous and should increase their skills in English and computer use. As put by the authors, ‘SEARs were to be the structured learning environment in which teachers would help learners to have more choices and make more decisions in their learning.’ While Darasawang et al. do not discuss Thai education historically in their chapter, in another chapter Akaranithi and Panlay describe ‘traditional Thai education’ as involving teachers as ‘managers in the classroom’. Akaranthi and Panlay claim that Thai students have traditionally seen teachers as controllers of their education, and that ‘students have had until recently little cause to act anything but obediently and passively in the classroom’. These descriptions of the ways in which persons are regarded in traditional Thai classrooms might be seen as congruent with the resources and practices found in such classrooms. Both chapters describe past English teaching practices in such classrooms as centrally focused on grammar, and learning resources including teachers’ explanations on blackboards, books and teacherdesigned exercises. The move toward autonomous or learner-centred teaching in Thailand advocates changes to all aspects of the learning triangle. The official justifications for SEARs mentioned that the centres would entail new roles for both learners and teachers, and that teachers would take on roles as facilitators or counsellors. At the same time, teachers needed to retain their positions as assessors of students’ learning, and attendance at the SEAR examined in the chapter resulted in bonus points for students. Resources for SEARs included cassette players, televisions and video players (as well as computers that, in the end, were sparsely available). Other resources included Self-Study Plans and Personal Study Records. As for learning and teaching practices, the teachers were to check students’ work on the materials provided, inform them of the importance of self-access learning, the location of materials and the system for borrowing and returning materials. Official statements of desired education roles, practices and resources seldom describe fully how such elements are enacted in particular locations. Darasawang et al. describe for the SEAR they investigated that persons, practices and resources were either different from those advocated by the Ministry, or at least adjusted by participants. While the Ministry hoped teachers would become less managers and more facilitators, in practice, the authors note that teachers came to see themselves and to be seen by students as managers/distributors of increasing numbers of commercially-prepared educational products that were



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available in the SEAR. As well, students used resources in ways different from those hoped for by the Ministry. The study plans and personal record forms, for example, were completed mechanically by students, and involved little development of individual reflection on learning. And teaching/learning practices remained remarkably the same as they had been in the teacher-managed classrooms. Teachers assigned exercises to students in the SEAR to review work they had done in class, and students tended to use materials that could be easily checked by teachers. Does this socio-cultural reframing of the description given in Darasawang et al.’s chapter make anything clearer for us? Attention to the construction of persons, resources and practices in particular learning situations gives me a way to think more consciously about how these elements interact and reinforce and create one another. It helps me see that within different cultural or figured worlds, many different kinds of educational arrangements ‘make sense’ – and that when educational change is hoped for, attention must be paid (at least) to the persons involved, their resources and their practices. In the Thai case discussed above, the model predicts that assessing and facilitating learning may be in conflict (as the identities of judge and facilitator might be seen as contradictory), and that managing/distributing educational products is not much different from managing/distributing other kinds of social capital (such as the culturally-agreed upon canon of important works by authoritative authors). For me, the model provides a way to compare and contrast educational situations and to understand at least some aspects of their functioning. I go now to examine other chapters briefly to illustrate how the model might illuminate other situations described by the book’s authors.

Persons, resources and practices in developing autonomy I find it interesting in some of these chapters that, when authors describe situations in which they judge that the development of teacher and learner autonomy has not been smooth, we see major disjuncture among the elements of the learning triangle. In Thailand (Akaranathi and Panlay), for example, we see an authoritative mandating of computers as learning tools, in a situation in which students and teachers are accustomed to teacher-centred instructional practices. In this case, the introduction of a new learning tool, to be used in a particular way, is not (yet) successful in changing learner and teacher identities or customary teaching and learning practices. In Hong Kong




(Toogood and Pemberton), we see professors providing new learning resources (with accompanying new practices), an ‘independent learning component’, to teachers of a Spoken English course. Teachers, inexperienced in independent learning, have varying degrees of success and/or comfort with the approach. While the planners hoped that ‘promoting independent learning would involve a different role relationship with students’ (in terms used here, different identities for teachers and students), an investigation of teacher perceptions showed that such aims were not universally met. One teacher, in fact, found the learning materials to constrain her autonomy in making decisions about learning needs of her students. However, other papers suggest that things are more complex than might be suggested by the observation that changing any one element of the triangle may not result in overall transformation of the context. Sometimes, changing one element does seem to have significant effects. Nix, for example, found his introduction (and peer practice) of a new skill, interpretive note-taking, appeared to change the ‘psychological, socio-cultural or political aspects’ of his students’ learning, at least for some learners, and after careful scrutiny, perhaps for all learners. Several other authors found the enactment of new practices, or the use of new resources to have transformed their community (for example, Moreira). Little is hopeful that the introduction of a new tool, the European Language Portfolio, will transform language teaching and learning across Europe to more nearly autonomous models. To take an example more familiar to me, in North America currently, classroom teachers faced with changes in learning and teaching resources and practices (for example, high stakes tests and testing) are enduring what many have called de-professionalization and the loss of autonomy as teachers, and the ignoring of their students’ ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll et al., 1993) in ways that do not enhance what we might see as democratic relationships. The resources mandated for teachers in this situation are having major effects on their identities as professionals (as well as effects on their students’ identities). Alan Mackenzie (Chapter 18) recognizes the difficulties of implementing top-down change, and sees this partly as a psychological process undergone by teachers and students. He advocates that administrators make sure that teachers have time to dialogue about the change process. But it is perhaps not only that educational resources and their distribution have been changing; and that understanding such change will require looking at other and larger institutional figured worlds, perhaps even globalizing political and economic relationships.



