92-pages-GUIDELINES-FOR-SECONDARY-SCHOOLS-All-Streams-and-Sections

ORIGINS OF INTEREST IN THE CONCEPT OF AUTONOMY
The concept of autonomy and independence is not a new one. It is indeed deeply rooted in the various
philosophies of the world heritage. It has also been advocated in many educational, social and political sectors as
we shall see below:
• Kant’s contribution to the issue of autonomy has been noticed in many publications about education. He
states, for example, that autonomy is the foundation of human dignity and the source of all morality; and
hence should be an essential aim of education.
• All people concerned with learner autonomy quote an old Chinese saying: “If you give a man a fish, you
feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime” (Confucius 551-479 BC).
Inherent in this proverb is the idea of helping learners to do things themselves and learn for life. That is,
instead of spoon-feeding learners we need to aim at their growth as self-reliant and/or divergent learners.
• Relating autonomy to sociology, many voices claim that Man is no longer considered as a “product of his
society”, but he is “a producer of his society”. The learner should accordingly have a say in what to learn,
why to learn and how to learn.
• The new definitions and dimensions of a “learned” person have also contributed to interest in autonomy. A
learned person is no longer the “know-all” or “fountain of knowledge”, but someone who has learned how to
learn, and carry on learning even after leaving school and throughout his or her life.
• Many revolutionary education philosophers have contributed to interest in autonomous learning (e.g.
Rousseau, Dewey, Rogers, Illich, Vygotsky, etc). All of these have underscored the active role the learner
should play when learning.
• Interest in learner autonomy in the field of language education has been the result of the rapid shifts in
psychology, linguistics and applied linguistics over the last thirty years or so. Many publications have
underlined the position of the language learner as an active partner in the learning operation. From a
constructive view, the role of the learner has even been considered as determinant in restructuring and
reshaping his or her knowledge and experience.
Learner autonomy conjures up ‘independence’, ‘self-direction’ ‘awareness’, ‘development’, ‘involvement’, etc.
It also seeks to explicitly recognize the rights of learners in school and de-emphasize their being kept in the dark.
Learners; in other words, need to be informed on what is required from them and why. They need to be informed
about the method (or methods) to be used in the classroom and the reasons behind that. They particularly need to
be aware of the learning standards to achieve once the course is over. In our context, where English is taught as a
foreign language, learners need to be initiated and carefully trained to become autonomous. It is unlikely that
learners carry out learning on their own without such training.
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التوجيهات التربوية وبرامج تدريس مادة اللغة الإنجليزية س ت ث ت 2007