Learner Autonomy

Abeer, Daniah, Jung-min, Randah, Sally
Secretary:Abeer

As a group we do agree that the teacher can play a very important role in helping students to be more autonomous. We can consider the teacher as the facilitator of the process of learning and the guider for the student in terms of helping them to find their own way in learning and choose what serves their interests and targets. In fact, it is recommended for the teacher to raise learners’ awareness of their learning techniques, for example, teachers can provide their students with a form of questionnaire, given to them at the early beginning of the course, which is designed to help them to be aware of their learning strategies and the effective factors in language learning. In addition, we as teachers can raise learners’ awareness of self-assessment and its techniques. There are other techniques any teacher can choose from in order to help the learner to be more autonomous. We believe that the teacher can be more creative in providing the students with what can make them more independent and self-reliant.

After the discussion with my colleagues about their teaching methodologies and to what extent their students are autonomous, we found that we all agree that the teachers are engaged in learner training and their job is to draw students’ attention on how to learn rather than on what to learn. However, when speaking about our countries: (Britain, Korea, Libya, Saudi Arabia), we have to mention that we still do not have the total freedom to choose or to design our own syllabus or text book, even though we still have the responsibility of teaching our students how to be autonomous and provide them with the alternatives from which they can make their own choices.