LEARNER LEARNING AUTONOMY AND BLENDED LEARNING MODEL

TỰ CHỦ HỌC TẬP CỦA NGƯỜI HỌC VÀ MÔ HÌNH HỌC TẬP KẾT HỢP

ThS.Văn Thanh Tâm

Khoa Ngoại ngữ -HUFLIT

Email: tamvt@huflit.edu.vn

Tóm tắt
Ngày nay, hầu hết mọi người, đặc biệt là sinh viên đại học đều sở hữu một chiếc
điện thoại thông minh. Họ dành nhiều thời gian tìm kiếm các trang web để học khi được
hỏi về mục đích của các trang web tìm kiếm. Điều này cho thấy rằng người học bây giờ
đã có khả năng tự học. Khi được hỏi điện thoại thông minh có giúp ích gì cho việc học
của các em không và học kết hợp có mang lại lợi ích gì không, các em đều trả lời là “có”.
Vì vậy, nghiên cứu này được thực hiện nhằm kiểm tra xem việc sử dụng internet và học
tập kết hợp có giúp thúc đẩy tính tự chủ của người học và cải thiện kỹ năng học tập của
họ hay không. Để hoàn thành nghiên cứu, các quan sát, nhiệm vụ viết và số liệu thống kê
đã được khai thác. Và kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy việc sử dụng internet và học tập kết
hợp mang lại lợi ích cho người học. Nó không chỉ cung cấp cho người học những thông
tin cần thiết, phát triển tính tự chủ trong học tập mà còn nâng cao kỹ năng học tập của
họ.

Từ khóa: điện thoại thông minh, học tập kết hợp, học tập tự chủ

Abstract

Nowadays, almost everyone, especially university students, owns a smart phone.

They spend lots of time searching webs for learning when being asked about the purpose
of the searching webs. This revealed that learners now had the ability to learn on their own.
When being asked if their smart phones were helpful with their learning and blended
learning brought them any benefits, all of them answered “yes”. Therefore, this study was
conducted to examine whether the internet use and blended learning helped promote
learners’ autonomy and improve their learning skill or not. To fulfil the study, observations,
writing tasks, and statistics were exploited. And the results of the study revealed that the
internet use and blended learning brought benefits to learners. It not only supplied learners
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with necessary information, developed learning autonomy but also improved their learning
skill.

Key words: smart phones, blended learning, learning autonomy

Introduction

With the rapid development of information technology, almost all things have
changed. In education, there has been a clear shift from teacher-centered classes to learners-
centered classes with a lot of activities encouraging learners-cooperation, since the
appearance of electric tools from the internet. Schools have been applying information
technology into teaching in order to help learners learn with their best ability, and then
blended learning has been focused. What this method of teaching and learning has been
doing is to help learners to develop their learning autonomy at the best. However, whether
how much learners benefit from this way of learning and teaching leaves us a question. This
paper aims to review previous research and demonstrate the results of a study to find out
answers to the question.

Literature Review

Everyone knows the value of the internet in many different fields, from business,
military, health care, to education. So far, schools and universities have considered blended
learning as a useful way to help learners achieve their goals. Tong, Uyen, and Ngan (2022)
confirmed in their study that blended learning brought lots of benefits to learners such as
stimulating positive learning attitude, developing learners’ ability to study on their own,
and helping learners “refine” their knowledge. So, this way of learning has shifted from
teacher-centered classes to students-centered ones as Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky
introduced and encouraged when they found that in such student-centered environments,
even in higher education, students learnt with their best. Besides, they also convinced that
such a new way of learning encouraged students to develop their critical thinking rapidly
and build their successful future.

Rogers (1983) argued that "the only learning which significantly influences behavior
is self-discovered". Learners will learn by doing things by themselves and they will
discover things through doing them. However, he did not point out that whether it is
necessary for learners to learn with any help from others such as teachers or not. And
whether such ways of learning can help learners recognize mistakes or errors they may
make or have so that they can correct themselves.

