scholarly journals Is Technology Paving the Way for Autonomous Learning?

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Mehran Esfandiari ◽  
Mir Wais Gawhary

The shift towards communicative, learner-centered approaches to teaching has resulted in attention being drawn to promoting autonomy as a capacity for independent learning. Taking responsibility for their own learning enables students to break down barriers to learning that appear in teacher-directed environments. With independence and interdependence as its two interrelated aspects, autonomy has its roots in interaction with others in social contexts, and it is now looked upon as being certain abilities that facilitate the navigation of learning through higher degrees of motivation, creative thinking, and conceptual learning. Thanks to technology, language learners easily access authentic materials for out-of-class learning. However, this paper aims to argue that where promoting autonomous learning is concerned, it cannot be enough per se; proper guidance is crucial, and the interrelation between pedagogy and technology has to be explored so that enough attention is paid to the affordances of certain technological tools to enable language learners to become more autonomous.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Mehran Esfandiari ◽  
Mir Wais Gawhary

The shift from traditional towards more learner-centered approaches to teaching has resulted in the concept of authenticity becoming central to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). As a relational notion, authenticity has to do with the interaction between learners and input materials in terms of appropriate responses, as opposed to its notion of genuineness as an absolute quality. It paves the way for language to be authenticated through context, as it encourages a use-to-learn rather than a learn-to-use approach. Using authentic materials requires a great deal of attention to be paid to not only the contextualization and authenticity of tasks, but also to the incorporation of genuine texts into task design, which itself has been revolutionized through modern technology. Using the Web as a technological tool has resulted in another version of authenticity, which might be in line with finder authenticity. The main aim of this paper is to argue that the notion of authenticity has come a long way from genuineness to finder authenticity.


2018 ◽  
pp. 90-99
Author(s):  
Lorraine Reinbold

JASAL (The Japan Association for Self-Access Learning) held their 12th Annual Conference/Forum on December 16th, 2017 at Kanda University of International Studies (KUIS) in Chiba. JASAL is a non-profit organization that fosters learner autonomy and self-access learning to a cross-section of educational institutions in Japan. This article contextualizes the plenary talk and selected presentations that captured the underlying themes of this conference: 1) necessity to become a social learning space for language learners, 2) necessity of structured support, and 3) necessity to assess and modify.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 152-157
Author(s):  
Shomirzayev Shomirzayev

This article discusses how to use the craft of national crafts. More importantly, the role of the teacher in the learning process is determined by the fact that the learners are helped by independent learning. In addition to teaching the readers not only the knowledge they have, they also understand their role in teaching independent, creative thinking, critical thinking about their personality and knowledge, analyzing information, identifying what needs to be done, drawing conclusions, and teaching their own ideas. The main purpose of collaborative learning is to work on a common problem and focus on the problem.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 530-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Barry ◽  
David Wiens

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing (qua beneficiary) if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing per se does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 027347532110389
Author(s):  
Janneke Blijlevens

Marketers and designers are likely to work together on innovation teams as they both have customer satisfaction as their end goals. Collaboration between these disciplines in innovation teams is often impaired due to the different thought-worlds that drive decision making: intuitive versus rational. To facilitate collaboration between design and marketing it is valuable to teach marketers about designers’ ways of thinking. Approaches to teaching design thinking to marketing students often focus on students becoming more creative, intuitive, and innovative themselves. However, the integration of the two disciplines does not require that marketers become designers, and vice versa, as both bring unique skills necessary for successful innovation. An educational framework is presented that aims to teach marketing students an understanding of the thought-world of design thinking rather than to become design thinkers themselves. The focus is on recognizing how the others’ approach to the same goals are complementary to their own approaches instead of being different or “wrong.” This framework is unique in aligning design thinking phases with critical thinking phases—marketing students’ dominant thinking style—through specifically chosen aictivities to scaffold the understanding of an intuitive, divergent, and creative thinking approach to the development of innovative marketing ideas.


Author(s):  
Dongshuo Wang ◽  
Bin Zou ◽  
Minjie Xing

Language learners at all levels need a way of recording and organising newly learned vocabulary for consolidation and for future reference. Listing words alphabetically in a vocabulary notebook has been a traditional way of organising this information. However, paper-based notes are limited in terms of space (learners often run out of space for certain categories; for others the space might be unused) and time (handwritten pages deteriorate over time and cannot easily be updated). Organizing vocabulary in more meaningful categories might make it easier to learn. Textbooks, for example, often introduce new vocabulary thematically. Words can also be organised according to their grammatical class or characteristics, their real world category (e.g. modes of transport, means of communication), their phonological pattern, their etymological elements, or according to when/where they were learnt. This research experiments how the mobile learning of a lexical spreadsheet can be used for the consolidation of and reference to new vocabulary. Offering the learner multiple ways of organising vocabulary at the same time – combining all of the approaches mentioned above, the resource can easily be modified and updated. Importantly, in keeping with autonomous learning theory, the spreadsheet is designed to encourage learners to take more responsibility for their own vocabulary learning and to approach this process more systematically. The resource can be used from any mobile smart phone, tablet or i-Pad.


1998 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 39-45
Author(s):  
M.C.L.F. Hoeks-Mentjens

Since in 1993 the Dutch government set detailed goals for educational programmes on secondary schools for 14-year-olds, writing EFL materials has become an increasingly complex task for textbook writers. Not only are they supposed to deal with these new objectives, but they are also expected to cater for all pupils within that age-group and ensure that (teacher)independent learning can be achieved. Writing course books for all pupils implies writing for pupils with language learning difficulties as well. In a newly developed English course a distinction was made between dyslexic pupils, who experience purely phonological problems, on the one hand and poor language learners, who in addition are characterized by a poor general understanding on the other. In this article the editor of 'Worldwide', the new Dutch EFL course, reports on how the various elements mentioned above have been incorporated into the material.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 166
Author(s):  
Norah Mansour Almusharraf

This qualitative case study examined how female English language learners in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) realize learner autonomy, especially in the context of the learner’s meaning development via purposeful vocabulary acquisition. EFL students’ perceptions and applications of autonomous learning strategies for the purpose of English vocabulary development were investigated, as well as their adapted methods for learning English. Data collection included face-to-face semistructured interviews of 8 students from two different classrooms, classroom observations, participants’ reflections on specific English coursework, and English learning autobiographies. The findings revealed the students’ appreciation of the English language and showed how various autonomous learning methods developed their sense of self-possession.


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