Learner Autonomy through Online Discussion

Learner autonomy in students of a second or foreign language has been in the spotlight of research for decades.  Beginning with Holec’s oft-cited definition involving the ability or capacity of learners to take control of their own learning (1981), we find many cogent explanations of what such a process, or manner of learning and thinking, might involve.  Benson (2007) points out two more recent developments in defining autonomy involving the psychology of it as well as efforts to operationalize it. 

Rather than focus on the procedures or steps necessary for learners to gain autonomy, Little (2001a) contends that at its foundation, autonomy rests on “the development and exercise of a capacity for detachment, critical reflection, decision making and independent action.”  Many in the field of English language education have commandeered the notions of autonomy, critical reflection, and critical thinking and they are now applied in piecemeal tips and isolated skills through general objectives and mass-produced textbooks, resulting in little effect on learning. Given the link between autonomous learning and critical thinking, language learning provides an excellent venue to practice both because learning a language, even poorly, induces some basic reflection (revision of output) and basic autonomy (recognition of preference in learning activities).  It further tends to incite more introspection because of the affective nature of learning a second language as an adolescent or adult.  However, to earnestly endeavor to enhance autonomy and critical thinking, we must educate ourselves, as teachers, in their many definitions, realizations, and apparent stages; we must learn how best to model such thinking in our specific context.

Giving students the freedom to choose, an idea elaborated by Little (1996), is of particular importance in attempts to engender greater learner autonomy in English language learners.  Nonetheless, there cannot be complete freedom to make decisions at first since contemporary young adults in particular do not approach education autonomously, as recent research has shown (Cabrales, Cáceres, & Feria 2010).  They may even be resistant to emerge from a passive learning mode in which they expect the teacher to provide a detailed set of information that they can memorize and apply without having to think deeply overmuch.  Since there is no easy solution to infusing autonomy and critical reflection into the curricula, we have to look for opportunities that work well in the context of a particular course.  It is clear that many teachers around the world find themselves with limited time and restrictive curricula, so finding time and appropriate context to build these dynamic forms of thinking is a major challenge. Methodology from hybrid courses, namely online discussion, provides immediate context and space to exercises autonomy and reflection; it is also an ideal medium for directing students’ attention to particular linguistic and cultural issues.

The potential of online discussion to enhance learner autonomy has been explored and is considered to be viable (Kaur and Sidhu 2010).  Recent research has also clearly indicated that online discussion forums lend themselves to deeper, more reflective thinking about cultural assumptions and perspective, allowing students to become aware and take control of their ethnocentric perspective (Garrett-Rucks, P. 2013).  By adding an element of hybridization to the typical face-to-face classroom, students gain experience in managing their own learning, but also have the guidance of the teacher, and the feeling of security of interacting with a known group of individuals.

Free web resources, namely nicenet.org, can readily be set up for online discussion in an educational setting, and the workshop will include a brief tutorial.  The majority of time will be spent discussing autonomy and critical reflection, analyzing models of online discussion in language learning, and developing specific topics and plans for individual contexts, including peer review.

References 

Bailin, S., Case, R., Coombs, J. R., & Daniels, L. B. (1999). Common misconceptions of critical thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(3), 269-283.

Bailin, S., Case, R., Coombs, J. R., & Daniels, L. B. (1999). Conceptualizing critical thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(3), 285-302.

Bardi, J. (2000, January 1). John Bardi Thinking Critically About Critical Thinking. Retrieved March 9, 2014, from http://www.personal.psu.edu/jfb9/essay2ThinkingCritically.html

Benson, P. (2007). Autonomy in language teaching and learning. Language Teaching, 40(01), 21- 40.

Cabrales Vargas, M. D. C., & Cáceres, J. A. (2013). La dinámica del currículo y la evolución de la autonomía en el aprendizaje del inglés. Íkala, (18 (1)), 45-60.

Garrett-Rucks, P. (2013). A discussion-based online approach to fostering deep cultural inquiry in an introductory language course. Foreign Language Annals, 46(2), 191-212.

Kaur, R., & Sidhu, G. (2010). Learner autonomy via asynchronous online interactions: a Malaysian perspective. International Journal of Education and Development using ICT, 6(3), 88-100.

Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2012). Critical thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life (3rd ed.). Boston: Pearson.

Thoughts from frameworks discussion (Wk 2)

I like the question about developing a critical thinking attitude.  How do we do it?  As Luvern mentions in her post, young children must be given the opportunity to think for themselves, to make decisions themselves--in her words, "make personal ideas."  The small things truly matter, for instance, "how can I get the water from this carafe into my cup without spilling?"

We adults are compelled to hustle over to them and show them exactly what to do, or at least tell them from where we are not to spill, how to hold the cup, where to push on the lever, etc.  These put anxiety on the child and detract from the child's creative and critical thinking about the issue at hand.  We can clearly see they want to try, they even beg to do it themselves from a young age.  If we berate them for a "failure" of spilling water, we beat down their desire to think with careful awareness and detail about what they are doing, because they will fear us, fear doing "wrong."  We become too easily impatient with young children trying to make decisions about how to do things, how to act, because it takes time and we adults are typically in a hurry.  Something so mundane as getting a cup of water shouldn't require adults to wait, clean a mess, wait, clean another mess, and so on!  Oh, but it should.  It must.

Little Linguists

I spend so much time thinking about thinking, and language learning, I wonder how things get done.  Yesterday, I was reading with my 5-year-old, and we were noticing some words that sound similar, with only one sound different (not just typical rhymes, which are another favorite topic), but also words such as 'friend' and 'Fred.'

As literate adults, it requires not a second thought to say 'n' is the sound that differentiates these two, but for an emergent reader, a 5-year old, it takes quite a bit more repetition of the words to think about it.  I could have just shown her both words and it would have only taken a moment for her to notice the 'n,' though we would have had a tedious and irrelevant discussion about the appearance of 'i' there despite the same vowel sound: /ɛ/.  But I didn't want to focus on the orthography.  I wanted her to concentrate on the sounds, trying to pinpoint which sound is different.  The first consideration is keeping something like that fun.  As most teachers of young learners know, keeping the experience fun, especially if the topic is somewhat abstract, is crucial or you can just toss it out.  So, we went back and forth, saying each word slowly.  She started pausing in the middle of the word, listening to the vowel, and said [ɛ]!  "I think we're really close to it," I encouraged and said 'friend' again, holding the [n] just a little.  She said the sound then, suddenly and excitedly: "[n]"!

What is the point?  A focal point of my thinking in education right now is on building conceptual frameworks, albeit somewhat hazy and unclear to begin with, of various possibilities of interpreting information within a given subject.  I guess this may be a 'road map' in the parlance of our times.   So, in the case above, instead of only looking at /n/ as a letter on a piece of paper, I want to consider it as a phoneme, as an auditory experience, and then as a physical experience, too.  Stella and I made faces at each other, making the [n] sound exaggeratedly both in the word 'friend' and by itself.  When we can consider incoming information in various ways (as a letter on the page, as a particular sound, as a physical gesture with specific sensations in the articulatory organs, we build a more ample foundation, a broader framework with which to accommodate new information.

In terms of language learning, this is of vital importance since you are practicing a new language in all its forms (written, oral, literary, soundbite, etc.).  If you focus just on the details of input as it is written (our tendency as older language learners), you are bound to come up against limitations in interpreting new information.  Many languages have no corresponding grapheme to a given phoneme.  If a learner has the ability to notice and isolate small differences in incoming sounds, they will more quickly accommodate new sounds.  Where is my research for this?  While this is more of a logical deduction than an empirically supported observation, it is also the latter, but the empirical evidence is not documented!

Similar to the above scenario, if we teach adult learners the concept of vowel space, the notions of how the tongue moves inside the mouth, jaw lowering and raising, to produce different sounds, we find that they have an easier time making adjustments to accommodate new vowel sounds.  Without this conceptual basis to think about vowels, many learners have nearly zero experience with conceptualizing vowels.  For most, it is a letter on a piece of paper, or the sound in a word with no thought to the corresponding physical gesture.  Of course, to open such a discussion, learners should consider on their own what makes different vowel sounds, and how vowels differ from consonants, physically.  With these ideas internalized, it becomes easier to imagine how to make modifications to realize new vowel sounds.  Then, autonomous learning is more likely.