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Complicating the picture further, perspectives of teachers and students on learning conditions may vary widely: in England, in an MA Professional Practice module described by Brown et al., we see at least some students uncomfortable with what course tutors saw as practices to foster learner autonomy, but which the students saw as restricting access to the knowledge of their course tutors (a resource). As well, Little and other authors (for example, Akaranithi and Panlay; Toogood and Pemberton) point out, the objectives policy makers have for introduction of new teaching and learning roles, or resources or practices, may vary widely with the enactment of those identities, practices and resources in classrooms and other educational settings. Likewise, Michael Carroll and Sara Cotterall (Chapter 13) observe that the narratives that authors tell of their attempts to change their teaching situations are ambiguous, and that other stories could be told of these classrooms.

A socio-cultural perspective on autonomy Part of my resistance to signing on to learner autonomy is that the notion of an autonomous, individual self has not been helpful in the research I do. I am much more attracted to theoretical perspectives that see individuals as socially constrained but also agentive subjects who, in Holland et al.’s (1998) word, ‘improvise’. These authors tell a story of a lower caste Nepali woman ‘culturally’ prohibited from entering the home of a higher caste family in which she is to be interviewed by an anthropologist. Faced with this dilemma, the woman climbed up the walls of the house to the second floor interview room, acting agentively in an improvisational manner to fulfill both her desire to be interviewed and the cultural proscription. Holland et al. point out that members of figured worlds are improvising in similar ways all the time. Faced with cultural imperatives and political and economic positioning (such that access to certain tools or positions is unequally distributed), agents negotiate ways to assert themselves in particular ways. I want to contribute to a pedagogy that will allow students and teachers to improvise with the materials they have at hand, to engage in practices that make a difference, and to claim identities of expertise. But I think this goal is more complicated than we might think. Advocating for the creation of autonomous learners may also be a chimerical goal that fails to take into account the dynamism and fluidity of teacher-student relations. Socio-cultural researcher Barbara Rogoff (1994) argued that our frequent characterizations of classrooms




as teacher-centred, learner-centred, or something else (perhaps autonomous classrooms) may be too crude to capture what actually happens in classrooms – moment-by-moment negotiation of roles, manipulations of tools and engagement in activity. In previous work (Toohey et al., 2000), we observed episodes or moments of particular arrangements in a classroom, but found that any overall characterization of this classroom as learner-, teacher- or community-centred oversimplified ongoing events. So it may be with learner autonomy – that is, we might be able to observe moments of it (whatever it is) in classrooms, but this is not to say all participants are equally autonomous or that having acted with autonomy on one occasion, a participant will thereafter always act autonomously in other future situations. As I think about my own and others’ work, I realize that a conventional and limited notion of learner autonomy as learner independence might not fit very well with my allegiance to educational ‘communities of learners’ (Rogoff, 1994), which is of course an ideological position among many. My work has been guided by scholars who see identities/resources/practices as continually negotiated, and constructed within specific cultural, political and economic constraints. In this work, learners are never independent; rather, they are linked to other people and their tools and their practices in complex ways. I see teachers in North America resisting what Kincheloe (2003) calls the ‘stupidization’ of their work, and engaging with other teachers in critiquing and undermining the figured world in which standardized tests and testing make sense. Moreira (Chapter 5) tells us that student resistance to learner autonomy may be because they have been so strongly socialized in transmissive forms of education, and she, as well as others, asserts that changing the students’ minds will be accomplished as teachers subvert this notion of education. From a socio-cultural perspective, the issue may be seen partly as situated in people’s historical experiences (using Holland and Lave’s (2001) apt phrase: ‘history-in-person’), but from this perspective, attention would also need to be paid to the material and symbolic resources and activities both teachers and learners have become accustomed to, of the specific teaching and learning figured worlds of students and teachers. To understand socio-culturally why students resist teacher efforts to inculcate autonomy (a mildly amusing oxymoron), we must understand the arrangement of identities, resources and practices in the students’ figured world that makes their resistance ‘make sense’. As well, if we are interested in education for democracy, we must ask the critical questions of if and/or how specific practices, resources and



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identity roles for teachers and students mirror other (actual or desired) social arrangements in larger social worlds beyond the classroom. Specifically, as Auerbach (Chapter 7) trenchantly asks, ‘When and under what conditions is learner autonomy being promoted and commodified by forces of global capital?’ Many advocates of autonomy, despite their national and/or cultural situations, seem interested in promoting the power of individual students and teachers to determine their futures, to participate in democratic communities that recognize teachers, as well as learners, as simultaneously involved in learning and critical social practice. As Little (2004: 124) puts it: ‘developing learner autonomy aims at equipping learners to engage critically, yet responsibly, in the social processes they encounter’. Is it possible that these goals, although salutary and important, in congruence with the goals of other institutions, may inadvertently promote the normalizing of notions of individuals who ‘choose’ and purchase and consume? Is the notion of an autonomous self one that serves the needs of global capital? These questions and others are what makes the work represented here so interesting and important. We are privileged to have descriptions of teachers close to the front lines of classrooms, and we see them interrogating their work in a multitude of ways. Many are not interested in an autonomy that stresses individualism, but use the term to signal efforts toward the equalization of possibilities for agency in their students. This is an autonomy that I think is worth struggling for.




