Enhancing learner's autonomy in efl context the case of secondary school students in Algeria

I-Literature review on learner autonomy in education

Benson and Voller (1997) point out five ways the term autonomy is used for:

· situations in which learners study entirely on their own;

· a set of skills which can be learned and applied in self-directed learning;

· an inborn capacity which is suppressed by institutional education;

· the exercise of learners' responsibility for their own learning;

· for the right of learners to determine the direction of their own learning. (Cited in Balçikanli,2007).

As (Borg & Al-Busaidi,2012), Sinclair (2000) suggests 13 aspects of learner autonomy which `appear to have been recognized and broadly accepted by the language teaching profession' (see Table 1).

Table 1 : Learner autonomy definition (Sinclair:2000)

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I-Literature review on learner autonomy in education

Echoing Widdowson (1990), Little (1991), in an attempt to define learner autonomy, warns against five "misconceptions" that were current in concepts of learner autonomy in the 90s. They were the assumptions that :

(1) autonomous learners make the teacher redundant;

(2) any intervention on the part of the teacher may destroy whatever autonomy the learners have managed to attain;

(3) autonomy is a new methodology;

(4) autonomy represents easily described behavior; and, finally,

(5) autonomy is a steady state achieved by certain learners.

To further concretize learner autonomy for educational purposes, Little (1997) defines

learner autonomy in relation to particular tasks, highlighting that learner autonomy also consists in the ability to use particular knowledge and apply certain skills to new tasks, situated in contexts different from the learning context and under new conditions, which require a reconsideration of the task approach, the strategies to use, the product to aim for, etc . When learners have become flexible and adaptive learners in this sense, they can be considered autonomous learners, namely "( ... ) when they are able to perform that task (i) without assistance, (ii) beyond the immediate context in which they acquired the knowledge and skills and on which successful task performance depends, and (iii) flexiby, taking account of the special requirements of particular circumstances." (Little,1997:14).(Cited in Jiménez Raya:2007:16).

3-Autonomy in learning stages

Fitts and Posner (1967) proposed that motor skill acquisition (learning) involved three stages ( https://www.coursehero.com/file/pjqrh9/cognitive-strategies-dominate-Improve-rapidly-however-beginners-generally-do/, By June the 6^th,2020) :

3-1-Cognitive Stage (verbal-cognitive stage) : The beginner focuses on cognitive oriented problems.

-The task is completely new, Focus on solving cognitively-oriented problems

-Many questions : What to do? (discover goal), When to do it? (discover timing),How to do it? (discover strategy).

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