Language Learner Autonomy

Theory, Practice and Research

David Little,Leni Dam,Lienhard Legenhausen

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783098613
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Didattica nell'ambito linguistico e artistico

This is the first book on language learner autonomy to combine comprehensive accounts of classroom practice with empirical and case-study research and a wide-ranging engagement with applied linguistic and pedagogical theory. It provides a detailed description of an autonomy classroom in action, focusing on Danish mixed-ability learners of English at lower secondary level, and reports the findings of a longitudinal research project that explored the learning achievement over four years of one class in the same Danish school. It also presents two learner case studies to show that the autonomy classroom responds to the challenges of differentiation and inclusion, and two institutional case studies that illustrate the power of autonomous learning to support the social inclusion of adult refugees and the educational inclusion of immigrant children. The concluding chapter offers some reflections on teacher education for language learner autonomy. Each chapter ends with discussion points and suggestions for further reading.

Part 1

The Autonomy Classroom in Practice: An Example from Lower Secondary Education

1Using the Target Language: Spontaneity, Identity, Authenticity

Introduction

We have already emphasized that use of the target language (TL) plays a central role in our version of the autonomy classroom. We have also explained that in our view autonomy is not a new capacity we must develop in our learners. They may not be used to acting autonomously in the classroom; indeed, their previous experience of schooling may well have been wholly teacher-directed (cf. Figure 0.1, p. 16). But if they are novices in relation to the learning they are expected to accomplish at school, they already know a great deal about life outside school, in which they have been by no means passive participants. Phillida Salmon puts the matter thus:

By the time they start school, all children possess rich resources of human understanding. […] [They] have learned much about the way people live, the way people relate to each other, the way matters are organized. What kinds of thing happen in buses, shops, post office, clinic – what transactions are done, how people behave, what is possible and not possible – all this is familiar territory. […] Many children have, by this age, acquired a specialized knowledge of their own. The experiences of play school, nursery groups or being ‘minded’, bring their own insider’s understandings […]. [C]hildren of five have not acquired all these kinds of understanding by being merely spectators on life; in one way or another, they are already active participants in living. (Salmon, 1985: 24–25)

Salmon is describing the acquisition of what Barnes (1976) calls ‘action knowledge’. Pupils’ capacity for autonomous behaviour based on action knowledge can be observed in the playground, where even very young learners participate in the organization of a society to which most adults have no access (see, for example, Opie, 1993). If learners’ sense of identity derives from their ‘action knowledge’, our task as teachers is to engage that ‘action knowledge’ in the business of language learning, to ensure that what goes on in our classrooms is as much ‘real life’ as what goes on outside. This means that TL communication in the classroom must be authentic in the sense that it arises from and speaks to the learners’ identities, and spontaneous in its response to the constantly evolving needs of classroom activity. In Chapter 2 we shall discuss the role of collaborative oral interaction in language learning; here we are concerned with TL use from the perspective of the individual learner. We focus especially on the early stages of learning because they appear to present teachers with their greatest challenge: ‘If I speak the TL will my learners understand?’ But before we do that we must say a little more about why we think TL use is so important and, in doing so, explain more fully what we mean by the term.

The Importance of Target Language Use

We learn to speak only by speaking

There are three reasons for insisting on TL use in the L2 classroom. First, fluent linguistic communication – listening, speaking, reading and writing – depends on a complex of procedural skills that we mostly deploy automatically. There are many things we can do to support the development of those skills without actually using them. For example, we can learn the words that we need in order to talk or write about topics of particular interest to us; we can practise pronouncing those words, and the phrases in which they are likely to occur, and thus increase our chances of being understood by other speakers of our TL; and we can pay attention to the formal features of the TL, gradually developing our sense of grammatical correctness. But in themselves none of these activities will make us more fluent communicators. To achieve that goal we must internalize our knowledge of the TL, not as a collection of separate building blocks but as a gradually expanding, fully integrated repertoire that we can deploy automatically, and the growth of automaticity depends on using the TL for purposes of communication and constantly pushing against the limits of what we can already do with it (cf. Swain’s ‘output hypothesis’; Swain, 1985, 2005).

Target language use promotes incidental learning

The second reason for insisting on TL use in the L2 classroom is related to the first and has to do with the distinction between incidental and intentional learning. Incidental learning takes place as a by-product of our involvement in activity of one kind or another; it is usually involuntary and may entail the development of knowledge to which we do not have introspective access. Much ‘situated learning’ (cf. Introduction, p. 13) falls into this category. Intentional learning, on the other hand, follows an explicit plan or agenda and involves conscious effort. One way of describing L1 development is to say that in the early years the spoken language is acquired for the most part incidentally, as a result of the child’s involvement in many different kinds of interaction, whereas learning to read and write is the result of intentional learning. L2 learning at school is inevitably an intentional process: it is guided by a curriculum that specifies particular outcomes. Yet it is impossible to teach explicitly and learn consciously everything we need to know in order to become fluent in our TL. Intentional learning must be supplemented by incidental learning. That is why, for example, reading widely in the TL has always been recognized as an essential means of increasing our vocabulary. To begin with, we may find it necessary to reach for the dictionary more often than we would like, but the more we read, the more we are likely to develop strategies for coping with new words. In due course we deploy those strategies automatically and unconsciously and our vocabulary grows incidentally, without our really noticing it. Spontaneous and authentic TL use – listening, speaking, reading and writing – is essential because it promotes incidental learning within a framework that is always intentional.

Doubts about the efficacy of explicit grammar teaching

The third reason for insisting on TL use in the L2 classroom emerges from the findings of research into the efficacy of explicit grammar instruction. Most mainstream language teaching methods assume that learners will develo...