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Bold numbers refer to chapter titles; italicized numbers with an ‘n’ refer to notes. academic literacy, 126–7, 129–30, 143, 149, 153–4, 154n access to identities, practices, resources, 232–5 action, 15, 69, 88–9, 133, 197, 203, 205–6, 232 agentive, 240 on identities, resources and practices, 235 mediated, 232 social, 89 transformative, 138 action research, 16, 25, 31, 39, 57–8, 60, 68–70, 72–3, 75–6, 79–80, 82, 86–7, 97–8, 169, 198, 207, 209, 221, 227 collaborative, 31, 39, 97, 207–8, 209, 221 active learnership, 90, 108, 108–9, 117, 119, 162 administration/administrative support/administrators, 169, 222, 224–6, 228–30 adversity, 131, 138, 142 agency, x, 88, 90, 132, 231, 232, 234–5, 242 agent, 232, 234 ALMS (Autonomous Learning Modules), 30–6, 38–40, 41n, 42n ambiguity/uncertainty, tolerance of, 126–8, 160, 163 analysis, 24, 73, 77 critical, 89–91 I-statement, 78, 80–1 assessment, 12, 47, 60, 64, 87, 114–15, 119, 125, 180, 188, 204–5, 217 criteria, 60–1, 64, 66–7, 69, 185, 189 see also self-assessment

attitude, 45, 49, 125, 133, 141, 190, 194, 200, 203, 207–8 audience, viii, 85 authentic language autonomy, 96, 106–7 authenticity, 5, 98–9, 101–4, 106–7 authority, 52, 85, 88, 90–1, 159, 235–6 deferral to, 236 autobiographical elements, 32, 38 narrative, 12 writing, 35, 85 autobiography, 30, 31–2, 38, 40–1, 85 see also language learner/learning histories autonomous academic literacy, 143–54 learner, 5, 7–10, 12, 52, 88, 101, 123, 133, 154, 174, 204, 222, 224, 230, 232, 236–7, 240 learner-user, 143, 149, 154 learning, 7, 88–9, 198, 207, 239 practice, 57, 222 teacher, 8, 10, 12, 207, 230 autonomy, 59, 64, 70, 76, 81–2, 84–5, 88–90, 96–8, 101, 104, 120, 129–30, 132–3, 136, 140–2, 145, 147, 150–3, 156, 158–60, 200, 204–5, 207–8, 222, 224–5, 230, 231, 231–2, 235–6, 241–2 authentic, 96, 106–7 and democracy, 86, 88–90 co-constructing, x concept, 88–9, 205 critical dimension of, 236 development of, 6, 8–9, 150, 154, 167, 174–8, 203–5, 208, 238, 242 globalizing, 89, 242 254



Index

in language learning/education, vii, 11, 145, 147 in language use, 145, 147 negative, 135, 158 orthodoxy of, 83, 87 pedagogy for/of, 15–16, 71, 83, 84–6, 88, 207 political approach/dimension, 143, 149, 154, 239 psychological approach/dimension/attribute, 84, 143, 149–50, 154, 239 promotion of, 82, 85–6, 88, 210 reconstruction of (in language education), 3, 10–12, 164, socio-cultural approach/dimension, 143, 149–50, 154, 239–40 socio-cultural view, 231–241 student, 59, 76, 85 teacher, 8, 10, 12, 16, 57, 120, 126, 194, 204, 209, 209–10, 221, 225, 227, 238–9 teacher-learner, 72, 82 technical approach/dimension, 143, 149, 154 see also learner autonomy; teacher autonomy Barnes, D., 6, 145–6, 148 belief, 12, 86, 90–1, 121, 184–5, 194–5, 203–8, 216, 218, 223, 235 Benson, P., 88–9, 107, 143, 145, 149, 231 Bruner, G., 6, 132, 145, 150–1, 154 buy-in (to change), 225, 228–30 capacity, 197, 204–5, 210, 228 to change/be changed, 221 to use language, 145, 152, 154 capital, 88–9, 238 care, 97, 106 caring community, 103–4 pedagogy/-ic practice, 95, 97–8, 101, 105 CEFR, see Common European Frame of Reference change, 43–5, 53–4, 58, 69, 80–1, 86, 88, 90, 157, 196, 199–202, 205–8,

210, 212–13, 221–6, 222, 228–30, 237–9, 240–1 agents, 225–7 educational, 224–5 narrative of, 81 process, 222–30, 239 see also transition choice, 2, 18–20, 57, 67, 77, 84–5, 101, 119, 132, 170, 186–7, 189, 191, 196, 203, 236–7 ideological nature of, 20 classroom dynamic(s), 7, 77, 91 inquiry, 20, 21 learning, 51, 136, 200 managers, 44–5, 49, 51–2 observation, 73, 77 practice, 54, 233 co-construction, see construction, constructivist co-telling, 39–40 collaboration, ix, 52, 54–5, 69, 77, 152, 179, 209–11, 214, 226 see also action research; team processes collaborative action research, 2, 31, 39, 97, 207–8 construction, 61, 66–7, 92, 210 inquiry, vii, 15, 31, 41, 210–1, 221 knowledge construction/production, 210, 221 learning, 123, 126, 162 learning environment, 125, 162 process, 39, 219 project work, 12, 209–21 reflection, 207–8 Common European Frame of Reference (CEFR), 8–9, 12, 109–10 common proficiency levels, 8,12, 110–13, 119n communicative approach, 1–2, 5 language teaching, 1, 2, 7 language use, 5–6 proficiency, 2, 6, 8 revolution, 1–2



