Empowering Language Learners: Strategies and Resources for Active Learning and Self-Assessment
Activities to Train Strategies and Equip Learners for Active Learning
Training Cognitive Strategies
These activities aim to enhance learners’ knowledge of effective learning methods and develop the strategies they need. Instead of relying on teachers to provide explanations, learners are trained to use techniques such as identifying clues in text, understanding affixes, and consulting dictionaries to establish word meanings independently. Encouraging the use of textbooks as resources, searching for language data, and analyzing patterns and rules can foster the development of other cognitive strategies.
Training Metacognitive Strategies
At the start of a course, it can be beneficial to engage learners in sharing ideas about potential metacognitive strategies. According to Oxford, metacognitive strategies include:
- Centering learning: Overviewing, paying attention
- Arranging and planning learning: Setting goals, organizing, seeking practice opportunities
- Evaluating learning: Self-monitoring
Sample Activity 1: Seeking Out Practice Opportunities – Keeping a Reading Journal
This activity is designed for the beginning of a course and encourages learners to expand their reading and writing activities. The guidelines were created for a group of pre-sessional Japanese students at a UK university. The activity was well-received, with the teacher offering to review writing occasionally and connecting it to oral classroom reports from learners to each other on their reading.
- Determine the format of your journal.
- Select one or two entries per week from sources like newspapers, magazines, or brochures.
- Choose the type of entry you want to make: summary, response, or reflection.
Activities to Encourage Learners to Monitor and Check Their Own Progress
Self-Monitoring Activity: “How Much Have You Learned?”
This activity involves learners in two steps: First, they assess their mastery of a concept in the program. Second, they work with another learner to evaluate their comprehensibility. The aim is to help learners develop the characteristics of a “good language learner,” including the ability to assess their own performance and be self-critical. Learners can enhance their awareness of their individual progress not only in language knowledge but also in their ability to use it. Self-assessment personalizes the monitoring process, and when learners are gradually introduced to collaborative work and can respond to it productively, it can be incorporated into assessment activities, as in the second stage of this activity. Teachers can support learners as they establish criteria for self-evaluation and provide regular opportunities for self-assessment. They can also help learners set standards for themselves by comparing their own assessments with the teacher’s.
The Role of Self-Access Facilities in Language Learning
Self-access resources can vary significantly from one institution to another. However, even with limited funding, teachers can create basic resources. When funding is available, decisions need to be made about the type of resources to develop, the skills learners will need to use them effectively, and the preparation and practice to be done in the classroom.
Facilities That a Self-Access Center Might Contain
- Computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
- Written texts
- Listening cassettes
- Library resources
- Radio and TV
- Grammar bank
- Language games
- Exam materials
For learners to use these materials successfully, teachers need to ensure that they can:
- Use the cataloging system
- Locate items in alphabetical order
- Use an index and a dictionary
These “core skills” are essential for self-access learning.
The Ultimate Aim of Self-Access Facilities
The ultimate goal is for learners to use the facility independently, according to their own goals, and with strategies for monitoring their own progress.
Developing self-access resources involves both their preparation and systems for housing them, as well as preparing learners to use them. Other decisions include how teachers can be prepared to integrate the resources into their courses, whether non-teaching staff will be needed for support, and whether staff development will be necessary for new forms of teacher-student interaction in counseling duties.
The success of self-access learning depends on the thoroughness with which learners have been prepared through a careful process of language training.
Are Learner Autonomy and Language Training Universally Appropriate Concepts?
There are several distinctions to be made and arguments to be disentangled. First, a distinction can be made between perceptions of language training for effective classroom learning and language training for self-directed learning in contexts outside the language classroom, such as in an open learning center or self-study at home.