Teaching: Encouraging learner autonomy

I've not posted for quite some time and thought I'd use a rewarding lesson experience yesterday evening as an opportunity to make my first post in 2010.

The activity

This was the last business English lesson of the current term for a group of business administration students, and as their next lesson won't be until March I asked the students to think of an action plan containing at least three ideas for things they can do to maintain their level of English during the interim. The ideas developed during the feedback session after the students had had time to think are not particularly new or ground breaking in themselves, but they do illustrate rather nicely I think how some relatively simple to use tools can be used to enhance learning and encourage learner autonomy.

As students described their plans I organized them into a chain and told them that they would be emailing each other in exactly a month's time to ask for a progress report on their plans and then replying with a report on how they were getting on with each of their three ideas (see below). To make sure that they did not feel totally abandoned or that I'd reneged entirely on my responsibilities as a teacher, I asked them to copy me in when they wrote to each other.

Students' ideas

Here below are five of the ideas the students agreed they will be working on as part of their action plans followed in each case with a brief account of the kind of report the students will provide in a month's time.

1) Reading for fun

When confronted with this kind of question students often vaguely suggest watching films and reading. A little unusually, the student who proposed this actually had four specific books in mind that she was planning to read, and still more interestingly she had a quite well defined notion of what she wanted to get out of this other than, of course, the pleasure of reading, i.e. being more active in noting how "English is used" and expanding her repertoire of language accordingly. We discussed the issue of using context to work out the meaning of unfamiliar words and expressions and the use of a dictionary where necessary to double check that her hunches had been correct.

As part of the report to her fellow student in a month's time she is going to add a list of the most interesting vocabulary she had made a note of, as well as a run down on the books read.

2) Flashcards

All three students had the idea of using flashcards to help with vocabulary expansion. So, for example, one student is going to review units worked on in the course book (Intelligent Business) and produce a set of cards for each unit using the online tool Quizlet. The wiki I have for the group has a tutorial showing how to login and use Quizlet, and as this student is a keen Blackberry user I suggested she download an application called Touchcards which would allow her to load a simplified version of the sets she produces in Quizlet to her smartphone. (The application works fine on my iPhone and it states that it's available for Blackberry too.)

In reporting back to her partner the student is going to provide links to the vocabulary sets produced in Quizlet, which of course should be a great help to the group as a whole when we pool all the resources in the group wiki once we get back together next term.

3) Online business magazines

Taking a closer look at business magazines was another idea that more than one student suggested and after discussing a number of publications that have online editions - The Economist, FT.com, Fast Company - one student decided to try out BusinessWeek as this is particularly rich in media - slideshows, audio and video - as well as the wide-ranging articles on business and economics it offers. Another student suggested that she combine this reading with the use of the Phase 6 educational software that produces vocabulary flashcards and has a system for automatically repeating the words until they are learnt. As this program costs around €30 to download the student agreed to download the demo version, use it with the new vocabulary from the her trial run with BusinessWeek.

In a month's time she will tell her partner how  the experiment went and provide a first-hand report for the rest of the group both on the online magazine and the new vocabulary building tool.

Another student was already familiar with BusinessWeek and his goal is to provide a list of links to articles he had found of particular interest in the magazine and add a short review for each one. 

The same student was very interested to hear that BusinessWeek also have a particularly good podcast and this led to a discussion about the usefulness of podcasts in their language learning and among those mentioned were:

• Peter Day's World of Business
• INSEAD Knowledgecasts
• London School of Economics Podcasts
• The Economist

Part of this student's report will be on which of these podcasts he subscribed to and found interesting enough to listen to regularly.

4) Videos on YouTube

One student expressed an interest in exploring YouTube more to find business related videos to watch. He had already found the Harvard Business Publishing channel in YouTube and was pleasantly surprised to learn that there was now YouTube EDU where many of the world's leading universities have channels. To make this viewing a little more active in terms of language learning the student will be producing sets of flashcards, again using Quizlet, relating to specific videos, and to add a little variety I suggested producing word search puzzles using armoredpenguin.com instead of the Quizlet sets from time to time

In reporting back on this idea to his partner in a month's time the student will provide links to the videos of greatest interest and to the related sets in Quizlet and word search puzzles that he has produced.

5) Written Assignments

One student will be writing one or two assignments in English for his MBA course. My suggestion here was to provide him with some links to online tutorials on academic writing and that he could explore these and make a note of sections that he used, or that he thought of particular interest.

When reporting back on this idea he will provide a review of the sites indicating specific areas that were of practical use to him in preparing his term papers.

The sites provided are:

• Skills4Study
  
• The OWL at Purdue
  
• UEfAP
• The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• University of New South Wales

Thoughts

It'll be interesting to see what these well laid plans come to in a month's time. What was encouraging was the readiness with which the students accepted the idea and the enthusiasm shown in developing the action plans. The fact that my involvement in the discussions was kept to minimum also boded well for the success of this little experiment. As mentioned above, the ideas themselves are not revolutionary, but coupling them with the use of emailing provides peer support and motivation that increase the chances of success, and the use of one or two simple online resources and tools add variety and interest and ensures that the students have achievable goals in producing tangible products - flashcard sets, puzzles, a body of reviewed articles, podcasts, videos and websites - that will be of interest and benefit to the group as a whole. In the longer term, the students will have acquired, hopefully, one or two skills and a little of the mindset that will help them be more self-directed and self-motivated language learners.

Any additional ideas, comments, further suggestions, questions or indeed criticisms you may have would be much appreciated.