Index 255

community/ies, 9, 12, 21, 39, 53, 103, 124, 232–4, 239, 241 caring, 103–4 democratic, 242 learning, 22, 210 competence/competency, 90, 109–10, 113, 133, 136, 138, 140–2, 206–8, 235 complaint, 72, 74, 78, 86–7, 229 computer use, 43–5, 47–54, 90, 168, 236–8 confidence, 39, 47, 102, 137, 161, 201, 206–8, 224 conflict, 55, 57, 67–8, 87, 96, 101, 128–9, 135, 185, 200, 215–16, 238 Confucius, 95–6 confusion, 74, 120, 126, 224 constraints, 12, 79–80, 84, 86–7, 106, 108, 110, 117, 120, 122, 126, 191, 194, 204, 209, 232, 234, 239–41 (co-)construction, vii–viii, x, 7, 16, 18, 85, 145, 148–52, 235 collaborative, 61, 66–7, 92, 210 of identity, x, 233 of knowledge/understanding, vii–viii, 5, 7, 50, 58, 72, 75–6, 78, 80, 143, 145–6, 148–52, 210, 236 of learning processes, 231 constructivist (-ism), ix, 75 position/view, ix principle, 12 understanding, 6, 75, 149 theory, 4 consultation, 168, 189–94, 197, 220, 225, 228 contradiction, 84, 84–8, 90–1, 129, 224, 231 control, 43, 47, 85–6, 122, 124, 141, 162, 185, 189, 192, 203, 206–8, 216, 230 Council of Europe, 1, 3, 8, 12, 109 common proficiency levels, 8, 12 counselling, 30–2, 34, 36, 38–41, 85, 228 counsellor, 31, 37–9, 40, 85, 236

course evaluation, 66, 77, 108, 227 objectives, 59–60, 65 requirements, 189, 201, 203–4, 223 CRAPEL, 4–5 creativity, 85–6, 88 crisis L2 learner/learning, 131, 131–4, 136, 138, 140–2, 158, 224, 228 management, 72, 74 critical analysis, 89–91 awareness, 24, 57, 60, 90 reflection, ix, 57–8, 60–1, 64, 66–8, 92, 189, 197, 205, 208 social practice, 242 cultural imperative, 240 Dam, L., 6, 8, 10–11, 123, 126, 147, 154 decision making, 17–19, 22, 90, 162, 168, 197, 205, 210, 215–16, 218, 221–2, 226, 237 democracy, 56, 57–8, 68–70, 86, 88–90, 92, 241 democratic classroom (approach), 60, 68, 86 communities, 242 learning environment, 20, 84 learning and teaching process, 11, 58, 86 participation, 90 pedagogy, 88 relationships, 239 teacher education, 57 traditions, 11 transformation, 11, 58, 86 deprofessionalization, 86, 239, 241 see also stupidization designing learning materials, 209–21 desire, 96–7, 204, 228–9, 235, 240 development group, 213, 218, 228 learner, 10–11, 226, 233 learning, 118, 129 of knowledge, 79–80 personal, 76, 81 professional, 25, 67, 159 teacher, 10, 58, 223, 226, 233



256 Index

dialectic, 84–5, 88, 154 dialogic action research, 39 construction, 85 inquiry, vii, ix nature of language and learning, 10, 98 practice/process, ix dialogue, ix, 31, 33, 39–41, 69, 86–7, 96–7, 99–100, 129, 157, 161, 227–8, 230, 239 diaries, 180–5, 187, 189–94 dilemma, 84–5, 87, 161, 208, 240 discourse(s), 98, 103, 106 autonomous learning, 88 of commodification, 89 of consumerism, 89 of denial, 99 didactics research, 58 of disempowerment, 68 educational, 15 of empowerment, 27 established, 103 final draft, 146, 148–9, 153 of history, literature and cultural criticism, 123 of learner autonomy, 95 of management, 88 of ownership, 89 polyphonic, 37 spontaneous, 98 teacher education, 58 dynamic(s) classroom, 7, 77, 79, 91 of power and privilege, 88 ELP (European Language Portfolio), 8–10, 12, 239 empowerment, 3, 12, 16–18, 20–1, 26–8, 57–8, 85, 92, 101, 104, 121, 162, 231, 236 professional, 21, 28, 92 engaged pedagogy, 58, 129 ‘English Only’ movement, 91–2 essentializing, 235–6 European Language Portfolio (see ELP) evaluation, 6, 11, 37, 60–1, 64, 77–8, 91, 110, 113–14, 116, 118–19, 124, 162

peer, 108, 109–19, 162 programme, 227 self–, 73, 108, 109–19, 162 by students, 77–8 system, 108–19, 162 experience, 31–2, 157, 159, 162, 207 classroom, 127, 135, 158 desirable, 16, 18 lived, 17, 106 past, 34, 36 personal, 34, 132 professional, 15–16 exploratory draft, 149 talk, 148, 150 failure, 87, 125, 131, 140–1, 159–61, 187, 208 feedback, 64, 67, 71, 73–4, 77–8, 86–7, 108, 113, 115, 121, 124, 124–5, 129, 171, 180, 184, 186–7, 189, 192, 198, 200 peer, 72, 78 written, 73–4, 113 fei ( ), 96 fen ( ), 96, 99 figured world, 234–6, 238–41 final draft discourse, 146, 148–9, 153 Focused, Transfer and General Practice (Framework), 180–4, 187–8, 190, 193–4 form filling, 8, 191, 225 see also record sheet; self-study plan; study record Freire, P., 90, 92, 157 General and Fundamental skills, 180, 186–7 genre, ix, x, 147 globalization/global capital, 89, 239, 242 goal setting, 8–9, 111, 116, 154, 203 group collaboration, 209 development, 218, 228 leader, 215, 217, 219–20 process, 219–20, 226



