AUTONOMY AND
COMPLEXITY[1]
We should not only
use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow. (Woodrow Wilson)
After reviewing some concepts of
autonomy in second language acquisition literature, I discuss the construct in
the light of the chaos theory and advocate that autonomy is a complex system.
In order to present empirical evidence for such assumption, a corpus of 80
language learning histories, collected in
Defining autonomy
One familiar definition
of autonomy is the one by Holec (1981:3) which states that autonomy is “the
ability to take charge of one’s learning”. Although it touches a central aspect
of the phenomenon, it does not take into account other factors that do
interfere in the learning process. The same can be said of Little’s concept
(1991) -"autonomy is a capacity of self-direction. This capacity is
exercised in the planning, monitoring and evaluation of learning activities,
and necessarily embraces both the content and the process of learning”. Both definitions
focus autonomous learners as human beings free from external constraints.
That argument matches
the etymological meaning of the word – the “right of self-government” – as
registered by the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology .This is also the way
philosophy sees autonomy. “To
be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing
agents.” (Buss, 2002).
Candy (1989) is another one to point out the menace formal education can
represent to the learners’ freedom to make their own choices. Young (1986) and
Pennycook (1997) follow similar line of thought. For Young (1986), in Pennycook
(1997), autonomy means “authoring one’s own world without being subject to the
will of others” (p. 35) and for Pennycook (1997) it is “the struggle to become
the author of one’s own world, to be able to create one’s own meaning, to
pursue cultural alternatives amid the cultural politics of everyday life”
(p.39).
Freire (1997)
understands autonomy as the learner’s capacity and freedom to construct and
reconstruct the taught knowledge. Although the concept of freedom is still an
important issue, Freire does not disregard the importance of the teachers whose
role, in his view, is not to transmit knowledge, but to create possibilities
for the students’ own production or construction of knowledge.
Littlewood (1996:428)
includes ability and willingness as components to develop autonomy and Sheerin
(1997) points out that “it is
important to distinguish between disposition and ability because a learner may
be disposed to be independent in an activity such as setting objectives, but
lack the technical ability…”(p. 57)
According to Littlewood
(1996), one may exhibit three types of autonomy: autonomy as a communicator
(using the language creatively with appropriate communicative strategies), as a
learner (engaging in independent learning using appropriate learning
strategies) and as a person (expressing personal meanings and creating personal
learning contexts).
Similarly,
Little (2003), in spite of acknowledging that learner autonomy is a problematic
term because it is widely confused with self-instruction”, states that “there is a consensus that the practice of
learner autonomy requires insight, a positive attitude, a capacity for
reflection, and a readiness to be proactive in self-management and in
interaction with others”. Little (2003) adds the idea of “autonomy as
communicator”, as he includes interaction, a social aspect of language, as part
of the acquisition process.
Freire
(1970,1997), Young, (1986), Pennycook (1997) and Benson (1997), and respecting
the learner’s identity, defend the idea of autonomy as a person, that is,
autonomy as a right, implying control of one’s own learning process. This
critical view of autonomy aims at social transformation, freedom to think and
act in order to become the author of one’s own world.
Benson
(1997) suggests “that there are,
in fact, three major versions of
learner autonomy for language learning (technical, psychological and political”
(p.18). The technically
autonomous learners are the ones who are equipped with the necessary skills and
techniques which enable them to learn a language without the constraints of a
formal institution and without a teacher. The psychological version defines
autonomy as a capacity for being responsible for one’s own learning, and the
political version focus on the
“control over the content and process of one’s own learning (Benson,
1997, p.25).”
So
far, we can conclude that autonomy is not only a matter of one’s own
responsibility for one’s learning and it is not “provided” by the approach or
tolerated by the teacher. It is something much more complex. Some researchers such
as Benson (1997), Sheerin (1997) Breen and Mann (1997), Nicolaides and Fernandes (2002) have
also acknowledged this complexity in their work.
Autonomy
as a complex system
A definition taking into account complexity and also
some constraints which interfere in one’s autonomy could be: Autonomy is a complex socio-cognitive system, subject to internal and
external constraints, which manifests itself in different degrees of independence and control of one’s own
learning process. It involves capacities, abilities, attitudes, willingness,
decision making, choices, planning, actions, and assessment either as a
language learner or as a communicator inside or outside the classroom. As a
complex system it is dynamic, chaotic, unpredictable, non-linear, adaptative,
open, self-organizing, and sensitive to initial conditions and feedback.