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 Wright (2011) and Hoidn (2017) agreed with that way of learning, and they also
believed that was true for higher learners because through that way of learning, it
encouraged learners to talk to their teachers and their friends in classroom, which created
an active learning, and gradually helped learners to build their problems-solving skills.
Clearly, with the student-centered environment, active learning, cooperative learning, and
inductive teaching and learning are boosted. In such an active class, learners have chances
to work individually and then debate with their partners.

Also, with the development and the help of information technology, learners need
to have “ability to take charge of one’s own learning” (Holec, 1981, p. 3). Clearly,
awareness of learning and learning autonomously are something that comes from learners
themselves. However, as Ba pointed out in his study in 2018 that though learners found
blended learning useful, “they were still not actually autonomous” (p.8). Moreover,
Dziuban et al (2018) revealed that “blended learning is the harbinger”, even in higher
education. So, what interests learners and whether learners themselves are interested in
learning environment or not are the things that teachers need to consider when they are
planning lessons or lectures.

It is normal that learners, even in higher education, really need incentives to learn,
and marks is a good example. If learners are not promised to award marks, they become
lazy studying. And then some questions arise from the review. That is whether learners are
aware of and take charge of their own learning and learn autonomously, whether teachers
encourage (without any award like marks), force, advice learners to learn, or they just stand
by and let learning autonomy be itself.

Method

Participants

Forty-three first-year students of a random writing class were invited to take part in
the study. Their English level were at PET on the CEFR scale. At the time they took part
in the study, they were being instructed how to write a paragraph, and they were supposed
to be aware of self-study.

Data collection and analysis

A qualitative approach was applied to analyze the data of the study and a
questionnaire was also released to the participants to see how developed the participants’
learning autonomy. At first, all the participants were asked to write and hand in a 60-80

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word paragraph about their favorite sport (pre-test), and all papers were corrected, and only
the format of a paragraph was focused. There were two learners committing no mistakes in
their writing papers, and they were asked not to join the study any more. Then the
participants were encouraged (they were not forced to do so) to go on the internet to search
and read any pages instructing how to write a good paragraph and send the links or materials
to the researcher. All of the participants then were asked to write a 60-80 word paragraph
about their favorite trip somewhere. The papers were then collected and the paragraph-
format errors were recorded and pointed out to them. Again, they were supposed to go on
the internet to collect other pages on how to write a good paragraph and complete six more
writing tasks until they finished 6 weeks with 6 different paragraphs. All the papers were
collected every week and marked, and the errors were recorded.

Findings and Discussion

When being asked whether they get access to the internet every day, all the
participants immediately said ‘yes,’ which meant 100% of the participants used the internet.
However, the results from the questionnaire on the purposes of the use of the internet were
(in figure 1) totally different. As in figure 1, the participants were much more interested in
using the internet for entertaining than the other things to do such as reading news,
shopping, or learning English.

Purposes of the use of the internet

English
News Entertaining Shopping
learning
Number of
32 36 41 12
participants
Percentage 78,0 87,8 100 29,2
Figure 1. Purposes of the use of the internet

As pointed out in figures 2 and 3, the participants also admitted that the time they
spent on learning English with the internet was not much. Up to 67% of the participants (29
out of 41 participants) said they just spent about one hour a day getting access to the internet
to learn English. Whereas only 4.9% (2 out of 41 participants) spent around 4 hours a day
learning English with the internet. However, most of the participants agreed that they felt
really interested in learning English (listening to tasks, songs…, reading news, papers in
English…) with the internet. This is an interesting point for teachers to consider when
planning their lectures.

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 4.9% 2.6%
12.2% 7.7%

17.1% 20.5%
70.7% 69.2%

< an hour/day 1-2 hour/day

3-4 hour/day > 4 hour/day really interested interested normal boring

Figure 2. Time spent on learning English with Figure 3. Felling interested in blended learning
the internet
The errors in the first writing papers (pre-test) in Figure 4 below were high. Each
paper was up to 62%, and there was 83% of the participants made mistakes, which showed
that the learners had not understood much about the format of a paragraph.

