Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 25 (2): Research and Reviews

RESEARCH & REVIEWS | 研究 & レビュー
Autonomy in Language Learning and Teaching:
New Research Agendas. Alice Chik, Naoko Aoki, & Richard Smith, 2018.
Palgrave Macmillan UK, 137 pages, ISBN 978-1-137-52998-5, Hardcover￥7,245, eBook ￥5,795.
Hugh Nicoll <hnicoll@gmail.com>

Autonomy in Language Learning and Teaching:
New Research Agendas (hereafter dubbed ALL&T),
edited by Alice Chik, Naoko Aoki, and Richard
Smith was published in early 2018, but had its
origins in the RenLA Research Agenda Project firstoutlined in December 2012. At that time, Alice,Naoko, and Richard were just a year into their 2011
to 2014 roles as co-conveners of the AILA Research
Network on Learner Autonomy (RenLA). TheResearch Agendas in their 2012 versions are stillavailable online here <https://ailarenla.org/lall/december-2012/>, a web page essential to thecontemplation of how difficult and poignant our
research and publication efforts so often turn outto be.
First, and most obviously, ALL&T became one of
Naoko's final publications; second, the project's
first public expression took place at AILA2014 inBrisbane, and it took an additional four years toshepherd the chapters through to publication, andfinally, the 2012 ReNLA web page includes acollection of tributes to Richard Pemberton, who
had died in January of that year. This, in a sense,brings us full circle to this issue of Learning
Learning, to our remembrances of Naoko, and tothe continuing challenges of research, scholarship,writing, and publishing in the face of what may
often seem literally insurmountable obstacles todevelopment, progress, and sustainability in boththe personal and public spheres of our lives asteachers, academics, and researchers.
For most of this year I have been reading andre-reading ALL&T, in a rather disorderly fashion.
Throughout these now many months I have been
puzzling over several questions:

1. Are our efforts as researchers andwriters–perennially thinking about how todefine "learner autonomy" and "learnerdevelopment" merely Sisyphean (see Alison
Stewart's essay, this issue) , particularly
when we try to apply our tentative
definitions to the task of understanding
where the field has been and where it'sgoing?
2. Is attempting to identify and argue for"new research agendas" a similarly difficult,perhaps even a presumptuous effort?
3. Is there a special value to new ideas ineducation research and practice, or, do ourattempts at timeliness trap us in bandwagon
effects? Do the obstacles to freshness
inherent in the time it takes to edit andpublish a collection of chapters represent afurther, and perhaps final confirmation of
the dangers of pedagogical and theoreticalarrogance?
4. Yet, aren't these efforts at surveying afield, making generalizations about trends,
directions, and agendas an essential andinescapable aspect of our roles as
academics, researchers, and scholars?
5. And finally, what are the practicalobstacles (and the obstacles in the current
political economy) to getting our work into
the hands of readers who may benefit fromour efforts, assuming, that is, that mostclassroom teachers are not too burned out
to devote some time to reading and thinking

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 25 (2): Research and Reviews
about theoretical and practical puzzles in afield of study?
As I am now a retired professor living in
Miyazaki, far from an academic and commercial
hub, availability and price of books and research
papers are foremost among these concerns for me.
There are also, I should acknowledge, a number ofother equally personal issues at play, that led me
to look forward to the publication of the ALL&T
collection. First, and now sadly, is the fact I met
both Richard and Naoko shortly after they founded
the LD SIG together, sharing our first discussions oflearner autonomy in Hong Kong in 1994. I followed
their work over the years, and took great interestin Richard's work in the practical and theoretical
approaches to the literature on and practice ofteaching in difficult circumstances, and in Naoko's
explorations of learner identity, narrative, andvoice, and genre-challenging approaches toacademic writing. I was also fortunate in that I
could attend the ReNLA symposium in Brisbane in2014, where I had a symposium participant's
interest in seeing how the proceedings would bepublished. In many ways, the ALL&T collection does
stand as a testament to the ways the editors' andcontributors' work helped to both confirm thecritical hope that learner autonomy/autonomouslearning and teaching began with (see Paulo Freire,1970, 1994, and Henri Holec, 1979, to cite onlytwo), and helped to expand the community of its
authors and practitioners. I was, I have to admit,
somewhat disappointed, therefore, on two counts:(1) The time it took to actually bring the essays
into print, and (2) the cost of the publication itself.
Eventually, as I thought over these questions
through this year, I wrote to Richard and Aliceasking if they still felt the five chapters sufficientas an articulation of "new agendas" for the field,and if they had any comments on the publication of
the collection and on its price, and thus its
relative inaccessibility to teachers and research
practitioners with limited funding and/or access tomajor research libraries. Both Alice and Richard
were gracious in their responses, agreeing that
open-access (i.e., free) publishing models have
many virtues. Happily, chapter 2–“Learner