I consider autonomy a socio-cognitive system because it involves not only the individual mental states and processes, but also social dimensions if we view language as communication and not as a set of linguistic structures only. In order to learn a language, one must also use the language and develop autonomy as a communicator (See Littlewood, 1996). The different degrees of independence and control will vary according to the individual characteristics and the socio-political context.
Larsen-Freeman
(1997) had already noticed that “there
are many striking similarities between the new science of chaos/complexity and
second language acquisition (
As Benson (1997) claims, autonomy is “a complex and
multifaceted concept” (p.29). It consists of a large number of
elements, which makes it difficult to be comprehensibly described by a single
definition. A complex system is not a state, but a process and
each component of the system belongs to an environment build up by the
interactions among its parts. Nothing is fixed, on the contrary, there is a
constant movement of action and reaction and changes happen over time. Such
system is also chaotic. Chaos, according to Lorenz (1995), “is a standard term
for non-periodic behavior”. He adds, “In systems that are now called chaotic,
most initial states are followed by non periodic behavior, and only a special
few lead to periodicity” (p. 20). In complex or chaotic systems, there are
periods of inertia and periods of creativity. The same way, autonomy is a
chaotic process, and one can experiment periods of more or less independence
and control.
On reviewing the aspects of autonomy discussed so far,
one can easily recognize some features that are natural characteristics of a
complex or dynamic system, such as the idea of process in opposition to state,
instability,
variability, and adaptability. I dare say that autonomy is
essentially part of
Empirical Evidences for autonomy and
complexity
In order to find out how
students approach language learning, we have been collecting language learning
histories[3]
(LLHs). In our corpus, we find lots of evidence of autonomous learning even
when the learner is submitted to external control. See some examples[4]:
(1) My teacher always asked us to
translate the texts and also the vocabulary exercises at home. I must admit
that I acquired a certain knowledge about the language, as well as vocabulary
in those times, but I got to the conclusion that if I did not studied by myself
I would not learn so much. Since I always liked studying languages, especially
English, I used to have a different hobby: I used to read my bilingual
dictionary every time I could and also translate the lyrics of songs that I
liked in order to increase my vocabulary. I decided to watch films with
subtitles instead of seeing those dubbed ones. I confess that now I hate dubbed
films, whatever is the original language. I also used to listen to the songs in
order to get the pronunciation of some words, what did not work very well
because of the different pronunciation some words have in songs. I only took
English classes regarding conversation when I attended to English I classes in
2000
In (1), the leaner felt that the
school experience was not enough for him to acquire the language and developed
his own strategies. Although one can question the efficiency of reading a
bilingual dictionary, that student took control of his learning, planned what
to do and got used to listening to authentic language by watching movies
without subtitles. His autonomous behavior helped him become aware of some
features of spoken discourse, such as pronunciation variation.
Next
example shows an unusual experience.
(2)My first contact with English
happened in 1987, when I was eleven years old. It was an English course in my
neighborhood. Actually it was just an introductory course, really focused on
basic English. The classroom activities followed a traditional method, by using
non authentic materials, and teacher centered all the time. Then I went to high
school, where English classes are simply awful. Every year the same subjects
were taught to us, such as verb to be, negative forms, interrogative forms etc.
However, the sport I have been practicing from that period so far is full of
English words and expressions, what made me more interested in English. In fact
skateboard has been a ‘catapult’ to my English learning process. It is common
to meet native English speakers in skateboard contests, so I had to communicate
with them in order to comment the contest, or even about my turn in it, for
instance. This first steps where then, related to communicative learning
process, since real use of language was required in order to communicate.
Slangs and jargons were used all the time, and I did not know what exactly they
meant, but I could get their meaning through the context we were in. After
that, my interest have increased in many aspects of English, such as music, art
and sports, what is just the
continuity of the process that I began with when I was a child.
In this LLH, we can find a
prospective English language teacher. As so, he is able to use some academic
jargon in order to reflect upon his language learning history (LLH). We can see
the tension between the high school teacher’s concept of language, grammar
structure, and the leaner awareness that one learn a language by using it. His
chance to use the language was not planned, but a product of his desire to
communicate with his skate partners. If in (1) we have a student displaying a
certain degree of autonomy as a language learner, in (2), we have another
narrator highlighting his ability as an autonomous communicator, one who can
use effective strategies to successfully interact and develop his acquisition
process.
