Reflecton on Autonomy learning and CALL

The innovation of CALL leads to form a new research area for autonomous learning. Wolff (1997) claims that computers can offer ways of promoting learners the independence and interdependence while facilitating the construction of knowledge about the target language and enhancing the development of language skills. The environment provided by CALL is of great importance in fostering learner autonomy.

To begin with, CALL environment supported by multimedia and the Internet helps learners promote active learning and create authentic learning experiences by engaging in web-based researches, exploring concepts in a multimedia presentation and creating slides for a presentation. Moreover, the web creates numerous opportunities for "discovery learning”. The web can transport learners to a world with lots of information visually, audibly, and virtually. Learners can break down classroom walls with technology; the web and their active imagination allow them to learn what they want. Therefore, learners often feel more motivated to practice the language when they use a computer and autonomous learning can be easily and comfortably initiated and promoted via the computer technology compared with the conventional methods.

Next, CALL supports students with great control over their learning since they can not only study by their own paces but even by their own individual paths, going forward and backward to preview or review different parts of the program on particular aspects and skipping other aspects. Moreover, while CALL creates a setting of focusing on the main content or information, learners can have access to a variety of background-related links which will allow them rapid access to grammatical explanations or exercises, vocabulary glosses, online dictionaries, pronunciation information, or questions or prompts which encourage them to adopt an appropriate learning strategy.

Then, Learning supported by CALL allows learners to build a "cognitive scaffold" (Shelly, Cashman & Gunter, 2002), which is a mental bridge to build an understanding of complicated concepts. More significantly, the networked computers make learners’ communication beyond the classroom walls, thus enabling schools and communities to provide an environment for cooperative learning and the development of innovative opportunities for language learning. Instead of working alone on computer activities and projects, learners benefit from sharing ideas, discussing learning skills, and helping one another to approach tasks or achieve learning goals by e-mailing, chatting, conferencing and even web-authoring. In a word, the computer technology can serve as a good scaffolding device for autonomous language learning.

Nonetheless, it should be noted that the opportunities of fostering autonomy provided by CALL do not guarantee the positive outcome of autonomous learning.

Several disadvantageous factors like the physical limits or teachers’ technological confines will probably deter its inherent functions in language learning. Apart from those, learners’ lack of technical competence, dissatisfactory strategic performance online will also reduce the effectiveness of autonomous learning under it. Even worse, critics have pointed out that too many links and connections could bring on disorientation to students and multimedia resources may turn out to be too seductive an information source that learners may feel information overloaded. In this case, autonomy under CALL seems not easy to be achieved.

All in all, the computer technology is a two-edged resource, which on the one hand, can facilitate the language learning and foster the autonomy, on the other hand, can block the full play of learner autonomy someway or other. Then how to make good use of the technology to achieve a favorable extent of autonomous language learning?