Learners Talking: Implications for Teacher-Led Autonomy
Sara Cotterall and David Crabbe
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

To understand the relationship between teacher and learner autonomy, we propose that three steps should be taken. The first is to understand better the kind of goals and constraints with which learners operate in particular teaching-learning contexts and the consequent strategic behaviour they adopt. The second step is to evaluate the apparent effectiveness of the goals and strategic behaviour in those contexts. The third step is to re-examine the role of the teacher in managing the learning opportunities for the learner in the light of the information gathered. The outcome of these three steps should be an understanding that provides a better empirical basis for clarifying and potentially changing teacher and learner roles in context.

This contribution to the symposium will draw on learner interview data relating to the first of these steps and show how they might be used by teachers to better understand the constraints on autonomy.

Stimulating Autonomy in the Foreign Language Classroom: Convincing the Teachers
Vera Santos
Centro Universitário Franciscano, Santa Maria, Brazil

This paper reports on three-year research which started in 1999 and is scheduled to present its results in 2002. Its purposes are two-fold: (1) to investigate the real reasons why teachers are so reluctant to introduce autonomous behavior in the classroom, and (2) to suggest ways by which autonomous teaching and learning are stimulated. Four universities (two public and two private), four university teachers, eight school teachers and sixteen student-teachers are taking part in the research. The results have demonstrated that internal aspects, such as submission to peer opinion, are more relevant to explain the resistance to the new behavior than external factors like limits imposed by the Ministry of Education. It was also found that the university teachers and the (student-teachers) future teachers are more prompt to accept the idea of developing students’ autonomy than the school teachers. Implications so far have pointed to some aspects like negotiating and discussing with the three groups with an emphasis on the relationship between autonomy and learning for the school teachers.

Please Note: This paper will not be presented at the Symposium.