Autonomy is a property of a complex system,
in our case
The complex systems are also, dynamic, non-linear,
unpredictable, open, adaptative, self-organizing, fractal, and sensitive to initial conditions
and to feedback (Gleik,1987; Lewin,1992; Lorenz,1995).
A dynamic system continuously changes over time,
often as the result of feedback, and adapts
itself to the new environment, learning from its experience. The changes are non-linear
as the effect is not necessarily proportional to the cause. They are chaotic
because the system is apparently disordered, although there is an underlying
order in this apparent disorder. Nothing is determined or predicable. Just a small change in the initial
conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system.
Kirshbaum (2002) explains that
the unpredictability that is thus
inherent in the natural evolution of complex systems then can yield results
that are totally unpredictable based on knowledge of the original
conditions. Such unpredictable results are called emergent properties. Emergent
properties thus show how complex systems are inherently creative ones.
The systems are open
as new elements can enter or leave the system, and any element in the system
influences and is influenced by quite a few others. McGroarty (1998), for
example, acknowledges the constraints from the educational system in language
learning. According to him,
The objectives, goals, and activities
associated with language teaching [similarly] constrain opportunities to learn,
because they adhere to conventions arising from educational and institutional
history rather from the contemporary experience of learners and teachers (p.613).
My hypothesis is that,
in an educational context, those and other elements – learner;
teacher; institution; material; social and political contexts; technology – can
work either for or against autonomy.
I do not consider autonomy as a personal trait only. It may be an innate characteristic, but it can be also repressed or fostered by interior and exterior conditions. Let us examine each of those elements of the autonomy system.
The learner
As far as the learner is
concerned, the following factors might interfere positively or negatively in
one’s autonomy: personality; capacity, abilities; intelligences[5],
learning style; attitude; learning strategies, motivation; willingness to
learn; willingness to communicate; critical sense; culture; beliefs; age;
freedom; independence; language affiliation[6];
confidence; responsibility; and previous experiences. [7]
I am not going to
discuss all those factors, but just present some histories which exemplify
willingness to learn, a central component of autonomy, according to Littlewood
(1996), and metacognitive strategies, which I consider of paramount importance
to support learners’ autonomy.
In the following excerpt, we can see a good
example of an autonomous learner as far as willingness to learn is concerned.
(3)Before starting
studying English in the public school, I tried to learn English by myself at
the age of 10. I loved songs sang in English, but I had to find out what the
lyrics were telling me. Accordingly, I used a small dictionary several times
and made an effort to join the sentences with the purpose of comprehending
every song that I used to like. I also tried hard to copy the singer’s
pronunciation of words and that helped me on identifying the same words in
different songs.
I was in the 7th grade when I have my first formal English class. Although I was so excited about really studying English, I got somehow disappointed when I was told that the teacher would work just with grammar, reading and a little writing. Luckily, the teacher aimed to do more. She developed interesting projects, worked with pronunciation, used a lot of games, songs and videos. Her classes were nice, but something was missing for me. I did not want just to repeat words and sentences. I wanted to really speak English. The teacher used to ask us our opinion about a subject but comments were always in Portuguese. I wanted more.
I continued studying
by myself and at school, until I got a wonderful opportunity: I started working
as a receptionist in private language school. I could study for free as I was
an employee there. I took a three years course there and, in my opinion, it had
a lot to do with the communicative approach. Classes were very communicative
and student-centered; varied materials were applied; there was a lot of
interaction - we were usually encouraged to express our point of view and give
personal exemplification; (…)
The willingness to learn English
appeared at the age of 10 and she tried to study the language alone. She used
songs and experienced different cognitive strategies to try to understand the
messages of the songs. Her desire to speak English did not find response in the
school and the narrator compensated for that by being responsible for her own
learning ( a sign of the system adaptability) until she got the opportunity to
find a language school where she could develop her oral skills. It seems that
the need to study alone decreased as she found a learning environment which
matched her needs.
The next LLH extract is similar to the previous one, but the author makes it clear that he continued to be autonomous.
