Fostering autonomous language learning
How can we get our students to complete work out of class? How do we show the benefits? Can it be part of our assessment? This article shows you how.
I chose a longer version of this title for the presentation I delivered at CLESOL 2021 in Auckland, describing the reflective action project as part of my master’s degree in 2019. It’s still a long title, isn’t it? Not that I was trying to gather the attention of virtual conference attendees by using all the hype words; this phrase defines part if not all my teaching philosophy. Language learning is a never-ending process, and it cannot be limited to a classroom. As a non-native speaker/teacher of English, I experience this every day. For me it has been more than 30 years of learning English, 20 of which include teaching it; and I am constantly learning something new. Luckily, I do have sufficient learning strategies to cope with ‘new’ language whenever I encounter it. That is why my teaching philosophy also includes fostering those strategies in class so that my learners will continue to learn even after completing the courses I teach.
Out-of-class language learning and motivation
Numerous studies show that high achievers often attribute their success to out-of-class learning activities (Nunan 1991, as cited in Wang, 2012). Those activities may include any kind of learning that takes place outside the classroom and involves self-instruction, naturalistic learning, or self-directed naturalistic learning (Benson, 2011).
During the reflective action project, the course I taught was called NZCEL (New Zealand Certificate in English Language) Level 4 Academic Qualifier, which is designed to help learners gain the necessary skills to help them study at tertiary level in New Zealand. So, the curriculum is mostly based on university-related themes and topics, and the tasks and assessments are related to relevant academic skills such as writing essays, note-taking, giving presentations, etc. However, the motivational patterns of the learners in the class do not always reflect academic enthusiasm. At that time, I had a class of 21 adult migrant learners of 10 different nationalities, aged between 20 and 66, with various levels of education. The needs analysis at the beginning of this course usually shows less than half of the learners to be interested in further university study. Having completed all other available courses (general and employment qualifiers), some students still enrol in the academic qualifier without any academic goals for the future. Some enrol to further advance their language skills, and unfortunately, some enrol to continue receiving full-time student benefits.
As a course requirement, learners are expected to keep a log of the activities that they do in English outside the classroom as evidence of self-directed study. This is called their ‘Language Log Book’ (LLB). Learners need to record at least one activity per week for reading, listening, or watching TV or movies noting down what they did, when, and for how long, and add additional comments (e.g., Was it difficult? Was it interesting? What did they learn from it? etc.) Teachers then collect the LLBs every five weeks before the assessments and give feedback. The whole course is an 18-week blended full-time course (22 hours) but only 12 hours are contact hours. Together with other assigned online homework, LLBs count as the extra work that they need to do to be full-time students.
Reflection and action
Although it has been a course requirement, for several reasons I did not believe it had been used properly for the maximum benefit of the learners and that was one reason I chose this focus for my reflective action project. First, there was no time in the curriculum to include or model learning strategies outside class with the students. The program was already heavily loaded with 12 assessments, allowing little room for the delivery timetable modifications. In addition, although it was a requirement, there was no reward or penalty for completing or failing to complete LLBs. Once students realised this, unfortunately, it became difficult to motivate them. I had taught the same course for six different cohorts and this class was my seventh. This project made me realise that somewhere in between I, as the teacher, had lost my motivation to encourage students to complete the LLBs. This made my heart heavy as I believe to be a successful teacher I need to be motivated. Institutional restrictions and curriculum requirements had slowly turned me into a teacher who just followed the delivery timetable and inevitably taught to the assessment. But I was unhappy to be this type of teacher. So as an action point for the project, my aim was to create three lesson plans to increase my students’ intrinsic motivation for out-of-class language learning by emphasising the advantages and by modelling several useful activities that they could do; and reflect upon my practice to utilise LLBs better so that learners would develop skills and strategies that they would continue using while doing out-of-class English activities even after they finished the course.