Index 257

group – continued relationship, 56–7 see also collaboration, collaborative; team guidance, 170, 187, 200, 203, 205–6, 208, 224, 226 happening of truth, 97, 106 heart of language, 99, 106 heart of learning, 97, 103–6 histories, learner/learning, 30, 32–6, 38–40, 41n, 39, 85, 110–11, 151–2, 154, 235, 241 see also story/ies Holec, H., 3–7, 10 horizon of significance, 89, 234 ideal, 15, 47, 84, 226 see also vision identity, 96, 99, 106–7, 121, 138, 141, 223, 234–6, 238, 240–2 conflict, 96 construction of, x, 79, 233 learner, 35, 223, 238–9 linguistic, 8, 131 of expertise, 240 persons, practices and resources, 237–8, 241–2 professional, 239 (socially) situated, 79, 233 socio-cultural, 96 teacher, 223, 238–9 transformation of, 27 ideology, 58–9, 88, 90 independent learning, 108, 110, 119, 176, 191, 196, 196–208, 208n, 223, 237, 239 individualism, 88, 242 innovation, 18, 53–4, 83, 97, 184, 193, 195, 225, 229, 232 pedagogical, 1, 17–18, 28, 89 input, 74–80, 87, 90–2, 211, 216, 236 inquiry, 15–17, 24, 58, 87, 96–7 classroom(-based), 16, 20, 21 collaborative, vii, 15, 31, 39, 41, 210–11, 221 dialogic, vii, ix learner-centred, 23–4

narrative, ix, 28, 98, 132–3, 156, 159 pedagogical, 15–16, 22, 27 reflective, 21, 87 school(-based), 16–18 teacher, 20, 26 institutional culture, 10, 130, 193 interdependence, x, 3, 57, 210, 221 interpretation, 133–4, 149–50, 152–3, 156, 158–9, 161, 221 interpretive/-ative exploration, 97 frame(work), 148, 150 process, 147 research, 24 interview, 47–9, 51, 73, 145, 169, 171–2, 189, 198–205, 209, 212–18, 220, 227, 240 I-statement analysis, categories, 78–81 journal, 17, 19, 23–4, 97–8, 101–5, 227 Kaleidoscope, 31, 33–4, 36–9, 41n knowledge, 6, 60, 104, 127, 201–2, 206–7, 212, 214, 221, 236 access to, 240 appropriation of, 236 (co-)construction, vii, viii, 5–7, 17, 50, 51, 58, 72, 75–6, 78, 80, 148–52, 210, 221, 236 demonstration of, 146, 153 development of, 79–80 origin of, 105, 157 pedagogical, 60 production of, 221 professional, 16–17, 21, 197 -telling, 146–7, 149–50 transformation, 146–7, 149–50, 152–3, 210–11 transmission of, 90, 121 L2 conception, 145, 152, 154 learning, 136, 142 learning crisis, 131, 131–42 language autonomy, 106–7 biography, 8–9



258 Index

first (L1) use, 91–2 learner/learning histories, 30, 32–6, 38–40, 41n, 39, 85, 110–11, 235, 241 learning, 7, 9, 35, 37, 39, 108–11, 117, 131, 145, 157 learning experience, 12, 142 learning plan, 180, 187 learning skills, 9, 109, 115, 186 of heart, 96, 99 proficiency, 44, 46 skills, 109, 115, 122, 127, 189 use, 7, 9, 145, 154, 158, 160–1 learner agentive, 232 autonomous, 5, 7–10, 12, 52, 88, 101, 123, 133, 154, 174, 204, 222, 224, 230, 232, 236–7, 240 awareness, 85, 115 beliefs, 12, 32 crisis, see under learning -directed approach/environment, 91, 123 development, 10, 58, 226, 233 empowerment 57, 121 experiences, 31, 33–4, 157, 159 freedom, 90, 190–1 histories, 34–6, 38–9, 110 identity, 32, 35, 223, 238 narrative, 12, 153 power, 23, 92 profile, 33, 36, 38 role of, 45, 49, 51, 97, 161, 168, 223, 235, 237, 240 stories, 31, 40–1, 154, 158 (see also histories, learner/learning) training, 168, 199–202, 205 -users, 143, 149, 154 voices, 68, 86, 159, 232 learner autonomy, 2–12, 16, 22, 26, 31, 47, 56, 57–9, 67–70, 84, 86, 89, 95, 95–6, 108–9, 116, 120–1, 125–6, 129–30, 143, 154, 162, 167, 170, 174–8, 186, 193–4, 204–5, 210, 223, 227, 231–3, 236, 238, 240–2 commodification of, 88–9 concept of, 2, 3, 11 definition of, 7, 10

development of, 6, 8–10, 167, 174–8, 194, 204–5, 242 as method, 7 learner-centred approach, 168 classroom, 129, 240–1 evaluation, 109 inquiry, 23–4 principles, 21, 22 teaching, 121, 237 learner-centredness, 43–5, 89–90 learnership active, 108, 108–9, 117, 119, 162 collaborative, 109 learning collaborative, 123, 125 crisis (L2), 131, 131–3, 136, 138, 140–2, 158 environment, 20, 123, 126, 162, 168 experience, 31, 35, 51, 85 heart of, 97, 103–6 history/ies, 30, 32–5, 38–40, 41n, 85, 111, 151–2 (see also histories, learner/learning) independent, 110, 116, 118–19, 176, 191, 196, 196–208, 208n, 237, 239 materials/resources, 5, 9, 181–5, 187, 191, 209–21, 237–9 objectives, 1, 4, 8, 52 plan, 197–8 portfolios, 56–7, 63–6 process, 10, 39, 45, 58, 81, 86, 107, 118, 162, 197, 216, 223, 226–7, 229, 231 reflective, 11, 76 self-access, 3–5, 7, 9, 11, 47, 86, 95, 168–70, 173, 180, 226, 237 self-directed 3–5, 22, 43, 45, 47–9, 51–4, 86, 89, 95, 167–68, 177, 231, 236–7 skills, 9, 11, 149, 171, 201–2, 204 spaces for, 86, 123, 157, 163, 207–8 strategy, 30, 126, 136, 138, 171, 181–5, 187, 191, 197–200 style, 8, 30, 134–5, 158, 167–8, 176, 197, 199–200, 202