Autonomy in Developing Countries”– is open accessthrough Springer, <https://link.springer.com/
content/pdf/10.1057%2F978-1-137-52998-5_2.pdf>.
Richard mused in retrospect on whether including'New' in the title was a good idea, particularly
given that project took so long to complete. With
those caveats aside, however, both Alice andRichard feel the chapters can continue to prove
themselves valuable to readers.
The collection itself opens with an introductory
chapter by the editors, arguing that “new researchagendas” are needed to respond to “changingperspectives on language teaching and learning.”(p2) The five main chapters focus on "Learner
Autonomy in Developing Countries" (Smith, Kuchah,and Lamb), "Language Teacher Autonomy and SocialCensure" (Xuesong Gao), "Learner Autonomy andGroups" (Palfreyman), "Learner Autonomy andDigital Practices" (Chik), and "Researching theSpatial Dimension of Learner Autonomy" (Murray).
For me, the threads that bind the individualchapters together return us to a cluster of familiar
themes:– Constraints on autonomous learning andteaching – chapters 2, 3, and 4 especially;– The central paradox of the independence/interdependence puzzle (all chapters, perhaps);– The affordances of digital practices - chapters
2 and 5, in particular; and,– Learning environments ('the spatialdimension'); whether our focus is on classrooms(or the lack thereof) and the attendantconstraints, virtual spaces in a variety ofcontexts, or the use of dedicated learningspaces such as self-access centers and othersocial learning spaces (most explicitly, Garold
Murray's chapter).
What I have gotten most from musing on theseissues is that our primary commitment as teachers
must be to pedagogies and the development ofpublication models that support the construction ofdemocratic classrooms. I am particularly interested
in further teasing out the relationships between(and potential lessons in) chapters 2, 3, and 4, allNewsletter of the JALT Learner Development SIG <http://ld-sig.org>

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Learning Learning 『学習の学習』 25 (2): Research and Reviewsof which explore quality of life questions forlearners and teachers in our shared and troublingtimes. The fact that the book has raised so many
hard-to-answer questions for me about learnerautonomy/autonomous learning suggests that
ALL&T is well worth reading for those of us
interested in puzzling through some of the knots
that engagement with pedagogies and research forlearner autonomy/autonomous learning necessarily
confront us with. I wonder whether others wouldfind this too? I therefore hope that readers ofLearning Learning will encourage your libraries topurchase the collection. In addition, I would like toshare the book with member(s) of the Learner
Development SIG with a view to creating acorrespondence around any ideas and issues thatcatch the interest of and/or challenge fellow
readers of this book.
My shared review proposal is this then: that you
contact me, and I will send you the book to readand respond to. You send me your response to boththe book and this incomplete review and we theninvite others to share their views in response sothat a continuing and collaborative review can be
published in the next issue of Learning Learning in
2019. (And please do return the book to me once
you have written your review!) Naoko, I feel, would
enjoy a co-constructed and on-going review anddiscussion of one of her parting gifts to us.

References
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New
York, NY: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1994, 2014). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving
pedagogy of the oppressed. London, UK:Bloomsbury.
Holec, H. (1979). Autonomy and foreign language
learning. Strasbourg, France: Council for CulturalCooperation.

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