Phoneticians and thinking language learners

Recently a colleague posted this article on FB through VenTESOL.  It was originally given as a talk at Seoul University in 1996.  Consider,

In this talk I want to discuss the usefulness and importance of phonetic transcription for people studying languages. Since most of you here are phoneticians, you are presumably already convinced of this; I may be preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, there are many language teachers who appear to be far from converted, and I believe that certain arguments do need to be spelled out.

...

For the language learner, a passive acquaintance with phonetic transcription enables him or her to extract precise and explicit information on pronunciation from a dictionary, bilingual or monolingual.

Without this information, a learner risks being misled either by an inadequately trained ear or by the dazzling effect of the ordinary spelling.

It should be difficult to imagine language teachers who are not impressing the significance of phonetic transcription upon their students.  Yet here, and based on experience, we see that many teachers are reluctant or even ignorant of IPA and its value.

As with many places where linguistics ties so directly to language learning, it is useful to consider how much a student of language should learn about linguistics.  Some complain that the topics are not appealing enough to learners.  Well, learning a language is not always a trip to the carnival, and learning phonetic transcription should become so much more than "a passive acquaintance" with which one can "extract precise and explicit information on pronunciation from a dictionary."  Of course, that is fully appropriate for a language student, but what about the value of learning the details of phonetics?

What about language students who study how these sounds vary between languages and within a single language? Learning to pay attention to such small details as described in this paper (how a phoneme /t/ changes based on preceding and proceeding sounds) trains the ear and the mind to pay closer attention to speech, and with appropriate direction, one's own speech.  Thus a learner begins to notice subtle clues that suggest how to make appropriate change toward more accurate pronunciation (or production, or writing, or listening).

Rather than studying how words sound by staring at some poorly understood symbols in a dictionary, language students become novice phoneticians, novice linguists, using the riches of the field to gain confidence, control, and autonomy.  To improve progress and depth of learning for language students we must devise plans with topics and projects on linguistic analysis and scientific study of an array of socio-linguistic phenomena.  Such critical study of details in the field of linguistics dovetails perfectly with self-analysis and self-assessment of language proficiency and learning strategy/outcome.  It's not to say that as language learners advance they should not study other topics, but language courses typically taught with a text full of somewhat arbitrary readings and activities would be well served by such a change in focus.  Even low-intermediate learners could manage simplified readings on these topics and develop their own analyses or surveys to make comparisons or study some other communicative detail such as facial gestures.

Just today I listened to a colleague talk about an ap for diagramming sentences--yes!  Learners need to become experts in how languages work.  Yes, we need content, but their is plenty of stimulating content, chock full of potential critical study, in the field of linguistics.  I also personally find x-bar structure more elegant that the traditional grammarian's sentence diagram if students are going to do some sentence structures, but anything would be a good start.

Taking time to recognize assumptions

Evaluating assumptions and their impact on thinking is a crucial step in critical thinking.  No matter how much practice a person might have at this, it always amazes me how easy it can be to make an assumption and fail to recognize that it is not a fact, and then make an inaccurate inference.

Everyone has their own beliefs, and for many, they may seem like facts.  For example, a person might believe that anyone willing to live on government financial support is lazy and abusing the system.  Such an assumption looks fairly obvious to be a belief or opinion.  We use prior experience to build these ideas, and new information is shaped by our assumptions.

Last week, I thought it was a fact that graduate students must be matriculated and taking graduate courses in a university.  When I learned my students were graduate students taking courses in our intensive English program, I assumed they were also enrolled in other graduate courses and so there would be some differences in the way their schedules worked compared to the undergraduates in the IEP who have not yet matriculated.  I went ahead and inferred that the schedule for these graduate students would necessarily involve just 2 or maybe 3 meetings per week, maybe 2 hours per meeting.

It turns out that these graduate students are in fact enrolled for 20 hours per week of intensive English, for the most part.  It turns out their schedule is nearly identical to other IEP students.  All of this means I need to be on campus every day, in the afternoon.

Having inferred that these students were somehow a special case with a different schedule also stemmed from my assumption that my teaching request form for the fall would have been considered in scheduling.  I indicated that working past noon would be problematic, so I assumed that I would be given some course that takes place in the morning.