Index 259

260 Index

materials, 5, 170, 181–3 design, 209, 211, 213–16, 221 meta-narrative, 145, 150–4 metaphor, 27, 57, 96, 121, 123, 129–30, 159 mode of action research (interpretive/explanatory), 98 of knowing/understanding (narrative/paradigmatic), 150–1, 153–4 of teaching (traditional/participatory), 92, 141, 161 motivation, 33, 81, 133, 142, 203, 217 extrinsic, 133, 135–6, 141, 175, 177 intrinsic, 133, 136, 140–1, 175, 236 multivocality, vii–ix see also voice, multiple narrative, 12, 31, 41, 81, 121, 145, 150, 153, 156, 156–9, 161, 163–4, 240 archetypal, 151 inquiry, ix, 28n, 98, 132–3, 156, 159 interpretation, 150 meta- (of transformation), 145, 150–4 mode of knowing/understanding, 150–1, 153–4 professional development, 25 questionnaire, 123 re-description, 145 reflective, 12 research, 12 self-assessment, 125 near peer model, 144, 148 negotiation, 19, 40, 56–7, 60, 67, 74, 86, 125, 130, 162–3, 180, 191–2, 210–11, 213–14, 226, 240–1 Norton, B., 141, 232, 234

note-taking, 143–54, 158, 239 copy-delete strategy, 146 final draft, 146, 148–9, 151, 153 technical development of, 148–9 Oxford, R., 133, 143, 149, 154, 158, 197 paradigm, 120–1, 150 paradigmatic condition, 150 connections, 153 interpretation, 150 mode of knowing/understanding, 150, 154 narrative, 150 paradox, 85, 87–8, 106, 123 participation, vii, 25, 56–8 collaborative and responsive, x in communities of use/practice, 232–5 democratic, 90, 242 Pennycook, A., 129, 160 pedagogic(al) inquiry, 15–16, 22, 27, 58 innovation, 1, 15–18 knowledge, 60, 65–6 practice, 57–9, 67, 70, 95, 97, 105, 121, 156, 210 strategies, 56, 60–7 pedagogy for/of autonomy, 15, 71, 83–6, 88 critical, 129 democratic, 88 engaged, 58, 129 transformative, 88, 123 peer assessment, 115 evaluation, 108, 109, 115, 117, 119, 162 feedback, 72 modelling, 144, 148 teaching, 72, 74, 77–8, 81 personal construct, 6, 77, 81 development, 76, 81 experience, 34, 132 histories, 34–5, 39 persons, 232–5, 237–8



linguistic competence, 109–10 identity, 8, 131 Little, D., vii, 1–11, 57, 106–7, 133, 143, 145, 197–8, 210, 232, 242

phenomenological way of seeing, 100, 104–6 policy/policy makers, 43, 46, 52–5, 86, 90, 222 political approach/dimension of autonomy, 143, 149, 154, 239 portfolio, 16–21, 24–8, 31, 56, 61, 63–4, 66, 97, 105, 123, 197, 200, 202–3 development, 18, 20 learning, 56–7, 63–4, 66, 198 reflective, 16, 18–22 power, viii, 16, 47, 85–6, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 125, 136, 157–8, 203 powerlessness, 131–2, 135, 141, 157, 218 practice, 43, 46, 53–5, 84, 87, 92, 201–2, 204–8, 232–41 autonomous and alternative, 57 collaborative, x exploratory, 97 learning/teaching, 236–8 pedagogic(al), 57–9, 67, 70, 95, 97, 105, 156 professional, 59, 62, 66, 71–2, 76 see also identities, persons, resources pre-understanding, 96 presentation communal/group, 97, 127–8 oral, 101–3 poster, 122–5 problem-posing, 91–2 problem-solving, 17, 92, 133–4, 136, 141 problematizing autonomy and democracy, 88 process, 9, 11–12, 30, 32, 38–9, 56–8, 60, 64, 84, 91, 113, 147, 203, 206–7, 209, 211–17, 219–21, 225–27, 229–30, 236, 239, 242 learning, 10, 39, 45, 58, 81, 86, 107, 118, 162, 197, 206, 216, 223, 226–7, 229, 231 teaching/learning, 2, 9, 60–1, 66–8, 78, 227 professional development, 20, 25, 28, 67, 159 empowerment, 21, 28, 92

experience, 15–16 growth, 26, 28 identity, 239 independence/interdependence, 210, 221 practice, 62, 71–2, 76 reconstruction, 3, 10–12, 65–6, 86, 164, 206, 222, 224 collaborative, 128 multi-voiced, x practitioner-driven, 10 record sheet, 168, 170, 238 see also form filling; self-study plan; study record reflection, 15–16, 18, 30–9, 41n, 56, 60, 64, 68, 73, 76–8, 80, 82, 87, 90, 97, 105, 116, 132, 139, 156, 156, 159, 161–4, 172, 187, 197–8, 207–8, 220, 223, 226–7, 238 critical, ix, 57–8, 60–1, 64, 66–8, 92, 205, 208 text, 31–34, 36, 39 reflective inquiry, 21, 87 portfolios, 16, 18–22 processes, 7, 208, 226 teacher education, 18, 84 teaching, 16, 20, 31 writing, 18, 97, 145, 208n, 209, 213–14, 216–19 (see also reflection, text) reflexivity, 32, 39–41, 89 relatedness, 133, 136, 140–1 renaissance, 99, 157 repositioning, 90, 158 representation forms of, ix, 154 research, 24–5, 28, 48, 67, 74–5, 77–8, 81, 97, 144, 159, 184 action, see action research of autonomy in language education, 10–11 dialectic, 154 methods, 73, 77–8 narrative, 12 skills/strategies, 60–3, 65–7 resilience/resiliency, 133, 136–7, 140–1, 236



