Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
Autonomy is the
ability to take your own decisions, the ability to take your own way, the
possibility to open the door you find appropriate for your personal
development. There are so many doors to open, but you should open them yourself,
walk through the door and be responsible for your choices. It is wonderful that
people have started to analyze and apply autonomy not only on geographical and
political levels, but on educational as well. It is vitally important to be
independent, and to be responsible for your knowledge and life.
According
to the Oxford Dictionary “autonomy” is a polysemantic word that means:
1.
the right or condition
of self-government (mass noun);
2.
a self-governing country
or region (count noun);
3.
freedom from external
control or influence; independence;
4.
the capacity of
an agent to act in accordance with objective morality rather than under the
influence of desires (in Kantian moral philosophy).
It takes its
origin from the early 17th century: from Greek autonomia, from autonomos 'having its own laws', from autos 'self' + nomos 'law'. [1] Originally this term was
used in politics and moral philosophy. However, “…the notion of learner autonomy was first developed out of
practice—that of teacher-researchers at the Centre de Recherches et
d'Applications Pédagogiques en Langues (CRAPEL), University of Nancy, France,
in the early 1970s. According to the former Director of CRAPEL, Henri Holec
(personal communication), the need for a term to describe people's ability to take charge of their own learning…
arose for practical, though idealistic reasons. ” [2]. With the aim of promoting lifelong
learning “…CRAPEL began to offer adults the opportunity to learn a
foreign language in a resources centre, free from teacher direction.” [3]
However,
Dimitrios Thanasoulas in his article “What
is Learner Autonomy and How Can It Be Fostered?” writes that autonomy is the
synonym to activity, critical thinking and independence. The other question is
how to use this freedom correctly. “…this shift
of responsibility from teachers to learners does not exist in a vacuum, but is
the result of a concatenation of changes to the curriculum itself towards a
more learner-centred kind of learning.” [4] The role of the teacher remain crucially
important in the educational process, thus he/she becomes a tutor, a mentor ,
who tries to free student’s mind and to show the right door, as autonomous learning is “by no means teacherless
learning” [5]. The teacher is the guide, who clarifies that autonomous learning
can be achieved when cognitive strategies (repetition, resourcing, translation,
note-taking, deduction, contextualization, transfer, inferencing, question for
clarification) and metacognitive strategies
(directed attention, selective attention, self-monitoring, self-evaluation,
self-reinforcement) are applied. The teacher is the one to monitor the
educational process by answering the questions how to learn a language and what
to learn.
The success of implementing autonomy among teachers-students depends on the
desire to learn, the sense of self and self-esteem, the ability to overcome
occasional setback and mistakes while studying a foreign language. One of the
most important factors is motivation, as it comprises three components at once:
"desire to achieve a goal, effort extended in this direction, and
satisfaction with the task." [6]
In order to promote autonomy among students and become an autonomous
teacher it is required to experience the role of the autonomous students. We
need to pass the mental steps of development by living all the steps of the
autonomous student formation.
Ashok Raj Khati in his post “Teaching English: Lifeless Life?”
describes the monotonous life of a teacher of English. “He gets up at 5 am, rushes to the college at 6 am and starts his lesson
at 6.30. He gives lectures till 10.30, and then comes to have a meal in hurry.
He has to take several classes in a school from 11 am to 4 pm where he is a
permanent teacher. He has been working as an English teacher for 15 years.
Every year he enters into the same classrooms with the same walls, writes on
the same blackboard, opens the same textbooks, gives the same notes that he had
prepared many years ago. He finds that his students are always passive
listeners every year except in the first month of an academic year. He usually
uses chalk, duster, blackboard, and sometime cassette recorder for listening
activities…” [7]. Not to be trapped in this “lifeless life” teacher autonomy,
as the consequence, learner autonomy is the light in the end of the tunnel that
will encourage creativity, interest variety of approaches and sources, so the
students will have enough fuel for the entire academic year, as they will realize
the importance of acquired knowledge, will have a high self-esteem and will be
motivated to achieve better results, not because they live in the exam-oriented
society, but because taking charge of their learning is a norm.
The curricula elaborated at the Moldova State University have already
introduced the space for learning autonomy, or independent learning, as we call
it, where we introduce the activities, the strategies of activity accomplishment,
the criteria of assessment and the duration, similar to the ABCD method. Thus
the autonomous learning is fostered at the national level. However to achieve
success in building autonomy and benefiting from it, it is necessary first of
all to help teachers become autonomous by the means of conferences, seminars,
workshops, incoming teachers, by having internships at the universities where
autonomy is well developed. If teachers "adopt appropriate
activities" and skills and learn to become free when thinking,
progressing, enhancing teaching skills, learner autonomy will be a
bird-in-the-hand, as Samuel P-H Sheu
suggests in his article “Learner Autonomy: Bird-in-the-hand or
Bird-in-the-bush?” [8]
The
present generation of students has good web skills. They are active members of
social networks, they surf the net reading the news and e-books, listening to
the music, networking on Skype, Facebook, Twitter, using online dictionaries, writing
e-mails, creating personal blogs, watching online TV, subscribing to Youtube,
but the question is “What language do they use?” After making a small survey
among my students I have come to the conclusion that they spend from 5 to 10
hours a day navigating the World Net mainly in Romanian and Russian languages,
only 18 percent of first-year students use English. I have repeatedly advised
them a number of websites that will facilitate and improve their learning
process, such as dictionary.cambridge.org,
oxforddictionaries.com,
bbc.co.uk,
simpleenglishnews.com/,
and many others. Whereas, instead of brushing up pronunciation using online
dictionaries that have American and British recorded pronunciation of words and
enriching their vocabulary by listening and reading BBC news, they relax and
have fun in their mother tongue. The experience has shown that students whose level of English is
higher practice autonomous learning. They watch films in English, listen to the
radio (BBC), surf the internet, read online newspapers, with other words widely
use web technologies to foster their learning autonomy. The students, whose
learning process is restricted to the class work commit grammar mistakes, are
not self-confident, do not show initiative, and are less fluent in their
speech.
The
further use of web tools, gradual development of autonomous learning and
careful implementation and management of computer technologies in the class
will raise the students to a new level, so they can walk through new doors.
References:
2. 3. Smith, Richard ““Learner Autonomy”
4. 5.
6. Thanasoulas, Dimitrios “"What is Learner Autonomy and How Can It Be Fostered? ”
7. Ashok, Raj Khati “
Teaching English: Lifeless Life” “ Teaching English: Lifeless Life”
8. P-H Sheu, Samuel “Learner Autonomy: Bird-in-the-hand or Bird-in-the-bush?”
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