The highest The lowest

number of number of
Number of
errors in each errors in each The average
papers
paper paper
(average) (average)
Number of errors 41 11 7 9
Percentage 100 26,8 17,0 21,9
Figure 4. The average errors in paragraphs-writing

This result also revealed that their input into the format of a paragraph was not enough yet
and the time they need to spend on learning more about how to write a good paragraph is
necessary.

Based on this result, the researcher encourage participants to go on the internet to

read more about how to write a paragraph to develop their paragraph-writing skills and
oversee their self-study in order to develop the skills during the time. After reading and
analyzing the last papers from the participants, the researcher realized that if learners had
good learning autonomy, they would find the internet helpful and useful, as the table below
indicated.

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 The number The highest The lowest
The number
of number of number of
of papers
participants errors in errors in The average
after 6
at first each paper each paper
weeks
(average) (average)
Number of errors 41 38 8 3 5,5
Percentage 100 92,6 21,0 7,8 14,4
Figure 5. The progress in writing skill

The results from table 2 also pointed out that three learners did not take responsibility for
improving their writing skill, which meant that without requirement, some learners might
not take responsible for their learning. However, when learners’ learning autonomy was
there in their awareness, their language skills developed. As compared to the average
number of errors in the pre-test, the one in the final test was lower. This number showed
that together with learning autonomy, blended learning is really helpful and useful for
learners to improve their language skills.

Observations right in classroom also showed that learners were reading and willing
to use their smart phones and access the internet whenever being asked to do so to search
for information on a particular subject. After searching the required information, over 80
percent of the learners could recall and compare with what they have learnt before. Such
results indicated that learning with the internet born some certain fruit.

Conclusion

The results from the study pointed out one of the powerful points of blended learning
was that it helped learners a lot with their learning. They found the internet a useful means
for them to search and a source of necessary information for their learning whenever they
needed. It also helped them with developing learning skills, writing skills in particular, and
gradually building their learning autonomy. However, still, there were learners that were
not interested in blended learning at all. So, it is hard to have exact answer to whether it is
easy or difficult for learners to learn autonomously, and what interests them to learn on
their own, and how and what teachers do to arouse learners’ learning autonomy, or just let
learning autonomy be itself for learners.

Limitations

Despite being conducted with high seriousness and the clear results from this study,
it still has some limitations:
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 • The study was conducted in a short time – 6 weeks.
• A limited number of participants took part in the study.
Therefore, more studies on the same subject are really needed.

References

Ba, H. T. (2018). Using the Internet to Promote Business Learners’ Autonomy in

Vietnam. International Journal of Education & Literacy Studies, 6(3), 1 - 8.

Dziuban, C., Graham, C. R., Moskal, P. D., Norberg, A., & Sicilia, N. (2018). Blended
learning: the new normal and emerging technologies. International Journal of
Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(3).

Hoidn, S. (2017). Student-Centered Learning Environments in Higher Education

Classrooms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Holec, H. (1981). Autonomy in foreign language learning. Oxford: Pergamon.

Lathan, J. (n.d.). Complete Guide to Teacher-Centered vs. Student-Centered Learning.

Retrieved from onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu:
https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/teacher-centered-vs-student-centered-learning/

Tong, D. H., Uyen, B. P., & Ngan, L. K. (2022, 1 21). The effectiveness of blended
learning on students' academic achievement, self-study skills and learning
attitudes: A quasi-experiment study in teaching the conventions for coordinates in
the plane. Retrieved from Heliyon: https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-
8440(22)03945-
7?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2
FS2405844022039457%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Wright, G. B. (2011). Student-Centered Learning in Higher Education. International

Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 23(3), 92 - 97.

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