Contratos de la Administración Pública, Conceptos y su

Autonomy has been relevant to my research in so far as I see a direct link between autonomous learning in VLEs and awareness and control over modes and

meaning-making in VLEs. I have worked with a particular understanding of this concept, as presented in the Glossary, for reasons that I now explain.

Over the last 50 years, there have been two “schools” of thought about autonomy in language learning. The first one is mainly associated with Holec (1981) and his view of autonomy as “the ability to take charge of one’s learning,” and as a skill “to be acquired by “natural” means or in a systematic, deliberate way” (p. 3). In

technology-mediated language learning and teaching contexts – I maintain in my work – this ability is dependent to a significant degree on learner awareness and control of the learning context, more specifically, modes and their affordances, and should therefore be fostered through a task-based approach, or as Holec puts it, acquired in a systematic, deliberate way. Holec also believes in the absolute freedom

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of the learner to take all decisions concerning their learning – the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘in what order’ and ‘by what means’ – and to work with “a reality which he himself constructs and dominates” (Holec, 1981, p. 21). In online spaces, the ‘by what means’ is pre-determined by the representational resources available for making meaning and communicating which in turn have a direct impact on the degree to which learners can construct and dominate their learning reality. Their agency in terms of their learning reality is closely interrelated with their familiarity with the learning-environment-specific affordances and points to the demands on 21 st _- century language education professionals. They must make sure they themselves have the skills needed to construct a “reality” in “virtual” spaces which is conducive to language learning and that they are able to exercise what Kurek and Turula (2014) refer to as “digital teacher autonomy”.

The second school emphasises social interaction and has somewhat overtaken the first (see Benson, 2011; Murray, 2014). Little (1996), drawing on Vygotsky (1978), considers collaborative learning through social interaction as essential for the reflective and analytical capacity which are central to autonomy. Benson (2001) sees Little’s understanding as complementary to Holec’s as it adds “a vital psychological dimension, that is often absent in definitions of autonomy” (p. 49). Benson himself prefers the concept of exercising “control” over learning rather than taking “charge”, a notion that chimes with my understanding of autonomy, i.e. control over modes and meaning-making in VLEs through informed use of available resources which also requires analytical capacity. Such VLEs are increasingly becoming commonplace in education, not only in DLL.

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Yet, Benson warned DLL providers that expecting autonomy to be one of the outcomes of self-access work and supplying students with DLL materials was an unhelpful assumption. In a similar vein, Hurd (1998) posits that “no amount of surrounding them [learners] with resources will foster in them the capacity for active involvement and conscious choice” (p. 72–3), if, Hurds adds, they are not trained for autonomy. While Benson and Hurd refer to concrete materials when referring to resources, I propose that the same applies to representational resources in online learning spaces. This is in line with Little’s (2001) remark that “the pursuit of autonomy in formal language learning environments must entail explicit conscious processes, otherwise we leave its development to chance” (p. 34). Similarly, we make the case in Hampel and Hauck (2006) for learner (and tutor) preparation informed by multimodal pedagogy (Stein, 2004) for language learning and teaching in technology-mediated environments. It is not sufficient, we say, to equip learners with creative representational resources and to assume that their agency and control over the meaning-making and learning process, and therefore their autonomy, will increase by default.

Holec (1985) considers the imposition of an autonomous approach on learners “a contradiction in educational terms” (p. 189) but agrees with Little that teachers are responsible for raising in learners the metacognitive awareness and skills associated with autonomy. My understanding of autonomy is closely related to metacognitive awareness. Yet it relates not only to awareness of self, task and strategy, as in Wenden’s (2001) definition of MCK, but also awareness of the learning context as included in Rubin’s (2001) framework of MCK. As Benson (2001) says, “Autonomy may be recognised in a variety of forms, but it is important that we are able to identify

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the form in which we choose to recognise it in the context of our own research and practice” (p. 47–8).

Web 2.0 technology has undoubtedly given language learners access to new ways of exercising their autonomy. While some contend that this has given rise to “actual new forms of autonomy,” others maintain that what we are witnessing is simply “a case of ‘old wine in new bottles’” (Cappellini, Lewis & Mompean, 2017). In an effort to reconcile old and new ways of thinking about the nature of autonomy, Little and Thorne (2017) offer the following approach: “The concept of […] learner autonomy […] provides us with a framework within which we can think about language learning and teaching and then of course apply that thinking and adapt it to the needs of specific contexts” (p. 15). Like Benson, they acknowledge the context-dependent aspect of investigations into (language) learner autonomy, i.e. the fact that autonomy manifests itself in different ways in different environments. Hence, as Cappellini et al. (2017) conclude, “[l]earner autonomy, like learning itself, is contextual” (p. 3). In my work I draw on Palfreyman’s (2006) definition and understand autonomy as the informed use of interacting (representational) resources in context, more specifically, technology-mediated (language) learning and teaching environments.

2.4 Task-based language learning and teaching