Personal example Archives - Oxford University Press

Asian girl sitting on the floor reading Continuing the 10 Commandments for motivating language learners series, Tim Ward, a freelance teacher trainer in Bulgaria, takes a closer look at number five of the 10 Commandments: Promote learner autonomy.

Thanks for the replies to the last couple of blogs, all in response to comments on two of the Ten Commandments for motivation. This time round, I want to turn my attention to just one, but it’s one of the areas that’s received lots of attention in the last few years: Dornyei and Czizer’s version reads: Promote learner autonomy.

Now, in general terms everyone’s agreed that learner autonomy is a good thing but the specifics of how to encourage it are a bit harder to pin down, not least because there are so many different levels at which autonomy works. So it’s with a degree of trepidation that I start this blog.

Best to begin softly: what is learner autonomy?

Easy enough – a workable definition is that it’s the readiness and ability to take charge of one’s own learning inside and outside the classroom. In ascending order of difficulty, the next questions go why? and how? So, why is it a good thing that learners take care of their own learning? (Bear in mind, by the way, that these are all discussions we can and maybe should be having with our students.)

There is a whole raft of answers from the more to the less obvious. Students only spend part of their time and a fraction of their lives in the classroom with us, the teacher, so learning skills they can use outside and in later life is doubly valuable – a point the Common European Framework is very strong on making. More than that, autonomous students will probably learn with more enjoyment, do better in exams, set their own targets, be more fun to teach, and so on…

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Smartly dressed young woman smiling Following on from his first post, 10 Commandments for motivating language learners, Tim Ward, a freelance teacher trainer in Bulgaria, takes a closer look at the first of the 10 Commandments: Set a personal example with your own behaviour.

There were lots of responses to the last blog on motivating language learners. Thanks for all that – establishing a dialogue is such an important part of our professional lives.

It was really interesting to hear from learners like Bethanyx – more from the learners’ perspective is always welcome! Many of the posts anticipate things I’ll come back to in later weeks (Paul Bishop saying that learners need to know the benefits of what they’re studying, Bindu writing about helping students think ‘out of the box’ and many more).

An interesting comment from Marluce in Rio to the effect that teacher efforts are all very well, ‘but (there is always a “but”) course books need to be used completely in my school, and we feel sometimes overloaded’. Agreed! Two thoughts. One is that course books should always be the servant not the master; the other is that some course books are better than others, and it’s important to look for ones which are right for the students.

Generally the response goes some way to confirming what I’m thinking, that there’s a widespread perception – internationally, even intercontinentally – that our job is getting harder, or at least we have to find more ways of getting through to students. It’s a perception that may even be true…

Which leads me on to the theme of this post. I finished last time by outlining the 10 commandments of motivation as described by the Hungarian researchers Zoltan Dornyei and Kata Czizer. These were what they called ‘macrostrategies’, meaning I suppose that they are kind of general rules. The task I want to move on to now is to try to put some flesh on the bones, to see how we can actually put these macrostrategies into practice (which I suppose means coming up with some microstrategies, though a large part of me prefers the term ‘specific ideas’).

Take the first commandment of motivation which says ‘Set a personal example with your own behaviour’.

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