- •Acknowledgements
- •1. Introduction
- •2. Theoretical Background I.
- •2.1 Reasons for promoting autonomy
- •2.2 Attempts to define autonomy
- •2.2.1 An overview of definitions in the literature
- •2.2.2 Conflicting and complementing concepts
- •2.3 Attempts to describe an autonomous learner
- •2.4 A working definition of autonomy
- •2.5 A working description of an autonomous learner
- •2.6 A practical approach to learner autonomy
- •3. Theoretical Background II. Aspects of autonomous learning – an overview of theory and research
- •3.1 Theories of motivation
- •3.1.1 Integrative-instrumental and intrinsic-extrinsic theories of motivation.
- •3.1.2 Attribution theory
- •3.1.3 Relating motivation to success
- •3.1.4 Motivation and autonomy
- •3.2 The theory of personal constructs
- •3.3 Modern communicative approaches and the issue of learner/teacher roles
- •3.4 Research into learning strategies
- •3.5 Research into learner beliefs, preferences and attitudes
- •3.6 "Measuring autonomy" – and overview of research to date
- •3.7 Summary
- •4. Research
- •4.1 Research background
- •4.2 Aims of the research and research questions
- •4.3 Methods, materials, participants
- •4.3.1 Participants in the project
- •4.3.2 Methods
- •4.3.3 Anticipated problems
- •4.3.4 The structure of the interview
- •4.4 Data analysis and interpretation
- •4.4.1 Factors explored in the study
- •4.4.2 Factors revealed by the study
- •4.4.3 Reactions to a more autonomous learning environment
- •4.5 Discussion
- •4.6 Conclusion
- •5. Ideas for further research and Epilogue
- •5.1 Ideas for further research
- •5.2 Epilogue
- •6. References:
- •7. Appendix – a transcription of the interviews
4.6 Conclusion
Our research worked towards three major aims – to elicit the learners' perceptions of the Masaryk University Internationalization Project, to determine whether learner autonomy plays a major role in their attitudes to learning, and to find out whether their perceptions of learner autonomy challenge our view of the concept in any way, problematizing any further research and/or aiming it in different directions. We used a standardized interview that included a number of open and general questions, so that the students had a chance to express their views without being directly prompted. The interview focused on nine major factors that were perceived both as relevant to the issue of autonomy and suitable for this type of research – learner confidence, attributing success or failure to a variety of factors, learner/teacher roles, lesson/curriculum planning (i.e. active involvement in the learning process), managing anxiety, motivation, finding opportunities for independent work, external feedback and translation (in the context of beliefs about the learning process). In addition, our research yielded another factor – the issue of age in language learning.
Given the necessarily open-ended nature of our research project, the results are uniquely promising. We have analyzed the students' feedback on the Internationalization Project and found out that most of them displayed positive shifts in attitude towards independent learning. This provides an optimistic complement to Smíšková's (2005) study; also, it supports our general optimism about the task of guiding students towards greater autonomy.
With little prompt, the learners addressed almost exclusively issues linked with learner autonomy in their answers; this was especially true of the open questions about teacher/learner roles, or the questions eliciting feedback on the course (Items 4, 5, 8, 9). This gives support to the idea that autonomy plays a major role in the students' perceptions of their own learning.
The analysis of the students' responses provided valuable insights into a number of issues related to learner autonomy. A summary of our findings is provided in the preceding chapter; however, the general conclusion to be made is that learners' beliefs and attitudes are increasingly complex, and that tools that attempt to 'measure' learners' readiness for autonomy, such as Cotterall's (1995; 1999) studies or Oxford's (1989) SILL, are highly problematic and should be revised or discarded for their lack of reliability. This, however, does not mean that similar studies need to be abandoned. At the end of each section in the preceding chapter, we provided a number of questionnaire items that stemmed from our analysis, sometimes directly reflecting the students' responses. In any further attempts to undertake a quantitative analysis of learners' readiness for autonomy, these items may serve as reliable tools.
However, we hope that the scope and complexity of our findings showed the importance of qualitative research in the realm of learner autonomy. It is only there that we seem to be able to obtain reliable, authentic data on what learners truly think and what their personal constructs are, thus merging applied linguistics and reality.