| Summary: | 碩士 === 逢甲大學 === 外國語文學系 === 105 === Abstract
In an era of rapid changes in knowledge and technology, knowledge-based economy has been the mainstream, and how to quickly update the knowledge and skills is an important key to enhance college students’ competitiveness in their job markets. Formal school education is no longer the only channel to get knowledge. Technology has greatly changed a lot of learning methods and resources, and also helped to distribute the knowledge more efficiently around the world. Developing lifelong learning is the ultimate goal of college education, and to achieve the learner autonomy is an important element in a strong country. Nowadays, much research examines autonomous learning through different ways, the different media, different methods, different mechanisms, different targets or objects and different cultural backgrounds. They come out with different results.
To autonomously learn a foreign language in an Asian context has been challenged as learner autonomy counteracts a teacher-dominated and exam-oriented education culture of this area. Meanwhile, using various forms of technologies to help English learning (CALL) has been traditionally tied with autonomy and demonstrated with various degrees of success since a decade ago. However, most of the prior CALL literature in Taiwan context has not looked at specifically and enough how learners became autonomous learners with the assistance of online English learning materials which are claimed to be accessed anywhere at any time. The current project re-examined whether college learners would foster an autonomous attitude after experiencing more updated Internet English materials.
Through eleven email messages to get instructors’ permission to promote the project and recruit participants in class, over fifty college students were invited to use a suite of web-based English learning materials in an informal/out of class context to promote their own English proficiency for a period of eight weeks. First, through pretesting, recruited participants were placed into four different groups: A1, A2, B1 and B2 corresponding to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), and were offered different online contents. Each week, they were provided with four different customized modules of 1.5-2 hours of learning content through ClarityEnglish learning materials, Tense Buster for grammar learning, Active Reading for reading comprehension and strategies training, and additional grammar explanations from Youtobe. During the eight weeks, the public and private communication platforms Facebook, Messenger and Line were also offered. At last, only six students completed the eight-week project with the posttest and answered a questionnaire. We examined their perceptions and the feasibility of self-directed learning through the comparisons of pretest and posttest, the learning records in the eight weeks, the chats from the communication platforms and last the feedback of the questionnaire. The results indicated that almost all the six participants who completed the materials made progress. The questionnaire survey and interviews showed that the mechanisms designed encouraged autonomy in the learning process.
Reasons for a huge attrition of participants in the process were discussed with difficulties of fostering learner autonomy without the structure of a course and an instructor. Every participant knew that the English ability was very important to them, but we found a few limitations of this research. Because the online course was an informal learning, most of the learners didn’t have urgent needs. Without enough motivation and also the close-end of the online learning material, it was difficult to quickly enhance their learning interest and keep their learning motivation. Also, the communication platform didn’t help much in this case. The participants and the researcher couldn’t get the enough information for each side at the right time in order to offer the quicker help and solve their problem in time. For a future autonomous research project, we suggest to have some face-to-face communication to build up more trust between both sides, and to have some guidance at the very beginning. Another important issue in successful autonomous learning is to do the pre-survey for the learners’ needs analysis first, because the pre-survey for the learner’s right needs would help more on fostering the learner’s attitude of autonomous learning. Future research and implications are also discussed.
Keywords: learner autonomy, computer assisted language learning
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