Autonomy in Language Learning: Stories of Practices

About this e-book

Autonomy in Language Learning: Stories of Practices Edited by Andy Barfield and Natanael Delgado Alvarado 

Stories of Practices brings together many different teachers' stories about their engagement with learner (and teacher) autonomy in many different places over many years. It stands out from other books on learner autonomy in the special way that the story chapters are structured. In this volume, each of the 14 story chapters is composed of the story of one teacher (the storywriter) and the responses of two readers (the reader responders) to that teacher’s evolving engagement with learner autonomy. A story chapter starts with the storywriter’s initial story of their engagement with learner autonomy. This Part 1 story is followed by reflections from two reader responders who draw out questions and issues from the storywriter’s starting narrative. The storywriter then continues with their Part 2 narrative, addressing points raised by the reader responders and focusing towards specific learner autonomy practices. Finally, each story chapter closes with second responses from the same two reader responders, this time focused towards pedagogic, ideological, and/or research issues that the storywriter’s continuing story highlights for them. In all, then, the story chapters are co-created from six different perspectives and they have a resolutely multivocalic and dialogic quality about them.

Stories of Practices also brings together a remarkable range of contributors working in the learner autonomy field across many different geographical and institutional contexts (Asia, Europe, the Gulf States, Latin America, North America, and Oceania). Some of the writers are already well known in the field, others are relatively new, and this helps create a lively dynamic within each chapter, as well as a rich diversity across the whole book. The story chapters are divided into four sections. The first four chapters are devoted to primary/secondary/high school education. The second section focuses on tertiary education and has three chapters, as does the next section dealing with self-access. The final section, made up of four chapters, is devoted to teacher education. This is followed by a final ‘trialogic’ chapter by Felicity Kjisik, Mike Nix and Stephan Breidbach who take extended turns to explore the different connections and contradictions that they see in the grounded exploration and theorization of learner (and teacher) autonomy that Stories of Practices embodies.

Contributors to this e-book

Alice Chik (Hong Kong), Androulla Athanasiou (Cyprus), Anna Uhl Chamot (USA), Antoinette Camillerri-Grima (Malta), María del Carmen Reyes Fierro (Mexico), Chika Hayashi (Japan), Christian Ludwig (Germany), Christine Nicolaides (Brazil), Christine O’Leary (UK), David Palfreyman (UAE), Desirée Castillo (Mexico), Diane Malcolm (Bahrain), Felicity Kjisik (Finland), Flávia Vieira (Portugal), Frank Lacey (Denmark), Gary Barkhuizen (New Zealand), Hugh Nicoll (Japan), Irina Minakova (Czech Republic), Isabel Barbosa (Portugal), Jodie Sakaguchi (Australia), Katherine Thornton (Japan), Kuchah Kuchah (Cameroon/UK), Leena Karlsson (Finland), Lucy Cooker (UK), Manuel Jiménez Raya (Spain), Maria Giovanna Tassinari (Germany), María Sara Rodríguez (Uruguay), Martin Lamb (UK), Mehmet Boyno (Turkey), Mike Nix (Japan), Moira Hobbs (New Zealand), Naoko Aoki (Japan), (Peter) Jing Huang (Hong Kong), Peter Voller (Hong Kong), Pornapit Darasawang (Thailand), Richard Smith (UK), Sarah Mercer (Austria), Shu Hua Vivien Kao (Taiwan), Simla Course (Turkey), Stephan Breidbach (Germany), Steve Brown (Japan), Terry Lamb (UK), and Umida Nurjanova (Uzbekistan)

About the editors of this e-book

Andy Barfield teaches and co-coordinates content-based courses through English in the Faculty of Law, Chuo University, Japan. Much of Andy’s work and research are to do with collaborative teacher education, curriculum and student development. He is particularly interested in the connections and disconnections between learner autonomy, exploratory practice and critical pedagogy, as well as in ways of writing and talking that enable learners and teachers to explore issues dialogically, collaboratively and critically with each other. Email: barfield.andy@gmail.com

Natanael Delgado Alvarado coordinates the Self-Access Centre of the School of Languages at Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango (UJED), Mexico. Natanael is also an editor of Independence, the newsletter of the IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG. At his university he has participated in the implementation and re-design of an innovative e-blended-learning model with a learning strand based on the fostering of learner autonomy. His current research focuses on the integration of language learner strategies and digital technologies for effective language achievement in independent learning settings. Email: ndelgado@ujed.mx

Introduction by Andy Barfield & Natanael Delgado Alvarado

‘… Imagination has a specific quality tied to landscape and locale, to community, to neighbourhoods. Even the rise of the modernist novel with its certain internationalist flavour, well look at Ulysses [by James Joyce]: what could be more local and provincial as it were and specific to a place and time than that, but it's the modernist bible, the central text.’

