This is the last lecture in Phase II (Dec 2006 - June 2007) of the video-conferencing teacher education and teacher training project in ELT from UK to Al-Quds Open University in Palestinian Territories. The project is sponsored by the British Council, and Mark Krzanowski is the Project Manager in London. This session has been prepared for Palestinian trainer trainers and experienced Palestinian teacher educators.
Successful Learner Autonomy and Learner Independence in Self-Directed Learning
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7. 5. Give practical examples of how you would exploit the CD recordings of ‘Active Learner’ for promotion of learner autonomy in English for Academic Purposes classes . ‘
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10. 7. Give examples of different modern Learning Technologies (LTs) and comment on whether they are a blessing or a curse for educators wishing to promote learner independence. Provide some specific instances of the advantages of LTs for self-directed learning. “ Learning technology is the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching, and assessment. Learning technologists are people who are actively involved in managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of learning technology. A very wide range of people in industry and in private and public sector education have learning technology as a core part of their role: you do not have to be called or to call yourself a learning technologist to be one!” http://www.alt.ac.uk/learning_technology.html Examples: Technologies such as Macromedia Flash and streaming video and audio permit material to be viewed again and again, anywhere, any time. The three main (incompatible) formats for streaming media are Real , QuickTime and Windows Media . Practical example: YouTube & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcbpsYj1LXw
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14. 11. Allegedly a good independent learner is able to use a wide range of cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies. Give some examples of both, and say which group is more important. Directed attention, when deciding in advance to concentrate on general aspects of a task; Selective attention, paying attention to specific aspects of a task; Self-monitoring, i.e., checking one's performance as one speaks; Self-evaluation, i.e., appraising one's performance in relation to one's own standards; self-reinforcement, rewarding oneself for success Repetition (when imitating others' speech) Resourcing, i.e. having recourse to dictionaries and other materials; Translation (using their mother tongue as a basis for understanding and/or producing the target language; Note-taking; Deduction (conscious applic. of L2 rules); Contextualisation (embedding a word or phrase in a meaningful sequence); Transfer (using knowledge acquired in the L1 to remember and understand facts and sequences in the L2); Inferencing, when matching an unfamiliar word against available information (a new word etc); Question for clarification, when asking the teacher to explain Metacognitive [Wended, 1998] Cognitive [ O’Malley & Chamot, 1990]
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28. Selected Bibliography Chapter on ‘Learning with Self-Access’ Why should learners contribute to the self-access centre? Diane Malcolm ELT Journal 2004 58(4):346-354; doi:10.1093/elt/58.4.346 http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/58/4/346 http://iteslj.org/Articles/Thanasoulas-Motivation.html http://iteslj.org/Articles/Shrader-Empowerment.html http://iteslj.org/Articles/Shrader-Empowerment.html MK (BBC World Service, 2002-2003)