Maintaining Control: Autonomy and Language Learning

3. Crash or clash? Autonomy 10 years on

Crash or clash? Autonomy 10 years on 27 Introduction In the first part of this chapter, I show how the notion of autonomy has spread into language pedagogy in the past 10 years and how this mainstreaming has been accompanied by conceptual distortions and discursive dissonances. Such dissonances can be located in the contradictions between the discourses of individual personal autonomy and of critical socially situated autonomy. I argue that we are at a crossroads and that if we take the notion of social learning seriously, opting for the road of individual personal autonomy is not sufficient. We need to take a whole-community approach to autonomy and reassert the critical dimension originally associated with autonomy and foreign language learning. This redirection will help us engage in a new research agenda in the years to come. The notion of autonomy over the last 10 years A period of dissemination Over the past 10 years, interest in the concept of autonomy in relation to language learning and language teaching has developed in many directions and at many levels. At the conceptual level, one could argue that the publication of the Council of Europe’s Framework in 2001 reflects the impact of Henri Holec’s Autonomy and Foreign Language 3 Crash or clash? Autonomy 10 years on Edith Esch 28 Edith Esch Learning published by the Council in 1979 (Holec 1979, 1981). As David Little rightly reminds us, Holec explicitly linked the concept of autonomy to the Council’s work on adult education (Janne 1977) which “emphasised the importance of equipping adult learners with the knowledge and confidence to participate in the democratic process” (Little 2004: 70). It is difficult to assess whether the educational aims of the Council have been achieved, but when it comes to language learning, the size of the impact can be observed at the level of practice. The last decade can be characterised as a period of dissemination of the idea that autonomy is more than a commodity and that it needs fostering and developing as advocated by Trim (1977). While the pedagogical principle per se can be pursued in many language learning and teaching environments, efforts to implement it have been particularly notable in university Language Centres, not only throughout Europe and in former Commonwealth countries but also in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan and South America — in short, wherever the need to harness new technologies has imposed a complete reassessment of language learning and teaching practices. Innovations associated with particular individuals or institutions 20 years ago — such as the Language Learning Advisory Service of the Cambridge Language Centre (Harding-Esch & Tealby 1981; Harding-Esch 1982; Esch 1994) — have now become mainstream throughout the educational sector. Moreover, in Europe, dissemination has frequently been based on government-funded evidence-based research or action research so that, in parallel, a process of validation has taken place at the policy level. Let me illustrate briefly the way in which the process of mainstreaming has interacted with trends in research and influenced the way we conceptualise the pedagogical relation. In using the term ‘pedagogical relation’, I refer to Yves Chalon’s (1970) characterisation of the relationship between teacher and learner (‘enseignant’ and ‘apprenant’ in French), where both words denote active participants, in opposition to ‘teacher’ and ‘taught’ (‘enseignant’ and ‘enseigné’), where the word enseigné refers to a passive recipient. Let us start with ‘the learner’. This construct from the late 1960s became popular when developments in second language acquisition made applied linguists switch focus from the process of language teaching to that of language learning. The 1973 collection of edited papers Focus on the Learner: Pragmatic perspectives for the language teacher by John Oller and Jack Richards is a typical example of that turning point (Oller & Richards Crash or clash? Autonomy 10 years on 29 1973). The disembodied character of the learner became the object of much research activity in the innatist and/or cognitivist tradition, and as the term became increasingly popular, use of the terms ‘pupils’ and ‘students’, which both reflect a socially dependent and responsible role in the pedagogical relation, declined. In the past 10 years, ‘the learner’ has undergone a process of resocialisation as sociocultural theories have regained currency (Lantolf 1994, 2000). During this time, the abstract and idealised construct has been literally fleshed out as researchers have increasingly acknowledged the role of the social and cultural context in the learning process. The motivations...