Analyzing student practice in language resource centres of the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg : is planning really central to self-directed learning?
Résumé
The Language Resource Centres (LRCs) of the Louis Pasteur University (LPU) in Strasbourg were created to promote both language learning and the development of learner autonomy among university students. Teacher support in the LRCs is based on the prevailing principles found in the literature on self-directed learning. But little is in fact known about how learner autonomy actually develops and a few authors have started to challenge the assumption that planning is central to self-directed learning. Our doctoral research set out to comprehensively study how university students learning a foreign language in an LRC proceed when encouraged to self-direct learning. The corpus of data was obtained using a methodology combining direct observation of individual learners' work sessions and subsequent interviews. The confrontation of the data with literature on autonomy led us to identify four lines of analysis, according to which student activity was then qualitatively analyzed. This article will focus on one of them: if and how the learners controlled or monitored their learning process. Although our results remain to be confirmed on larger numbers of learners studied for a longer time span, they open challenging areas of investigation into the nature of the processes involved in self-directed learning.
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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