(4)[…]However, the next year. I
changed my position. Somehow that weird language started to get my attention
and I realized I had some facility to learn it. From this moment on, I entered
in an English course and had good results. Then I decided to studied at (name
of a language school is mentioned) and again I was successful. Actually, I
think that these courses were a tool for me to develop my skills, but a bit
part of my learning processes depended on me. I say it because I’ve always been
a very shy person and to afraid of speaking in public. Thus, I just could
improve my English, mainly my oral skills, by studying on my own, through
songs, movies and cartoons.
One can see that the narrator is
aware of his innate capacity to learn a language. Despite the negative
influence of his first experience when he could not follow his classmates, a
suddenly change in his attitude (“I changed my position”) and his consciousness
about his learning capacity urged him to find a better place to learn. Even
though, he went on control of his own learning. His shyness and the fear of
speaking in public made him look for alternative strategies to develop his oral
skills. This example can also illustrate
another feature of the chaos theory – the sensitive dependence on the initial
conditions. Lorenz (2001) redefines “a chaotic system as one that is
sensitively dependent on interior changes in the initial conditions[8]
(p.24)”.
In the last example, it is clear
that an inner change in the learner’s attitude made all the difference in his
learning process. Fear and shyness were overcome by his motivation, willingness
to learn, attitude, beliefs and own objectives which could not be achieved
during junior high school. His changing position replaced his old learning
system for a more autonomous one.
The
next two excerpts show us that, even when the narrators acknowledge the
efficiency of formal experience, some of them still perform some autonomous
acts.
(5)In 1998 I began to
study in an English course. The course helped improve my accuracy but didn’t
teach me communicative competencies. The material has emphasized grammar
exercises and didn’t had much about formal and informal language, oral and
written English and cultural context. It was up to the teacher: some of them
have explained while another just have followed the book.
I have my own
methodologies as listen to a lot of music in English, watch movies and TV in
English. At University I discovered a great way to learn: reading. Literature
makes me think about English. Also it helps me to improve vocabulary and to
learn the language use.
The learner in the (5),
had the capacity to evaluate the course, his needs and could find out the best
way to learn the language. He also had the insight that reading literary texts
could be a good way to improve vocabulary and to learn more about language use.
(6)I think that the structural
method was quite good for me because I had the common sense and autonomy to
look for other resources outside the classroom, not depending on my teacher to
teach me everything I was supposed to know.
Example (6) was chosen
so as to show how some students are consciously autonomous. In (6), the learner
is aware of the limitations of his teacher’s methodology, although she
recognizes its positive features. She evaluates her needs (metacognitive
strategy) and assumes she is the one responsible for her own learning and that
she cannot depend only on the teacher. She knows she can also look for
resources, use her own strategies and build up her own agenda for her learning
process.
Finally, we have an
example of a highly autonomous learner, both as a communicator and as a
learner. After his high school, he decided to go on learning by his own.
(7)(…) In 1989, however (yes, folks,
I am almost as old as a dinosaur, but I still do not bite, ok?!), I started
learning English by myself, reading the magazine “Speak Up”, attending a
distance short term course and exchanging letters with people from different
countries. The problem was that I only practiced reading and writing; no
listening, no talking at all, and such a procedure brought me some problems,
some limitations, later on, when I decided to attend a “normal” course at a
private English school.
This
LLH demonstrates that being autonomous is not only a matter of being
responsible for one’s learning because, depending on the context, it is not
easy to find opportunities to develop oral skills. The students long for “communities of practice”, which Murphey, Jin
and Li-Chin (2005) call ‘imagined communities’ and define as communities
to which students belong or aspire to belong in the future. The absence of the desired communities of
practice is one of the reasons for the learner in (7) to enroll in a private
language school.
The teacher
The teacher may play an
important role on the learner’s autonomy development as they are in powerful
positions to help create such imagined communities and to stimulate or stifle
them (Murphey, Jin and Li-Chin, 2005).
The teacher might be qualified or
non-qualified; authoritative; supportive; an advisor; a knower; a researcher; a
facilitator; a consultant; a personal tutor; a helper; a counselor; a controller; a coach; a negotiator; and in
FL contexts, a good or not-so-good language model as, many times, the teacher
is the only FL speaker the learner has contact with.