Index 261

resistance, 55, 69, 71, 71–2, 74, 78, 80–3, 86–9, 91, 135, 204, 225, 241 resources, ix, 53, 198–9, 201, 205, 232–41 cultural, 236 educational, 239 learning, 235, 239 material and symbolic, 241 see also persons, practices responsibility, 57–9, 68, 101, 106, 114, 121, 126, 157, 161, 197, 199, 205, 229–30 role, 85, 156, 206, 217, 223, 235, 237, 241–2 as advisor, 202 as classroom manager, 44, 49 as counsellor, 40, 85 as facilitator, 44–5, 51 as learner, 46, 126, 161 as lecturer, 126 as leader, 215 as teacher, 46, 58, 159, changed/new, 47, 52, 64, 86, 237 conventional/traditional, 47–8, 53 student-centred, 44 teacher, 18, 58, 85–6, 90–1, 201 (see also teacher, role of) teacher educator, 15, 18–19, 85 scaffolding, 68–9, 86–7, 154n, 184–6, 190, 193, 215, 223, 226 tools, 223, 225–6 SEAR (Students English Access Room), 167–78, 223–4, 236–8 Schmenk, B., 88–9, 231 self-access, centre (SAC), 167, 168–9, 171, 178, 184–5, 200, 223 language learning (SALL), 3, 4, 7, 180–95, 225 language learning centre, 4 learning, 4, 7, 9, 11, 47, 86, 95, 168–70, 173, 180, 226, 228, 237 materials, 10, 170–3, 176, 233 orientation, 170–1, 187, 229 systems, 10–11, 229, 233

self-assessment, 8, 9, 11–12, 60–1, 64, 67, 110, 114–16, 118–19, 125, 161–2, 183 grid, 8, 110, 116, 119, 236 self-determination, 68, 132–3, 140–1, 210 self-directed knowledge construction, 72, 75–6 learning, 3–5, 22, 43, 45, 47–9, 51–4, 86, 89, 95, 167–68, 177, 231, 236–7 self-direction, 85–6, 88, 143, 147 self-evaluation, 30–1, 40, 73, 108, 110–13, 115, 117–19, 162 self-instruction, 3–6 self-knowledge, 107, 141 self-regulation, 210, 215, 236 self-study materials, 172, 186 plan, 171–3, 237–8 (see also form filling; record sheet; study record) sense of self, 121, 131 see also identity social capital, 238 constraints, 232–3 process, 242 turn (of L2 learning), 232 world, viii, 90, 157, 160, 232, 234, 242 socially situated agency, 232 identity, 79 socio-cultural identity, 96 model, 232 perspective, 231–3, 238, 240–2 relations, 149 setting, 132 situation, 132, 140 theory and interpretation, 232–40 space for decision/dialogue, 106, 123, 157, 163 for learners’ voices, 86 reflective, 207–8 stakeholders, 54, 222, 225 status quo, 57, 68, 86, 88



262 Index

stereotypes/stereotyping, 12, 122 story/ies, xi, 18, 36, 40–1, 71–3, 84–5, 98, 143–5, 150–4, 156–9, 163–4, 240 interpretation of, 158–9 telling (and re-telling), 158–9 see also history/ies strategies, learner/learning, 30, 126, 138, 170–1, 181–5, 187, 191, 197–8, 201 pedagogic, 60–7 problem-solving, 133–4, research, 60–7 self-development, 60–3, 65–7 struggle, 11, 58, 68, 84–7, 91–2, 101, 103, 106, 120–1, 129–30, 141–2, 156, 156, 159–60, 163–4, 206, 218, 242 shared, 11, 58, 86 study record, 170–3 see also form filling; record sheet; self-study plan stupidization, 241 see also deprofessionalization style conflict, 131, 135, 141 see also conflict success, 135–6, 141–2, 160–1, 195, 215, 219–20, 239 support, 77–8, 86, 130n, 142, 167, 169–70, 211, 220, 225–6 structure, 180, 180, 185–6, 189–90, 192–3, 195, 203, 207, 229 student, 167, 170 teacher, 31, 196, 196–8, 207 tutorial, 75–8, 87 systems course evaluation, 108–19 self-access, 10–11, 223, 229, 233 teacher action, 69, 203, 205 as assessor, 170–1, 176, 237–8 as authority, 95, 235–6 authority, 90 autonomous, 10, 12 beliefs, 194, 203–8

