Phil Benson – Autonomy Lecture at TUJ

Reading Time: 4 minutes

I attended the lecture given by Professor Phil Benson as part of the Temple University Japan Distinguished Lecture series. Previously I have attended a talk by Ema Ushioda in the same series and I always find them to be of interest. The first three hours are free, but for a small fee of 12,000 yen you can attend the full weekend of workshops. Sadly, due to work commitments I was only able to attend the first three hours. What follows is a breif description of Professor Benson’s lecture.

Phil Benson is a leading expert in the field of learner autonomy, and he literally wrote the book on it.

 

Professor Benson works at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Benson started off the lecture by talking the difference between learner autonomy and autonomous learning about what he had identified as the six different definitions of autonomy.

Learner Autonomy Autonomous Learning
Independence from teachers or teaching materials Learning by yourself (naturalistic)
Independence from teachers Learning by yourself (self-instruction)
Initiative in learning Self-initiated, unpredictable learning behaviour
Responsibility for learning Self-directed learning, learners make decisions.
A capacity to control learning Learning that displays a capacity for control.

Benson’s own definition is the last one in the table, that learner autonomy is “a capacity to control learning.” He then went on to expand on this and to break the components of capacity and control down into how they relate to the learner and their context.

What is a capacity?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When talking about the word desire he explained that he had purposefully avoided the term motivation because of what he termed to be a widespread problem in the field of applied linguistics in defining abstract concepts. He went on to explain that Autonomy suffers from the same issues, i.e. that short definitions tend to be too broad and all encompassing, whereas longer definitions exclude too much. He acknowledged the overlap between authenticity and motivation, but joked that when students wanted to write their dissertations about the links between autonomy and motivation he usually discourages them from doing so because it would be too much of an abstract set of concepts.

Benson then explained what he meant by control. He had done a meta-analysis of the research in order to see how the word control was used in relation to language teaching and learning. This lead him to arrive at the following categorisation, which he explained whilst pointing out similarities with the term capacity, although the two do not map perfectly onto each other, he noted.

Controlling What?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Benson, autonomy has moved a long way from being synonymous with self-access or self-study. For him the autonomy debate is much more of a conceptual question which relates directly with what approach is used in class and how teachers and learners interact in and around the classroom. However, he acknowledged that much of the work on autonomy focuses on adult education and his current research at the Hong Kong Institute of Education has brought him into contact with teachers who work at schools with young learners. He sees no reason why autonomy should be limited to adult education.

He also quipped that in many ways the teacher is seen sometimes as the enemy of autonomy because they impose what is learnt on the students, preventing them from choosing themselves. Benson advocated that ‘control over the learning content’ or learners having a choice of what is learnt is central to autonomy. For me, this is what made the session very relevant to my own research into authenticity. Benson’s ideas on the need for interest and choice in the content being used for language practise strongly coincide with my own on authenticity (see Pinner 2013)

Benson also talked about who controls the learning, and how there are many constraints on autonomy. He mentioned a recent study he had done (Benson, 2010) where teachers had attended an autonomy training seminar, but said after that they could not initiate such a methodology in their own class because they thought parents would complain, despite the fact that no parent had ever previously complained about such an approach. Finally, Benson talked about how students learning experiences of constraints of autonomy are all mediated through teacher. Despite pressures from the government and the department heads all influencing the teacher, the students’ experience of this all comes directly from the teacher and thus teachers are usually seen as the ‘enemy’ of authenticity.

This led the session onto a discussion about teacher autonomy. Benson said that teacher autonomy may be an unuseful [sic, un-useful as in not very useful but not useless] phrase because it is very different conceptually from learner autonomy. Unfortunately in the three hour session there was not enough time to get into detail about this, and this was another reason why I wished I could have attended the full weekend session.

Overall this was a really enlightening session and I took a lot away which I think will be useful in my research. I gained a better and updated view of what autonomy is and how it is being researched today.