In our corpus of 80 LLHs,
when teachers are mentioned, most narrators just describe what the teachers did
in the classroom. There are few praises and much criticism. As all the
narrators are prospective teachers and have already studied Applied
Linguistics, they are aware of the new trends in language teaching and usually
complain that they have undergone teacher-centered experiences, as one can see
in the following example:
(8)My first contact with the English
language was at year seven here in
There are also the ones who observe
that their teachers do not show any autonomy and remain over-reliant on the
textbook.
(9)In high school I had a teacher
called Beth, who did not do anything else but follow the book by the rules,
which was reading the text, and memorizing some specific words for the
quiz.
It is not uncommon to find
complaints about the teachers’ attitudes in comparison to more rewarding
experiences. In the following example, the student talks about one who did not
share the stage with the students and others who empowered the students with
tasks to develop their communicative skills.
(10)She was kind of rude with us and
she thought that she was the best, that she never commited a mistake; she was
the center of the class. She did not motivate us and her activities were mainly
to study grammar points.
(…) The teachers were
great and they tried to motivate us as much as possible. The teachers taught us
to interpret the social meaning of the choice of linguistic varieties and to
use language with the appropriate social meaning for the different
communication situations. They also used to teach us to understand some aspects
of a culture ( people´s beliefs and values) and the main purpose of their
classes was to give us the competence to be able to communicate effectively in
English and not the only purpose to have a grammatical competence.
The good teacher in these students’
opinions seems to be the one who helps them develop their autonomy as
communicators. This idea is repeated in the following excerpt:
(11)(…) when i was in high school, i
had good classes of english...
the teachers used to incentivate the students to speak and communicate
(specially by doing pair work activities).
Teachers can inhibit students’
attempt to speak or make the students feel comfortable as described in (12).
(12)My teachers used
to correct me when I made my mistakes of pronunciation when I read a text; thus
I didn’t want to speak in the classes.
My teacher used to
lend me extra books for reading just by pleasure and I practiced a lot of my
English talking to myself, but I could not talk to somebody else, because I was
always afraid of make mistakes in pronunciation and very insecure.
At the university,
things changed completely. The professor explained us that we also had to
collect materials, practice lot of listening activities besides the ones we had
to practice in class. The interaction in class motivated me and most of the
students to talk a lot and the more we used to speak, the more we learned in
terms of vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, etc. She also advised us to leave
grammar activities to do at home and bring doubts to class.
One
can conclude that teachers may influence the student’s development of autonomy,
but even when they do not play the expected roles, an inner chaos might urge
the students to take decisions to increase their learning processes.
The input
Several questions arise when one
thinks of the importance of input for autonomous learning. What kind of input
is available for learners? Are there good textbooks? What are the other kinds
of material available? Are students exposed to authentic communicative
situations? Is there a self-access center and what does it offer to the
learner?
When
self-access centers emerged, it seemed that the ideal conditions for autonomy
had been achieved. As Sheerin (1997, p. 55) reminds us, “[o]ne of the main
reasons for setting-up self-access facilities is to cater for learners’
individual needs. Individual learners have particular weaknesses which they may
wish to work on alone or in small groups with similar needs.” Nevertheless, as
pointed out by Kelly (1996, p.93-94),
“Creating a self-access center does
not in itself enable learners to become self-directed. Learners need to undergo
a considerable transformation of their beliefs about language and their role as
learners to be able to undertake independent learning effectively.”
In our LLHs there is no
mention to self-access centers as most of the Brazilian schools do not have
one. Nevertheless, students do refer to input sources other than the textbook,
as we can see in (13):
(13)I remember reading many things
in English: from shampoos labels to whole books. I have over twenty relatives
living in the
Textbooks are
continuously mentioned in many LLHS as something students liked or disliked,
but there is no reference to material that challenges them to make choices, an
essential condition for autonomy. A textbook, such as the ones described in the
narrative below, does not seem to contribute to one’s autonomy.
(14)The educational books demanded
accuracy in the answers and I didn’t have any context situations. The
activities were always very repetitive.
Nevertheless, students also say
favorable things about their textbooks and mention reading other books. See the
following excerpt:
(15)The book we used was completely
based on audiolingualism approach, but I can say that it increased more
vocabulary, my knowledge in grammar; moreover, my reading and writing abilities
developed since I had to write and interpret a lot of texts. (…) My teacher used to lend me extra books
for reading just by pleasure and I practiced a lot of my English talking to
myself, but I could not talk to somebody else, because I was always afraid of
make mistakes in pronunciation and very insecure.
