Abstract
This chapter gives an overview of learner autonomy and its proliferation in the 21st century and a historical account of related major developments and contextual antecedents for autonomous learning pedagogy. It also synthesises definitions of learner autonomy from different perspectives, exploring various conditions and factors that influence the development of learner autonomy.
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Notes
- 1.
Benson (2006) lists some major recent publications on autonomy in language education. These include published reports on collaborative projects, journal special issues, collections from conferences, collections of commissioned papers, short summary articles in encyclopedias and handbooks, short summary articles on the web, online entries on learner autonomy, guides for teachers and learners, chapters on autonomy in general guides to language teaching, and papers on autonomy appearing in collections covering topics not directly related to autonomy, including affect.
- 2.
Translation from French: Pedagogic Mixtures.
- 3.
Henri Holec is the former Director of Le Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues (CRAPEL) at the University of Nancy, France. He is a prominent educationalist and education theorist whose works on Learner Autonomy are of great influence.
- 4.
Though beyond the scope of the book, it is worth-mentioning that these relate to the ‘de-schooling’ movement of the era.
- 5.
Self-direction, self-control, self-enhancement, self-investment and self-management are used in the literature to refer to a form of learning done, designed, controlled, managed and evaluated by the learner.
- 6.
I would add the communist ideology as a major political phenomenon of the 20th century.
- 7.
See Hofstede (1991) and Triandis (1995).
- 8.
This is the view of the British Labour government expressed by Tony Blair in 1998.
- 9.
See Holec (1994), Holec et al. (1996), Holec and Huttunen (1997).
- 10.
See: Kolb’s (1999) Learning Style Inventory (LSI); Cognitive Style Analysis (CSA) and Allinson and Hayes’s (1988) Cognitive Style Index (CSI).
- 11.
Meta-learning is a term that refers to learners’ exercise of reflection on their own learning and indicates their self-awareness.
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Blidi, S. (2017). Learner Autonomy—An Overview. In: Collaborative Learner Autonomy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2048-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2048-3_1
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