‘English’ novelist Ian McEwan speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (The Guardian, 23 August 2012)

‘I replaced practically all personal pronouns with passive constructions as I believe this is more in keeping with the genre of academic journal article.’

A journal editor’s comments to one of the editors of Stories of Practices, April 2012

As readers of others’ stories and editors of Stories of Practices, we face, in writing these brief introductory remarks, similar tensions in making sense of this project that the many different contributors to this book also experienced in writing their stories and responding to them. In as much as developing pedagogies for learner (and teacher) autonomy is a constantly evolving and exploratory process of imagination, action, and reflection, it is messy, tentative and uncertain, just as the act of writing about such development also is. Both are situated within specific landscapes and locales, neighbourhoods and communities, but they are not limited to local space and time, for the public act of writing takes us beyond the local to address a wider imagined community. We know well how this movement through professional landscapes from the local to the global and back is often under pressure to conform to universalising, authoritative and highly conventionalised (read, commodified) ways of knowledging. Our attention is reluctantly drawn to the ‘rhetorical strictures’ of the standard literature review and positioning in the field, the creation of a research gap, the neat and certain presentation of research method, results and discussion. And we can’t help but acknowledge the policing of knowledge and voice that this commodification involves. But it is more than personal pronouns that risk getting displaced, replaced and suppressed as we move back and forth between the local and global. It is also a discourse of personal and pedagogic experimentation and uncertainty, as well as the value of the collective production and protection of local knowledge in developing pedagogy for autonomy, that are put at risk.

The recognition of these risks and tensions highlights, for us as writers, questions about the relationship between the local and the global in writing about autonomy. For us as editors this awareness also raises issues about our brokering role (Lillis & Curry, 2010) in helping writers navigate alternative or exploratory ways of writing about the development of autonomy, that differ from the dominant, overly restrictive, disciplinary conventions of academic discourse. The shadows of these conventions have thankfully remained at the edges of the landscapes that we have lived on and moved through during the Stories of Practices project: they have not been our central concern. Instead, from the beginning, we decided to attend to the dialogic and the narrative, and to encourage storywriters and reader responders to draw out critical issues from the narratives that they chose to share. So, to take you ‘into the midst’ (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000: 63-4) of Stories of Practices, we would like to tell you the story of how we came to be here in the first place.

The Stories of Practices project—and, together with it, the concept of creating an interactive structure within chapters between storyteller and reader responders—sprang from our work within the changing editorial collective of the IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG newsletter, Independence. Working on Independence allowed us to experiment with dialogic and narrative forms of writing (see, for example, Delgado Alvarado, 2011; Vye, Barfield & Athanasiou, 2011) that might somehow dovetail with practitioner exploration. Even in editing some solo-authored articles, we at times tried different ways of creating a dialogic dimension to the texts that would appear in the newsletter. If we received a monologic story from an author, one of the Independence editors might contact the author, and ‘join in’ the story in a voiced way to elaborate an interview around issues from the author's opening narrative (see, for example, Adamson & Athanasiou, 2011). In other cases, we sometimes asked writers to nominate another practitioner in the field who they wanted to interview as a follow-up to their own piece of writing in Independence. An example here is how John Adamson, who was at the time concerned with students' code-switching in self-access learning at a university in Japan, explored with Pornapit Darasawang her research into the translanguaging of learners using the self-access centre at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand (Darsawang & Adamson, 2011). Overall, these small experiments with writing let us (re-)learn how the trajectory of an established narrative could open up to other issue-raising directions through the inclusion of a supportive but critically minded interlocutor.