If, on one hand, books do not attend
the students’ needs, on the other hand, privileged students can be in contact
with authentic language through Cable TV, the Internet, movies and songs. As
they do not have interaction with an English speaking community, they attempt
do compensate that by means of mass media. Almost all the narrators report that
they look for the language in use by listening to songs, watching movies,
reading magazines.
The context
The context may foster
autonomy or hinder it. There are macro and micro contexts ranging from the
political and economical macro social contexts to the micro social and
educational ones such as the school, the classroom, including the teacher and
the classmates.
Many questions might be
asked. In which country is the language being learned? What are the political
relationship among this country and the English speaking ones? Do learners have
access to English speakers with whom to interact? Can they easily travel to
foreign countries to practice the language? Is there any political or
economical dependence relationship? Are there hard feelings or prejudice
against the English speaking people? Are books and other materials easily
imported? Does everyone have access to foreign language learning independent of
their social class? Are there any similarities between the native and the
foreign languages?
Let us see two examples
of how political and economical context can present obstacles to autonomy. Non
democratic governments can reduce opportunities for learners to be in touch
with other English speaking cultures. In
Some institutional
context features which might interfere in the learning process are: the
pedagogical project, the size of the classes, financial support for updating
materials and equipments, and investment in teachers’ continuing education.
In
In one of the LLHs, the
student says she had studied at three different language schools, and we can
see in the selected excerpts that only one seemed to have met her communicative
needs.
(16)(…) I had a lot of Communication
practice and I must say it was where I most learned, because I was supposed to
talk all the time and it was not random talk: it involved a lot of real life
situations, picture analysis, picture comparison, role-plays, focus on
communication.
(…) Teachers spoke all the time,
there were no new activities and almost all the classes concerned with grammar.
It seems that they were afraid of doing something more daring, something new,
because they were traditional and had a good number of enrolled students.
(…) I didn’t really studied English
there, I studied how to take the test, although I learned countless vocabulary.
The
schools can foster learners’ autonomy by offering them resource centers, good
libraries, and computer assisted language activities. The philosophical and
educational principles which underlie the school pedagogic project may either
leave space for autonomy or posit obstacles for more autonomous learners as we
can see in (17).
(17)My trajectory into English
territory started many years ago while I was following 7th grade class at a
public school. The class was full, about 50 students in it. Because of
militarism ideology or another stupid reason the boys and girls were separated
in different classrooms and even corridors. So it is easy to imagine a large
group of boys in plenty energy confined to a small room and even worse,
restricted to a small and uncomfortable desk. Despite talking a lot, receiving
hard punishment for small things and having no rights we had no voice to
complain or say nothing against anything. We had to accept the rules as they
were.
In
(18)I have NEVER had formal
instructions in English before enter the college. I studied in a school where
English was taught from “7ª série” on. But it was a public school and there was
NO available English teachers at the time. The school staff kept telling us:
“We are going to find you an English teacher, but while this does not happen,
you are going to have “religion” classes to replace the English ones”. I heard
that discourse the “7ª, 8ª séries”. When I started high school I thought this
problem would be solved. But it was not. Hence I had no formal instructions
before the college. When I decided to try “vestibular” I borrow one set of
books and tapes (from CURSOS DE IDIOMAS GLOBO - CIG) and I studied by myself.
The English test in “vestibular” for me was EXTREMELY hard. The things I got
from CIG was not enough to cover the kind of test required in “vestibular”.
Well, but I passed vestibular and enter the college. It was in 1999.
The student in (18) belongs to poor
social layer. He attended a high school which substituted the English classes
for religious ones probably because there was no English teacher available. Our
narrator borrowed some material and managed to learn enough to pass the
university entrance examination.
Poor people usually do
not travel and have no contact with foreigners[9].
The Internet is still not available in all public schools and underprivileged
students cannot afford a personal computer linked to the Internet. In spite of
all those obstacles, there is no reason to deny the students’ right to learn a
foreign language because nobody can foresee each student’s future.