Throughout my reflective teaching project, I wrote reflective journals, received continuous feedback from my mentor and organised meetings with fellow teachers who also had LLBs in their curriculum. To re-motivate myself I chose to have a group discussion with three teachers who had recently started working at our organisation. I chose new teachers because I was once happy to hear that LLBs were a component of the course. I improved my English through watching, listening, and reading authentic materials and I had been telling all my learners that this was the key to success in language learning. So, in theory LLBs could provide concrete evidence that the students were engaged in out-of-class language learning activities. However, over time I found myself spending less and less time focusing on LLBs. Apart from no punitive consequences, it was difficult to check the authenticity of the entries that students made. They could choose to write about anything. This could be an advantage as they oversee what they read, listen to, or watch. However, on the flip side, it could turn out to be a disadvantage as we could not check whether they did those entries that week or if they filled in five weeks’ worth of entries in a day! Who knew? I realised that with each passing semester, there was always a handful of students who left their LLBs blank – they must have been the ones who, from doing previous qualifiers, knew there wouldn’t be any consequence of failing or not completing the course. This was a source of great frustration for me and might be the reason I started to neglect this valuable tool. I thought talking to new teachers who might be unaware of those concerns would refresh my perspective towards LLBs and increase my motivation.
As expected, the new teachers’ attitudes towards LLBs were more optimistic than my attitude at that time. They agreed that asking students to write down what they do outside the class increases the likelihood of them doing something outside the class. When I informed the teachers that students could still get a certificate without making a single entry in their LLBs or completing an online unit, they were surprised and disappointed. I then explained to them that I planned to create three lesson plans to implement into the delivery timetable with the aim of increasing student motivation and participation in LLBs. They liked the idea and we discussed ideas of how to achieve that. We all agreed that checking the LLBs regularly every week, establishing good goal setting, equipping them with effective learning outside of class techniques, and connecting those activities with their real-life settings would help students to sustain their motivation to complete the LLBs.
At this point, readers might wonder why it was difficult to motivate learners living in an English-speaking society to take part in activities in English. Well, to be honest, as an adult migrant myself, I know that taking part in activities outside class is easier to say than it is to do. Most of my students have busy lives. With little time to spend on themselves and juggling work, family, and studying, it is understandable that they wish to spend time with people from their own communities. I do that too. For example, I spend most of my weekends with friends from my own country, and the same is true of my students. Telling them to find a friend from another country is not always the easiest fix. My aim was to create lesson plans to increase their intrinsic motivation for out-of-class language learning by emphasising the advantages and by modelling several useful activities that they could do.
The lessons
For three weeks I set aside one hour from the delivery timetable for my action project. The first lesson for my action project was scheduled for week 7 of the course, right after the first assessment week. I planned to use the first lesson to raise awareness of the importance and benefits of self-directed language study with a speaking skill focus. I checked the first LLB (weeks 1–5) and prepared a basic ‘find-someone-who’ activity out of their entries as a warm-up speaking practice. Then I told them that there was a positive correlation between LLB completion and assessment results. This attracted their attention. Then in groups I asked them to write down the benefits on a piece of paper.
The focus of the second lesson was pragmatics, noticing language features and useful phrases for specific speech acts and situations. To begin with I talked about my own language learning experience; how I used magazines and TV shows to improve my ‘teenage’ English to be accepted when I first moved to an English-speaking country at the age of 16. I showed examples of TV shows I watched. Then we brainstormed TV shows that we could elicit language from for different situations. To give an example, we looked at short clips of a medical drama TV show to elicit the language they could use in a doctor’s appointment.
The last lesson was on exploring different reading resources with a language focus on collocations. Learners often say that they feel like they are not studying while they do out-of-class activities in English, especially if the only study skill they know is to translate all the unknown vocabulary. In this lesson we looked into various sources with different levels of difficulty and elicited collocations and useful phrases that they could use elsewhere productively.
Results
There was clear evidence, after having just three contact hours devoted to raising awareness of the importance and benefits of LLBs and exemplifying different learning strategies that they could utilise autonomously in their free time. Prior to these motivation sessions and strategy building modelling activities, the first LLB submission rate was less than half of the class. In the second submission six more students completed their LLBs. I was delighted!
Research suggests the more autonomous learners are, the more successful they can be in their language learning goals. Self-directed out-of-class language learning activities are among the highly effective learning strategies which create learning autonomy. One assumes that living in an English-speaking country, learners would inevitably immerse themselves in English outside the class and pick up the nuances of the language. However, this is not always the case. Some students have lived here for decades yet cannot speak confidently. This is often because they live, interact and converse within their own community groups. It is my belief that Language Logbooks are one way to encourage them to be involved in out-of-class language language activities, which eventually leads them to be more competent language users.
References
Benson P (2011) Language learning and teaching beyond the classroom: An introduction to the field. In: P Benson and H Reinders (Eds) Beyond the language classroom (pp. 7–16). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wang D (2012) Self-directed English language learning through watching English television drama in China. Changing English 19 (3) 339–348 Doi: 10.1080/1358684X.2012.704584