Another part of our experimental editorial work brought responses from readers (rather than editors) more explicitly into play in different texts. One example is a short article (Lacey, 2011) about the challenges that a secondary school teacher was facing in persuading colleagues and parents in Denmark that learner autonomy was working for the 11-12 year-old children he was teaching. To elaborate on these issues, two readers, Irena Šubic Jeločnik in Slovenia and Shu Hua (Vivien) Kao in Taiwan, were invited to respond. Irena and Vivien related to Frank Lacey’s concerns by considering similar problems within their own local contexts. Together, they created a small exploratory ‘response community’ (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000: 73) that offered support for Frank in confronting dominant community expectations about education (see Jiménez Raya, Lamb & Vieira, 2007: 20-22).

Stories of Practices builds on these and other past experimentations with ‘collaborative writing for autonomy’ (see also Barfield & Nix, 2003; Barfield & Brown, 2007; Vieira, 2009; Barfield, 2012) by including acts of reader responding in the ongoing development of each chapter, rather than simply as a commentary at the end. This structuring allows for local to local collaboration, interaction and exploration between the storywriter and the reader responders; it also challenges each group of contributors to (re)position their storied knowledge to a much wider imagined global readership that publication in an e-book entails.

Coming into view, as we look over our story, is a metaphor of movement that we recognise as important in our conception of the Stories of Practices project. This metaphor is about being neither fixed nor certain, of staying alive to the potential of the moment by noticing the ‘movement between’. It is also about position—about being positioned, taking positions and also shifting perspectives as a shared narrative is shaped. The metaphor of movement takes us into the midst of narrative learning.

Some of the potential mapping from such movement can be seen in the guidelines that we invited reader responders to consider as they decided how to respond to a particular story¹:

* What positions does the writer move between in locating their development of learner autonomy—within themselves, their colleagues, their learners, parents and/or local communities, teacher educators and/or researchers, the local context/local discourses, wider societal and/or global contexts/discourses, ...?

* What particular voices does the writer make salient in their story? What positions or interests do these voices represent?

* What other voices are silent or struggle to be heard in the story? What positions or whose interests remain obscured?

* What tensions and contradictions do you notice as the writer moves in their story between different positions (e.g., self—others, internal—external, local—societal, local—global, learner—teacher, practice—research, practice—institution, practice—policy, and so on)?

* How are these contradictions embodied and voiced in the story (or not)?

While we did not insist that contributors address such questions, providing a common set of possible reference points may have enabled different storywriters and reader responders, as far as we know, to move between positions in their landscapes and see different directions they had taken and/or might yet take.

From working together with so many different contributors, we also came to appreciate how the constant shifting of positions around a storywriter's narrative between actual readers within the chapter and imagined readers outside the chapter seemed to confront and eventually empower authors ‘in an evolving process of narrative re-construction, re-telling and becoming’ (Goodson & Gill, 2011: 44). In the process of creating a shared chapter, each writer—storywriter, reader responder or conclusion chapter commentator—was always bound to two ‘others’ as they wrote. We have formed the impression that this ever-present sense of close ‘narrative encounter’ (Goodson & Gill, 2011: 73-91) helped make possible the emergence of a ‘third voice’ (ibid.)—or new perspectives—in different chapters. Following Goodson and Gill's model of narrative learning, it seems to us that the extended tri-partite interactions allowed practitioners not only to narrate and collaborate, but also, at times, to locate and re-integrate their stories of practices into renewed frames of understanding and action for the future. Other possible effects from such structured, co-constructed narrative encounters are of course legion: we would like simply to invite readers to consider how narrative knowing may create a heightened sense of agency for different protagonists in Stories of Practices—and to notice, too, what questions remain unresolved from one story to the next.

Having now emphasized connections and contradictions in Stories of Practices rather than complete answers, we are close to the end of this particular version of our story. Before finishing, we would like to thank all 43 writers for their fascinating contributions. During this project, we learnt a great deal from working with you and were constantly delighted as each chapter developed from one stage to the next. We thank you for writing with such openness, wholeheartedness and engagement. We would also like to welcome readers to Stories of Practices. We hope that you will similarly enjoy reading each chapter. As you enter into the stories and responses that follow, you may well find yourself connecting and questioning new pieces of the jigsaw in your own understandings of learner and teacher autonomy. We certainly did, and we also came to appreciate deeply the wealth of personal and professional experience and knowledge that projects like Stories of Practices bring together. This made editing Stories of Practices an extremely rewarding experience for us, and now it is our great pleasure to share this collective narrative resource with you.