On
the other hand, some initial conditions made all the difference for some
learners as we can see in (19). The student’s mother was herself an English
teacher and our narrator had the chance to get in touch with the language since
she was a young child. Her environment not only offered her someone who spoke
the language, but also a lot of material, opportunity to travel, and enrollment
in an English course for children.
(19) My English learning experience
is quite different since I started having contact with the language when I was
very young, something like two/ three years old, that is because my mother is
an English teacher, so she started teaching me songs, poems, verses, prayers,
etc, in English. It was so exciting! I felt like me and my mother had this secret
code language that only us could speak. For sure this early learning had a
great role in my future motivation to learn more and more about that “code”. My
house was always full of English books and English materials in general, so
when I was around 7, I started reading books and “teaching myself” with a
didactic book called “Steps”.
I joined an English school
when I was 9 years old, it was called “ New Way”, and it had a fantastic
environment, teacher were very well trained and we had a total emphasis in
communication, both oral and written, I studied there till I was 18. This
studies were essential to give me a communicative competence, specially the
functional and sociolinguistic ones, since they made me aware of the language
and its structure. When I was 11 I went to a trip in U.S, it was a great deal
for me as I could see that I was really able to communicate with natives. I
still remember how excited I was because I could ask for a map in
The next narrator had
the chance to interact with Americans and Brazilians who speak English.
(20)I´ve never been in a classroom
to learn English but I had hundreds of teachers. Virtually every American or
Brazilian who knew more than me and with whom I came into contact was my
teacher. I asked questions all the time and had a bilingual dictionary in my
jacket pocket at all times. I also kept a list of words which I had difficulty
remembering so that I wouldn´t have to look them up again. My exposure to the
language was pretty much the way Communicative Approach teachers try to expose
students in the classroom: natural settings, real situations and everyday
language and seldom using translation (especially after moving to
As we could see, the context is also
complex and dynamic and continuously changes over time. Different students
react differently to the context constraints and adapt themselves looking for
alternatives to supply what school has denied them.
Discussion
I would like to return to my initial quotation “We should not only
use the brains we have, but all that we can borrow”. In this sense, I think that
the desired autonomy in language learning ideal contexts should be regarded as
distributed autonomy, that is, learners and their willingness for autonomy,
sharing their achievements with other learners and borrowing theirs; teachers
who are themselves autonomous and who offer the learners some choices
concerning the learning activities and who accept their rights to question
and to suggest changes in the route of
the course; schools which are flexible enough to accept innovative experiences
and which allow teachers and learners to be the authors of the educational
process; technology which provides artifacts for teachers and learners to
exercise their autonomy as persons, learners, communicators, and technology
users; and, finally, a fair social, political and economical system which gives
every learner good learning opportunities and every teacher good teaching
conditions.
No learner is
omnipotent. Learners have their autonomy limited by several constraints as
discussed in this paper. In formal contexts, autonomy cannot be seen as
individualization, but as a possibility of sharing potentialities, as
distributed autonomy. Teachers’ role would include tolerance to avoid conflict
with more autonomous learners, stimulating them to share their knowledge with their
classmates.
Teachers who recognize their
students’ autonomy must be prepared for a different kind of learning
environment – less hierarchical, with more distributed power and more
distributed autonomy – where the most creative students are the strange
attractors which yield a balance between centralized management and distributed
autonomy.
As Benson and Voller (1997) put it,
autonomous modes of learning imply a re-evaluation of the roles of both learner and teacher, the relationship between them, and the relationship of both to institutions of learning. These roles and relationships can be complex and are not reducible to simple expectations of behaviour or distribution of power (p.93).
The use of the Internet
has brought a new dynamic and decentralized learning context. The advancement
of information technology has created worlds of distributed intelligence where
students are interconnected with other students with different degrees of
autonomy and all of them have access to countless resources.
In
our corpus, we could find evidence for autonomy as a complex system. There are
periods of inertia and periods of creativity. Learning and autonomy are not
linear processes and learners exhibit different degrees of independence. The
dynamicity of the learning process and the interference of different aspects of
the system bring chaos and changes happen as the result of feedback from the
macro and micro contexts.
Finally, I would like to
go back to some aspects of autonomy discussed in this paper and make a synthesis
of our findings.