References

Benson, P. & Voller, P. (Eds.) (1997) Autonomy and Independence in Language Learning. London: Longman

Benson, P. (2001) Teaching and Researching: Autonomy in Language Learning. London: Longman Pearson

Benson, P. (2010) ‘Teacher education and teacher autonomy: Creating spaces for experimentation in secondary school English language teaching’. Language Teaching Research, 14 (3), 259-275.

Pinner, R. S. (2012) “Unlocking Literature through CLIL: Authentic materials and tasks to promote cultural and historical understanding” in Watanabe,Y.,Ikeda,M.,&Izumi,S. (Eds). (2012) CLIL:New Challenges in Foreign Language Education. Vol. 2,Tokyo:Sophia University Press.

Social Networking for language acquisition

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Blogs, Wikis, micro-blogs, virtual worlds and social networks seem to dominate much of our time these days, especially with new technologies on mobile applications allowing us access from anywhere at almost any time. People are checking facebook from their smartphones and updating followers on Twitter while attending conferences and meetings, or during the commute. Many of the posts that appear on this site are composed on my Blackberry and published via 3G. Social networks take up a lot of people’s time these days, and love them or hate them they are a rich source of language input. When I was conducting research for my dissertation one of the questionnaire participants commented that they felt social networks would be very useful for the students in terms of meeting and communicating with people in the target language, especially because they taught in a Foreign Language context (meaning that the students all live in a country where the first language is not the language being studied) but because this teacher felt inexperienced about using social networks in their own personal life they were not comfortable recommending it to their students.

This seems perfectly reasonable. If you are not comfortable with something it is almost imposible to stand up and teach someone it, even if you can appreciate the value. For this reason I thought this post would be useful in providing a few ideas about how to incorporate social networks into your language teaching while avoiding the pitfalls.

To make this more digestible, I have composed a list of bullet points to illustrate what I think are the dos and don’ts, followed by a list of ideas and links to try out.

Let’s start with the warnings first.

All social networks work by having users enter personal information about themselves, which is then searchable by other users. All this personal information is stored in a database and much of the information provided is available for anyone to see and search. I’ve had experiences where I’ve clicked on a friend’s facebook profile, been able to learn who they are in a relationship, view pictures of their partner, gain phone numbers and addresses, birth dates and even find out where people are going to be at a particular time. Creepy though this sounds, this is all by simply looking at the information that comes up when you view someone’s profile. This is very dangerous, and I recommend you take this quick privacy report test before reading any further. The test is available at www.reclaimprivacy.org. You can also view recommendations there about how to improve your privacy settings. Once you are happy with this, you can also recommend it to your students. If you are planning to use social networks with your students it is highly recommended that you make your profile as private as possible as your students and your friends will get mixed together and that can lead to issues. A way around this is to have two accounts, or if you are uncomfortable having your students as ‘friends’ on facebook then I suggest you simply don’t allow them. You can still utilise social networks in your class without adding your students as friends.

Don’ts

  • recommend your students to make contact with people they don’t know or have never had previous contact with.
  • allow your students to post offensive materials or comments which may offend other users or result in them being banned from the site
  • add students as friends if your own personal profile has deeply private content on it (such as photos of you drunk, which your friends have posted up).
  • if you do have private or embarrassing content of yourself on the site, request that it be removed or remove it yourself – this is good general pracice. Alternatively, you could avoid getting into these situations in the first place, whichever is easier…
  • plan a lesson involving the use of a site such as facebook, only to find on the day of class that it has been blocked from the student machines. Always check out sites you intend to visit from the students’ machines and preferably using a student login

Dos

  • create a group or page which is specially for your class, so you can keep members organised and together. If you create a group, you can also connect with students without having to add them as friends, thus ensuring privacy for you and for them.
  • go over the rules of Netiquette, that is polite conventions and rules which students should abide by when posting on public online forums and sites. This should include being wary of anyone they don’t know adding them as a friend or requesting details.
  • encourage students to reply to other people’s public posts about topics which are of interest to them, even if they don’t know the person this is ok. For example, if you are fans of a celebrity who has a public fan page, or members of a particular group online, it is fine to chat and respond to people’s posts on these public areas because the nature of the discussion is open. This is not the same as sending a friend request to someone you don’t know.
  • encourage students to check back on the site in their free time and see if someone has responded to their post

There are many more of these and I will be compiling a more comprehensive list and adding it to a permanent page soon. Below are a few lesson plan ideas which you may wish to use.