April 2013

Andy Barfield, Tokyo, Japan

Natanael Delgado Alvarado, Durango, Mexico

Note

1. In a different collaborative writing project Vieira provided guidelines for the writers as they read each other’s chapters and gave feedback. The list of questions was designed to ‘achieve inter-textual coherence, enhance dialogue between (writers) in the process of writing and allow the reader to perceive (the) texts as particular cases of some broader issues tackled in the book’ (Vieira, 2009: 12). We drew on some of these questions, adapting and changing them according to our concerns with Stories of Practices. Jiménez Raya, Lamb & Vieira (2007: 20-22) was also an important source of ideas here.

References

Adamson, J., & Athanasiou, A. (2011). Middle management and diversity of evaluation of self-access. Independence, 51, 17-20.

Barfield, A. (2012). More than telling success: revisiting teachers’ learner autonomy stories. In K. Heim & B. Rüschoff (Eds.), Involving language learners: Success stories and constraints (187-99). Duisburg: Universitätsverlag Rhein-Ruhr OHG.

Barfield, A., & Brown, S. H. (Eds.) (2007). Realizing autonomy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barfield, A., & M. Nix (Eds.) (2003). Autonomy you ask! Tokyo: JALT Learner Development SIG.

Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Darsawang, P., & Adamson, J. (2011). Looking back on 20 years of self-access: Insights from King Mongkut’s University of Technology. Independence, 52, 28-32.

Delgado Alvarado, N. (2011). Eating for a lifetime. Independence, 52, 6-7.

Goodson, I. F., & Gill, R. G. (2011). Narrative pedagogy: Life history and learning. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Jiménez Raya, M., Lamb, T., & Vieira, F. (2007). Pedagogy for autonomy in language education in Europe—Towards a framework for learner and teacher development. Dublin: Authentik.

Lacey, F. (2011). Autonomy: the problems. Independence, 52, 18-20.

Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context. London: Routledge.

Shu-Hua, K. (2011). Response to ‘Autonomy: the problems’. Independence, 52, 21-22.

Šubic Jeločnik, I. (2011). Response to ‘Autonomy: the problems’. Independence, 52, 22-23.

Vieira, F. (2009). Introduction. In F. Vieira (Ed.), Struggling for autonomy in language education: Reflecting, acting, being (7-14). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Vye, S., Barfield, A., & Athanasiou, A. (2011). Learning that doesn’t label what ‘kind’ of autonomy is appropriate. Independence, 50, 21-24.

How to reference this e-book

To give an ‘in-text’ reference to part of a chapter in this e-book (where there are no page numbers), you can paraphrase the selected part of text and avoid the need for a specific page reference. Alternatively, you can use the names of the major sections in which the cited text occurs, e.g., ‘… seeing them in terms of discourses of power and ideologies lets me acknowledge the heterogeneous nature of cultures and places agency strictly on the actors’ (Course, Lamb & Aoki 2013, Part 2, Simla’s story continued, para. 8).

When listing this e-book as a bibliographic reference, be sure to include the type of e-book version that you have used as in the following example, where the reader has read a PDF version:

Barfield, A., & Delgado Alvarado, N. (Eds.) (2013). Autonomy in Language Learning: Stories of Practices [PDF]. Canterbury, England: IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG.

Apply the same principle when listing as a bibliographic reference a particular chapter in this e-book, as in the following example where the reader has read a Kindle version:

Smith, R., Barkhuizen, G., & Vieira, F. (2013). Teacher education and autonomy: Where’s the real story? In A. Barfield & N. Delgado Alvarado (Eds.), Autonomy in Language Learning: Stories of Practices [Kindle]. Canterbury, England: IATEFL Learner Autonomy SIG.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Richard Pemberton (1957-2012). Richard was a close friend, much-loved colleague, and an inspiration to many in the learner autonomy field—and just as importantly he was a storyteller supreme. He would have enjoyed this book immensely, and we like to imagine Richard smiling, laughing, sharing stories and responding, with all his customary wit and charming aplomb.

