Autonomy

In the chapter intitled Theory and Research: Autonomy in Language Learning, Deborah Healey starts out by outlining a general definition of "autonomy", following-according to her sayings (p. 391)- the term "self-direction" used by Dickinson (1987). She then discusses more in detail some important factors which affect the degree of autonomy: issues regarding the learner, which include: "1. degree of self-motivation, 2. preference for an independent style, 3. knowledge of how one learns best, 4. knowledge of what one needs to learn" (pp. 394-395), and issues regarding the content, which include three conditions: "1. The path to the goal is relatively unambiguous. 2. What is to be learned can be explained clearly. 3. Appropriate resources exist for self-directed language learning." (p. 396). Healey then gears her discussion towards building autonomy in CALL environments and starts out from the five preconditions for motivation suggested by Good and Brophy (1987): "1. an appropriate level of challenge or difficulty 2. learning objectives that are meaningful to the learner 3. variation in the teaching methods used 4. intrinsic and extrinsic feedback about success 5. no barriers to learning" (p. 397-398).

I agree that the level of students' autonomy depends on so many factors like: the proficiency and age of students, their goal in learning the language or addressing different learning styles, and I think that even in cases where it seems like students should mainly depend on their teacher for any of such reasons, there still can be solutions for encouraging their autonomy through, more control over the pace, for instance, or giving more attention to their learning styles. I have to admit I had not thought of self-assessment as a way to built students' autonomy, which proves that the issue of autonomy is more complex than one might think at first. I liked this chapter also because it includes a nice review of other important topics we touched upon in our course, like differenciation or building students' motivation.

Website evaluation #4

I have chosen to evaluate the website Oggi e domani (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/modlang/carasi/site/pageone.html). Although it doesn't seem to be recently updated, I have used this website for ideas in designing class activities or I sometimes took students to the computer lab and had them practice using this website. This is a very easy to use free of charge website, divided into 20 lessons with a clear although rich layout and content, which addresses beginners and intermediate levels and I think it could be an accessible and attractive website for anyone who wants to learn Italian.
Each lesson has two or three pages which contain dialogues or texts that will ellicit the new vocabulary or grammar topic introduced. Students have also the possibility to listen to the dialogue and/or record their own voice in order to compare with the original, for pronunciation practice. The website provides clear and colorful charts for grammar and vocabulary, as well as plenty of practice through interactive exercises in which, in many cases, students can get instant feedback. The vocabulary is introduced in context, but also supported by nice images. There are external pages that would usually support, through authentic material, the vocabulary or the culture topic introduced. As I said, there is evidence that this site is not currently updated or appropriatedly maintained: many links are broken, especially those of the external links, the forum is not active, or is not very clear how it works, at least. I think this is such a pitty, because I realy think this is/could be such a neat website: it has good graphics with plenty of images and sound files for pronunciation practice, the grammar charts are complete and very well structured and clear, it has numerous interactive exercises or others where students have space to provide their answer, without receiving though automatic feedback (this is usually the case where students need to provide personal answers and/or write short compositions).