None of this needed to come as a surprise, had I thought more about the circumstances of graduate students taking courses in the IEP.  My prior experience with this comes from other institutions.  The fact that these courses are being offered through our intensive program should have prompted me to ask more questions in the beginning.  I also know that my tendency when it comes to schedules is to not spend much time thinking about them. 

It's easy to look for ways to excuse or rationalize poor thinking.  I was busy, I was distracted (my favorite), I have two kids to care for, I don't spend enough time thinking about details that I believe I already understand well.  It takes discipline to stop and rethink what you take for granted; it's always more exciting to consider bigger ideas or novel topics and just speed by the things you think you know so well.

Critical thinking on Mars

There is no time like the present, right?  Start writing instead of thinking more about what to write.  Right.  Whatever I put here stands as reflection and exploration for myself, reminders for my own practice, and ultimately, ideas I can share and build on with others.

Though I usually think of critical thinking in terms of how long I've integrated it into my teaching practice, education that consciously attends to thinking started for me with science. Astronomy courses in college were most memorable since that's when I started to think carefully about my own thinking, though not from any particular guidance provided in the course.  It could have been a combination of keen interest in planetary physics and in the lab T.A., or maybe it was my studies in linguistics and Spanish, which had me looking hard at what happens in the mind when we learn another language and culture.  Why leave it to chance, though?

When we consider life on Mars, we have to imagine other perspectives.  It is an exemplary case of how creativity is crucial to make the most of critical thinking.  If we are going to live on Mars, how can we do it?  Purpose?  Questions?  Implications?  Significance?  Logic?  The elements and standards just line up with no end to the revisions!

There are 668.6 days in a Martian year.  Each day is around 24'40".  So, we have some grounding in our own perspective on earth to guide our imagination as to what life on Mars could be like.

Starting with something familiar, something we can relate to, is fundamental.  We all do it with scaffolding or schema activation; we bring in personal anecdotes or ask students to express how they relate to certain ideas.  As teachers, we find that we already have activities that involve reflection on thinking.  How can we develop these further? 

When we have students do reflective journals, it's important to first give them an idea of where they will end up (well, that's always the case).  Let them know that they will be monitoring their thinking and how it changes as they learn about and interact with new ideas.  Ask them if they've ever paid close attention to their progress as they practice some skill.  Give examples of noticing such progress and changes in thinking as you learn (modeling thinking).  Elicit their experience.  Once they've started on the reflections, have them share from time to time in the class or online, and bring attention to significant observations as well as other details that are relevant but may have been left out.  What about the medium?  Are they handwritten journals?  Oral?  Electronic?  Public?  Private?  Why? 

I don't actually want to live on Mars, by the way, at least not most of the time.

Valles Marineris is named after the orbiter that first showed pictures of it, the Mariner 9, and at one time, it was thought that water may have carved these valleys into the crust.  You can see what looks like a system of rifts or canyons running east-west near the equator.  What these canyons are and the status of water on Mars remind me how important it is to recognize and appreciate errors in thinking (rather than being embarrassed and potentially shutting out or even condemning other ideas).  Questions shouldn't be dismissed with answers, answers should refine questions, bringing others.  Mistakes should not be swept under the rug, they should be scrutinized for what they mean and other possibilities.  Whether or not there has been water on Mars has gone back and forth and elsewhere over many years.

While science appears to involve critical thinking de facto, the crucial reflective component often goes missing.  We can bring critical thinking into any topic, and we must in order to become more effective learners and decision makers.  Integrating CT shouldn't take time away from the curriculum you already have because it complements it, and learners should make better progress than they have before.  There should be more time for projects and deeper involvement, not less!

In this post, I thought a lot about S-14 and my much beloved, S-28.  I looked up complement to see if there was a better choice (and because I notoriously mix up spelling of homophones).  I always wonder how often other people use dictionaries, and how they use them.  It's a fascinating issue when it comes to language class.  There are so many great things to discover in dictionaries!  My go-to (monlingual English) online dictionary says that complement refers to something that 'completes or makes perfect.'  Great!  On that note, I hope to see more CT blogs appear in the future!