week7: Learners Autonomy

Through the reading that I did in this week, I learned a lot of information about learners autonomy. What is learner autonomy? Learner autonomy according to Dimitrios is "the ability to take charge of one's learning". Henri Holec is the "father" of learner autonomy. He believes that learner autonomy means that the learners are responsible of their own learning, study at their own pace and use their own strategies and learning styles to gain certain skills.

Another definition for learner autonomy is "a process that enables learners to recognize and assess their own needs, to choose and apply their own learning strategies or styles eventually leading to the effective management of learning" (Penaflorida 2002, p.346). These two definitions are similar in term of defining learner autonomy.

There are many synonyms to the term learner autonomy such as learner independence, self-access learning, self-paced learning and distant learning.

There are seven main attributes of autonomous learners which are:
1. Autonomous learners have insights into their learning styles and strategies
2. Take an active approach to the learning task at hand
3. Are willing to take risks
4. Are good guessers
5. Attend to form as well as to content, that is, place importance on accuracy as well as appropriacy
6. Develop the target language into a separate reference system and are willing to revise and reject hypotheses and rules that do not apply
7. Have a tolerant and outgoing approach to the target language

http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Learner_autonomy

From my experience some of the students are dependent on teachers on everything. They do not like to go and search or monitor their learnering. As I remember there is a section in the course book called self study. It contains many activities to be done by students individuals as self study but about 80% of them do not even look at it. They tend to copy answers from their classmate or ask teachers for answers. We need to foster learner autonomy more in our school.