Agony Aunt / Problem Page Lesson

You have been learning about giving advice in class and you would like to give your students some authentic, meaningful interaction with real speakers. Although you may need to screen the sites you use carefully, you could take your students to a site which allows people to write in with probelms or asking for advice. First your students could create their own posts asking for advice (make sure they only write about something they are comfortable sharing with the class, such as the feeling that they are not learning fast enough or have no one to practice with. If they can’t think of anything they could write it on behalf of an imaginary friend). After that they should follow the thread and also try to reply to some other people who are having a problem which they think they can help with. Although it may sound risky, I have done this lesson a few times with mature classes and students always get a lot out of it. If you explain that the class will be sharing the posts then people generally don’t post up anything too personal or that they are uncomfortable sharing, and my students are always respectful of other people. The real advantage of this lesson is that it goes beyond authenticity and is actual real world use of the target language. This really gives such a class the edge over any contrived language practice lessons from grammar books. A lot of rich, real language also comes out of these lessons, which students can ask about and share in class later.

Facebook Group

There are lots of groups on facebook and other social networks which are specifically for language learning. For example, the BBC has a learning English facebook page which allows wall comments and photos. This is a great place to get your students commenting on things and replying to posts. They could ask questions about something specific on the wall or post a link to something they found useful. Although this might not take a whole lesson, it could be treated as a homework or used as a study suggestion. Alternatively, you could have students go and post something on the wall and search other posts for something interesting to share with the class.

Twitter Contest

If your class enjoys a bit of competition, why not ask students to create a new twitter account and to see who has the most followers after a week, who can manage the highest number of tweets in a week, and who can manage to get a famous person to follow them. There could be a running narration going on over the course of the week and the final lesson where the winners are announced should be quite exciting.

These are just a few ideas but as you can see, there is no need for privacy to be invaded or personal space encroached on just because you are using social networks with students. The key is to try a few of these things out yourself (preferably in a language you are learning yourself) and then get the students to have a go. If students don’t wish to create profiles with their real names they can always create a generic or anonymous profile, as long as it is not used to offend or insult people.

If you have any further ideas or comments, please add them below.

Feedback

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Sending out student feedback is essential. Good materials design needs to incorporate student feedback. Also, after assessments and tests, it is vital that students receive personalised feedback in a supportive way.

Below is a training video which I made to help teachers automate student assessment feedback through MS Word’s built in Mail Merge features.

SLanguages 2010

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This year’s SLanguages Conferences kicked off yesterday on October the 15th at 18:00 with a great plenary featuring Gavin Dudeney [Dudeney Ge], Heike Philp [Gwen Gwasi], Marisa Constantinides [Marisolde Orellana] , Randall Sadler [Randall Renoir] and moderated by Gary Motteram [Gwared Morgwain]. At first there were 18 or so delegates in the Holodec, but after a while there were over 50! There were also more delegates who attended via Adobe Connect.

The conference was very educational from both a technical and pedagogic point of view, and as it is free to attend it is definitely worth a look. The program is available here and to access it simply login to Second Life and head for the EduNation island.

You can read more about the conference here at http://www.slanguages.net/home.php. This is the fourth SLanguages Conference, which is held annually in-world. It runs for 24 hours so it’s well worth taking a look, even if you’re totally new to Second Life.

Teachers’ Attitudes to and Motivations for Using CALL

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This presentation was given at both Antwerp CALL 2010 and EUROCALL 2010, Bordeaux. There is also a podcast of the EUROCALL conference and a recording of the EUROCALL presentation.