Part One: Stories of practices in primary / secondary / high school contexts

Chapter 1: Co-constructing learner autonomy for young learners: Learner efforts, teacher reflections, policy development. Shu Hua Vivien Kao, Antoinette Camilleri Grima & Kuchah Kuchah

Shu Hua Vivien Kao, Chihlee Institute of Technology, Taiwan, shuhua_k@hotmail.com

Antoinette Camilleri Grima, University of Malta, Malta, acam1@um.edu.mt

Kuchah Kuchah, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, h.kuchah@sheffield.ac.uk

Part One

Vivien’s story

It’s impossible for me to tell the story of my engagement with learner autonomy without first giving a historical view of the changing discourses around education in my society, Taiwan. Educational policies in Taiwan changed following the rapid political, economic and sociocultural transformations from the 1960s onward. After the Kuomintang (KMT) Party lost the Civil War (1926-1956) to the Communist Party in China, the KMT relocated to Taiwan. To maintain national security, martial law was imposed, with one result being that the discourses and practices in the educational system valued highly authoritative figures in society.

It was not until 1987 that martial law was lifted and democratic activities started to blossom. To meet the needs of these political and social changes, the Ministry of Education (MOE) initiated a series of reforms in the 1990s, in which learner autonomy was included as an educational aim. Despite this shift in the educational system in Taiwan, the society was, and still is, deeply influenced by a Confucian philosophical stance and a hierarchical relationship between teacher and learner. Typical classroom practice is normally associated with a ‘top-down lecturing’ approach rather than an ‘interactional’ one.

In my own experience, schooling was full of studying for examinations, one after the other. A major reason was the extremely competitive, once-a-year College Entrance Examination, which was abolished in 2002. This exam, the only route to university, was the ultimate goal for most secondary school students (as well as their parents). Many students who failed to pass the exam would either retake the examination in the following year(s) or simply give up. Although I passed the examination, I had to admit I was not happy at all being a secondary school learner as I felt that I was not studying for myself, but for other people such as my parents.

Growing up in a learning environment where students’ voices were rarely heard, I was not at all familiar with the concept of learner autonomy in a classroom setting. It was not until 1996, the year I started to teach English to primary school students, that my interest in learner autonomy took off. At the time, I did not have the opportunity to learn about theoretical perspectives in relation to learner autonomy. Rather, my attention was drawn to the potential of learner autonomy from seeing an 8-year-old boy named Kenny (a nom de plume) becoming an extremely active student in class and a relatively autonomous learner. At the beginning, the boy was neither active in class nor did he perform well. Later, that changed dramatically. After approaching his mother, I found that Kenny had been trying a strategy I’d suggested in class—listening to an audio-tape once a day—and found it helpful. The mother mentioned that the boy would not go to bed unless he had listened to the tape at least once and would try his best to plan his time in doing so. Kenny was an inspiration to me, and from that point on I started to encourage my students to use different ways of learning in class. As I could not find any local in-service training programmes on learner autonomy, my first involvement with learner autonomy was basically through experimenting with different ways to encourage children to try different learning strategies. However, I found it difficult to cater for different learning needs in a large mixed-ability class. I hoped that my learners would become more autonomous, but wondered whether there were practical ways or approaches available for helping learners to learn more autonomously.

Exploring answers to the questions I raised through the three years of teaching was a lonely process. Although I found some answers that worked, it was not until I commenced my Master’s and PhD studies at the University of Nottingham that I came to grasp a more holistic picture of what elements the development of learner autonomy encompassed. I also learned more about different approaches to implementing pedagogy for autonomy as well as their underlying theories.

Although, as a teacher, I was aware of the importance of learner autonomy for a student, I had to admit I had rarely been autonomous in the classroom myself from primary school to my university studies. In fact, the situation only began to change after I started my Master’s studies in the UK in 1999. The learning experience in the UK itself offered me the best opportunity to learn in a way that was totally different from what it was like in Taiwan. As a student in a more interactive learning environment, I slowly became used to becoming more active in class rather than expecting the teacher to ‘lecture’ throughout the class/course. It took some time for me to adjust from being a listener to being a speaker, from being a relatively reactive student to a more proactive learner, and from expecting to receive knowledge imparted by the teacher to expecting to share my own perspectives with the teacher and my classmates. I was lucky to become a student again, and this completely new learning experience changed my idea of being a learner from examination-oriented to learning-directed. For the first time in my life, I truly enjoyed and made sense of learning experiences where my voice as a student could be heard. To me, this was a fundamental ideological transformation as a learner.