We have no evidence to
say that autonomy is an innate capacity, although we cannot deny that it may
exist. On the other hand, we have enough examples of autonomy as the result of
adaptability to different situations, that is, as a learned capacity. In most LLHs,
we could easily see that self-confidence and motivation gave the students the
necessary affective support for them to choose their own learning strategies.
It was also clear that the autonomy degrees vary and that some students are
more willing than others to take responsibility for their own learning. It is
also clear that autonomy depends on internal changes and external conditions.
Internal changes, which can be named as the edge of chaos, can give birth to
autonomy and external conditions, either favorable or unfavorable, can also
lead the student to a more autonomous behavior mainly when the students are
highly willing to take control of their own learning.
One aspect which called
my attention throughout the LLHs was the awareness of what learning a language
is shared by most of the students. For them, learning a language is using the
language. It was a recurrent feeling that some teachers were not providing
enough authentic input and also that they needed real situations to use the
language. In the absence of a community of, most of the narrators reported that
they had appealed to mass media – movies, songs, videos – and, in less extent,
to interaction through the Internet. This capacity of evaluating their learning
process and the decisions students took were evidence of the importance of
metacognitive strategies for autonomous learners.
It became also clear
that autonomy is not a matter of individualization as social dimensions of
learning were also implicit in many LLHs. Students reported the help of
relatives and classmates, traveling experiences, and the importance of the
cultural production imported from English speaking countries. Teachers are also
mentioned as catalysts for autonomy and it happens in two opposite situations.
Teachers motivate students to be autonomous by lending material, suggesting
strategies, advising, giving choices, etc. Paradoxically, teachers are also
catalysts of autonomy when they are not able to fulfill students’ expectations.
Some of our narrators took charge of their learning process because they did
not want to be limited to grammar and translation.
Conclusion
We can conclude that
autonomy does involve a change in power relationship and that autonomy must be
considered in terms of psychological, technical, social and political
dimensions. Our corpus presented many different experiences, showing that
teachers do not have control over their students. Some students reveal they are
able to make decisions and guide their own learning process. The learners also
report circumstances where they had suffered social, economical and political
constraints, although some of them were able to overcome these obstacles.
As Waldrop (1992) puts it,
(…) these complex, self-organizing
systems are adaptative, in that they don’t just passively respond to events the
way a rock might roll around in an earthquake. They actively try to turn
whatever happens to their advantage. Thus, the human brain constantly organizes
and reorganizes its billions of neural connections so as to learn from
experience (sometimes, anyway). (p.12)
The LLHs reveal how the
narrators adapted themselves to different situations. Unfortunately they did
not realize that they had the right to demand more of the schools and accepted
curricula which did not match their needs.
The learners do not
perceive the school as a right, but as an uncontestable authoritarian entity.
Fortunately, some learners undergo the disorder of chaos and look for
experiences which bridge the gap imposed by formal education. Instead of
passively accepting the limited curricula offered by schools, they develop
their own strategies, they exercise their autonomy and become authors of their
own LLHs.
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[1] I am thankful to Adail Rodrigues
Junior, Flávia Azeredo and Júnia Braga for their qualified comments and also to
the undergraduate students (Elisa, Fernanda, Lindiane and Lucas), members of my
research group, who were the first readers of this paper.
[2]Although part 2.1
of his paper is named Complexity theory and autonomy, he
does not refer to the theory to discuss what autonomy is.
[3] The corpus is published on the web
in our project homepage: http://www.veramenezes.com/amfale.htm
[4] The LLHs are reproduced without any
editing.
[5] The term “intelligences” is used in
the plural, taking into account
[6] By language affiliation, I mean the
feelings the language awakens in the learner. The learner may love or hate the
language and feel positive or negative feelings. They may also look at the
language and people who speak it through stereotypical lenses.
[7]
I am aware that there are many other factors, even ones we cannot think
of due to the nature of the complex systems.
[8] Initial conditions, according to
Lorenz (2001: 9) “need not be the ones that existed when a system was created.
Often they are the conditions at the beginning of an experiment or a
computation, but they may also be the ones at the beginning of any stretch of
time that interests an investigator, so that one person’s initial conditions
may be another’s midstream or final conditions.”
[9] It is worth mentioning that some
poor Brazilians go to the United States to work as maids, drivers, waiters,
etc, and that a few of them become English Teachers when they come back. The
same happens with privileged young people who have the opportunity to stay
abroad in exchange programs.