This presentation is based on research conducted as part of my master’s dissertation in Applied Linguistics and ELT at King’s College, London (supervised by Dr. Nick Andon). The slides from the presentation are available to view here or download in PDF.

You can also watch the video here

Teachers’ attitudes and motivations for using CALL in and around the language classroom from Richard Pinner on Vimeo.

Computer Oil – making the most of your classroom machine

Reading Time: 4 minutes

WD40 is the magical sprayable oil which can fix almost any mechanical problem with a few well placed squirts. It is a mechanic’s best friend.

Sadly, WD40 does not work for computers, in fact it would probably not do your computer much good at all! When you are using an Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) for teaching, or any type of computer based applications, things almost always go awry. Believe me, I know!

Having worked as multimedia coordinator with hundreds of computers, where I supported not one but two flagship schools in central London which had both staff and student machines, each with a multimedia room and one with an additional computer lab, I have done a lot of trouble shooting both for my own and other teachers’ classes. One of the most common mistakes people make is to overestimate the power of their computer.

It is difficult to remember to conduct the basic maintenance that keeps a computer running efficiently when you are using it in front of a class. People tend to open up hundreds of new tabs on their browser, running very processor heavy sites such as BBC iPlayer, without closing windows which are no longer needed, or keeping other applications running in the background. IWBs often come with their own software and usually they are connected to low-spec computers which the school or institution buys en mass on the cheap, so don’t overwork them. If you want to keep your computer and IWB running and avoid crashing it, keep open only the windows and programs that you need and close things down when you are done.

Although I just told you to close windows, you still need to watch out for overheating issues.  The computer’s CPU produces a huge amount of heat when it is running, as much as the filament of an electric kettle. Overheating will cause your computer run more slowly and eventually crash. Think about the position of the computer. All computers have fans and vents, make sure these are not pointed at a wall or enclosed by a desk, as this will reflect the heat back into them. Also, don’t put things on the computer, as this can again lead to overheating. Another overheating risk comes from running too many applications and keeping too many windows open. The final thing you can do to avoid overheating is to ensure that the computer is not left on all night. Turning it on and off after each lesson may not be practical, but shutting it down each night will keep it running for longer and also is much better for the environment. You can create a scheduled task in control panel using a batch file which means that the computer will shut down automatically at a specified time each night. Just be sure that you remember to turn off the monitors and projector screens as even in standby these use a lot of power and again this is bad for the environment.

The computer will also run faster if you only have programs installed which you need. Many programs, such as apple Quicktime, will start themselves and run in the background upon startup even though you’re not using them. Check which programs are running in the startup and remove them from the registry to make the machine more efficient. You can also speed up the computer by ensuring that all the temporary internet files have been cleaned off, and that you defrag your hard drive often. By default, most Windows installations are set to use Virtual Memory, which is hard disk space acting as RAM. If your hard disk gets full and the Virtual Memory quota cannot be met by the physical remaining space on the disk then the computer is prone to crash.

If you are not sure about any of these things, ask your IT support to check them all. If you don’t have an IT support then you should ask your school or institution to hire someone in for the day to check all this, or do it yourself using online tutorials and ask for a pay rise!

Computers are sensitive animals. Many of them are made to work like slaves for long hours in hot sweaty conditions. It is not unknown for computers to be badly beaten when the pressure is too much and they begin to flag. This is not wise if you want your computer to work like a well oiled machine. If you click on something and it doesn’t work instantly, this means the computer is running slowly. Often people then fire a volley of double-clicks at the computer, which just means you are asking it to do the same job hundreds of times. Nothing slows a computer down faster than this clicking spree. Be patient with your machine, and don’t be fooled into thinking that whacking it has any effect.