-centred approach/classroom/ instruction, 43, 48, 68, 86, 90, 108, 121–2, 135, 238, 241 as change agent, 225 as controller, 44, 237 as counsellor, 85, 168, 170–1, 176, 236–7 development, 10, 12, 15, 17–18, 20, 31, 58, 177, 198, 223, 226, 228, 233 -directed/fronted approach/practice, 48, 76, 91, 224 education, 7, 15, 18, 20, 56, 56–9 educator, 2, 15, 18–20, 84–5 empowerment, 12, 18, 25 evaluation, 116 as facilitator, 92, 168, 170–1, 176, 198, 237–8 forum, 98, 105 as guide, 170, 176 as helper, 168 identity, 223, 238–42 input, 80, 87, 90–1 as manager, 44, 53, 237 as problem-poser, 92 research, 22–7, 159 -researcher, x, 39, 41, 161, 227 role of, 18, 40, 44–7, 49, 51–3, 58, 85–6, 90–1, 123, 168, 176–7, 201–2, 223, 235, 237, 240 support, 31, 196, 196–8, 207 teacher autonomy, 1, 8, 10, 12, 16, 57, 120, 126, 194, 204, 209, 209–10, 225, 227, 238–9 socially constructed process, 221 see also teacher-learner autonomy teacher education, 15, 18, 20, 45, 58, 72, 82, 84 teacher training, 168 teacher-learner autonomy, 72, 82 see also teacher autonomy teacher-researcher, 41, 161, 227 teaching diary/journal, 17, 19, 23–4, 124 learner-centred, 121, 237 /learning process, 2, 9, 60–1, 66–8, 78, 227 /learning theories, 65–6



Index 263

teaching – continued peer, 72, 74, 77–8, 81 practice, 72, 206, 230, 236–8 reflective, 16, 20 teaching/learning-centredness, 123, 126, 128 team climate, 215, 221 development, 218 process, 209, 211, 215–16, 218–20 see also collaboration; collaborative; group technical skill, 143, 149, 157, 160, 207 tension, 45, 84, 91 time, 157, 181, 184, 188, 190–1, 193–4, 202, 206, 211, 213–15, 220–1, 222, 228–30 tolerance of ambiguity/uncertainty, 126–8, 160, 163 see also uncertainty tools, 222–3, 225–7, 230, 234, 238, 240–1 distribution of, 240 manipulation of, 241 material and symbolic, 234 transformation, 16, 40, 69, 86, 140, 143, 145, 147, 149–54, 156, 159, 163, 210–12, 221, 224, 239 democratic, 11, 58, 86 of identity, 27, 107 journey of, 101 of knowledge, 146–7, 149–52, 210–11 meta-narrative of, 145, 150–4 transformative action, 38, 138

change, 69 pedagogy, 88, 123 transition, 82, 222, 223–5, 228–30 see also change transmission of knowledge, 90, 121, 149, 153 of meaning, 145, 148 transmissive approach to/-centred education, 68, 86, 126–7, 241 tutorial support, 75–8, 87 uncertainty, 17–8, 22, 25, 74, 85–8, 101, 159, 167, 206, 208, 224 see also tolerance of ambiguity/uncertainty values, 83–5, 87, 89, 105, 119, 207, 235 VELA (Virtual English Language Adviser), 180, 185, 187, 190–1, 194 plan 187–8, 190–1 Vieira, F., 8, 31, 59, 207 vision, 84, 92, 96–7, 140 see also ideal voice, vii–x, 15, 22, 27, 31, 34, 37–9, 52, 54, 70, 72, 86, 121, 133, 156–7, 179, 223 of learners, 68, 86, 159, 232 multiple, ix, 34, 37, 39, 179 (see also multivocality) writing autobiographical, 35, 85 reflective, 18, 76, 78–80, 145, 209, 212–14, 216–19



264 Index

Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education: Inquiry and Innovation

Learner Autonomy Across Cultures: Language Education Perspectives

Reconstructing American Education

Advances in Language And Education

Language awareness in language education

Identity, Motivation and Autonomy in Language Learning (Second Language Acquisition)

Education and Humanism. Linking Autonomy and Humanity

The Language of Inquiry

Sociolinguistics and Language Education (New Perspectives on Language and Education)

Maintaining Control: Autonomy and Language Control

Narrative Inquiry in Music Education: Troubling Certainty

Vocabulary in Language Teaching (Cambridge Language Education)

Visionary Observers: Anthropological Inquiry and Education

Issues in English Language Education

Critical Reading in Language Education

Language and Literacy in Science Education

Target Language, Collaborative Learning and Autonomy (Modern Languages in Practice)

Culture and Language Learning in Higher Education

Culture and Language Learning in Higher Education

Theoretical Inquiry: Language, Linguistics, and Literature

Anaphora and Language Design (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Studies in Immersion Education (The Language and Education Library, 11)

Autonomy and trust in bioethics

Autonomy

Vocabulary, Semantics and Language Education

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

Reconstructing Autonomy in Language Education: Inquiry and Innovation

Learner Autonomy Across Cultures: Language Education Perspectives

Reconstructing American Education

Advances in Language And Education

Language awareness in language education

Identity, Motivation and Autonomy in Language Learning (Second Language Acquisition)

Education and Humanism. Linking Autonomy and Humanity

The Language of Inquiry

Sociolinguistics and Language Education (New Perspectives on Language and Education)

Maintaining Control: Autonomy and Language Control

Narrative Inquiry in Music Education: Troubling Certainty

Vocabulary in Language Teaching (Cambridge Language Education)

Visionary Observers: Anthropological Inquiry and Education

Issues in English Language Education

Critical Reading in Language Education

Language and Literacy in Science Education

Target Language, Collaborative Learning and Autonomy (Modern Languages in Practice)

Culture and Language Learning in Higher Education

Culture and Language Learning in Higher Education

Theoretical Inquiry: Language, Linguistics, and Literature

Anaphora and Language Design (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs)

Studies in Immersion Education (The Language and Education Library, 11)

Autonomy and trust in bioethics

Autonomy

Vocabulary, Semantics and Language Education

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

Autonomy

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