On top of this reconstruction of my learning ideology, I also had the chance to constantly reflect on my previous teaching experiences in relation to theories of learner autonomy in my Master’s and PhD studies. With the help of my supervisor, Dr Barbara Sinclair, I was able to explore further the answers to some of the questions raised by my earlier teaching experiences, and at the same time, develop questions in relation to different contextual and social factors regarding the implementation of pedagogies for autonomy. Here are some of the questions I considered during that period of time:

* Will the theories of learner autonomy, mainly developed in the West, be applicable to the teaching context in the East, such as in Taiwan?

* How could learner autonomy be interpreted in a context derived from Confucianism, such as in Taiwan?

* Can promoting learner autonomy be a practical and achievable aim in children’s English learning in Taiwan?

* Why should learner autonomy be important for Taiwanese primary school English learners?

* To what extent could learner autonomy be fostered in children through classroom practice?

My approach to pedagogy for autonomy was channelled through a teacher-directed/learner-decided learner-training framework. During the course of developing further the promotion of pedagogy for autonomy in children’s English learning, I realised the indispensible role of psychological theories and enrolled for a Master’s course in Psychology at the Open University through blended learning. This was a different learning experience for me, and I was able to develop further not only as a learner but also as a teacher-researcher.

My journey, in attempting to put pedagogy for learner autonomy into teaching practice in Taiwan, turned out to be a vehicle for me to develop both greater learner autonomy and teacher autonomy, at both personal and professional levels. In a nutshell, my involvement in pedagogy for learner autonomy and the development of teacher autonomy went through various stages: witnessing the potential of learner autonomy, developing greater autonomy as a learner and teacher-researcher, reflecting on my own learning experiences and teaching experiences in relation to the theories of learner autonomy, and putting pedagogy for autonomy into primary teaching practice in Taiwan via learner training. Throughout this journey, I have constantly reflected on a variety of roles I play: as a teacher and a learner (through learning ‘how to teach’ as well as ‘how to learn’); as a researcher (through learning ‘how to answer questions’ as well as ‘how to ask more questions’); and as an explorer (through learning ‘how to empower’ as well as ‘how to enjoy the consequences of the empowerment’).

Antoinette’s response

As soon as I started reading Vivien’s narrative, I felt I could empathise with her, and understand where she was coming from, with how she has evolved from student to teacher to teacher-researcher, while sharpening her awareness of her own growth as a learner all along. In the second line of her story she mentions the ‘changing discourses around education’ in her society. I have also been experiencing this in my context (Malta), a country which moved from a long period of colonisation to independence in 1964 (Malta became a republic in 1974 and a member of the European Union in 2004). Self-determination at a political level has brought about important periods of reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of our educational system, resulting in an on-going and continuously unfolding implementation of policies focussed on, for instance, formative assessment to complement a much better-established system of summative testing/examining; inclusive education; and a college system which has replaced the division of state schools into those for high achievers from those for low achievers (i.e., students who failed a national examination at age 11). However, like Vivien, I continue to question myself about the extent to which, and in what ways, classroom practices have, or have not, changed. Some things have clearly changed in my context, such as the inclusion of weaker learners into the mainstream. But in other ways we are not there yet, for example when it comes to the need for shifting away from a textbook-based approach and a methodology dictated by the syllabus, to a context where teachers’, and especially learners’, voices can be heard. Indeed, in Malta unlike Taiwan, learner autonomy has not yet been posed as an educational aim. But I do not lose heart because I personally experience the development of learner autonomy as a passage (Vivien calls it a ‘journey’), and as such it requires time, effort and space for growth. Similarly, national (and other) systems require a long time to change, and they usually need to go through numerous processes in order to be able to progress.

Secondly, I was struck by how Vivien’s attention to pedagogy for autonomy was triggered by the improved performance of one boy, following her conscious attempt to ‘touch’ him by specifying a solution to a need, on a one-to-one basis, and eventually by ‘experimenting’ with how to excite her students by recommending ‘different learning strategies’, in the hope that each would pick the one(s) that suited them most as active and autonomous learners. At this stage, Vivien’s learning curve as an autonomous teacher experienced a sharp rise, and I wonder to what extent this led her to explore answers to questions by furthering her studies abroad; this, in turn, resulting in a rise in her curve as an autonomous learner. Having myself experienced postgraduate studies abroad (an MSc in Applied Linguistics and PhD at Edinburgh University), and eventually a professional engagement with the Council of Europe, I can appreciate how (a) travelling to other countries, (b) meeting significant contributors to a