If you combine all these small tips, you will notice a marked increase in the speed of your machine. If the machine really is a piece of junk, you can always buy more ram or re-format the hard drive and see if that makes it any quicker. Failing all this, ensure your school or college invests in decent hardware, but even if your machine is a top of the range machine, remember that a little love goes a long way and that there is no oil in a can panacea to make it run reliably unless you use it sensibly.

When to (and when not to) use tech in class

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The question of when to use, and equally as important – when not to use, technology in class has been a question that sadly gets left out of many of the discussions around new learning technologies. Unfortunately, a lot of the choices about tech in class come from a top down implementation. So, your school gets a load of new interactive whiteboards. They give you a 1 hour training session, remove all the old whiteboards and say ‘off you go then’. Questioning their practicality often gets you branded as ‘negative’ or even ‘anti-progressive’.
Happily, there are those who dare to ask questions about this approach to instructional technology. People like Mike Levy, Phil Hubbard and Greg Kessler (among others) have voiced their concern over ‘tech for tech’s sake’ and this is coming from the leading CALL experts and advocators. Interactive whiteboards, for example, don’t do things that normal ones do. You can’t have more than one person writing on it at the same time, for example, so if you are doing a spelling race or something like that you won’t be able to use it. A lot of great software and apps are being released at an amazing rate, but all too often they are put into use without prior evaluation. As CALL practitioners we need to ask ourselves, is this useful? How so? When would this be useful and when would it not? These questions are not dissimilar to the questions teachers ask themselves when planning or evaluating any resource for a lesson. You don’t need to be an expert to conduct this kind of evaluation either.

A good example is a Blended Learning Lesson Plan I wrote myself for use in my institution. I was thinking about this lesson from a very top-down perspective, I’m sorry to say. I was concerned our Moodle forums were underused, so I thought ‘how can I get these forums to be used in class?’ I created a lesson plan where the whole class is taken into the computer room and forced to use the forum to post a response to something.
Not only did this only mean that forums were used a lot for the hour of the class and then never again, it was also questionable pedagogically. Why make people communicate over a forum when they are in the same room as each other? In the pecking order of communication, face to face is always best.

Forums are powerful collaboration tools, but the point is to allow asynchronous sharing and knowledge. The same lesson applied to learners who are in a separated by time and space would be great, but not if they could just have easily have actually spoken to each other.
We are at a stage now where technology is so ubiquitous that we are not always so keen to implement it for its own sake. We need to critically evaluate the new item, see if it works, decide what it is good for and what it is not so good for.

I woul like to invite you to post your comments about any new piece of technology you have used in class. Was it useful? What can it do well? What are its limitations?

CALL Teacher Education

Reading Time: < 1 minute

There is a brilliant book entitled ‘Teacher Education in CALL’ (Hubbard and Levy eds. 2006) which details the current state of CALL teacher education – some of the predominant findings are that there is not enough CALL Teacher Education going on as part of INSET or PRESET training, and even when CALL is part of Teacher Education programs it is often considered unsatisfactory in terms of preparing teachers to actually use CALL applications in class.

In the TESLCA-L List-Serv I started a post about CALL and Autonomy and was soon contacted through the list by Greg Kessler, a researcher and CALL Teacher Education Specialist who contributed to the ‘Teacher Education in CALL’ book. The post took on a slightly new purpose then, focusing on CALL Teacher Education and how this can feed into Autonomy Training.

I decided I would expand the idea by adding a post here. By joining the free mailing list TESLCA-L you can read the archived postings and also add to them, or alternatively leave a comment here on this blog about the subject.

We are particularly interested in:

  • any CALL preparation courses you have taken
  • your attitudes towards CALL use and CALL Teacher Education
  • any experiences you have had while trying to integrate CALL into your classes

We look forward to reading your postings!

Using VLEs

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How many of us are now using VLEs to provide students with access to supplementary resources, lecture notes, additional or useful information and links to other repositories?

Many university level lecturing jobs and teaching posts are asking for experience with eLearning. This page aims to provide a forum for discussions about how best to use these resources for Language Teaching.

VLEs
VLEs