JALT学習者ティヘロフメントSIGの会報	 	  Voices	  	  	
  読者の声	 Autonomy	
  Big	
  and	
  Small	
  
	
  
Phil	
  Benson,	
  The	
  Hong	  Kong	  Institute	
  of	
  Education	  フィル・ベンソン	
  香港教育学院	
  Michael	  Mondejar,	
  International	
  University	
  of	
  Japan	  	
  マイケル・モデジャー	
  国際大学	  Jackie	  Suginaga,	
  Komazawa	
  Women’s	  University	  杉長ジャッキー	 	  駒沢女子大学	
 Keywords: autonomy, grammar, vocabulary, institutional education, demotivation, self-instruction,
self-access, independent learning, self-access learning, democratic schools, technology and language
development, project work
キ ー ワ ー ド :自律学習、文法、語彙、学校教育、意欲喪失、独習、セルフアクセス、独立学習、セル
フアクセス学習、デモクラティックスクール、技術と言語発達、プロジェクトワーク	 	 ackie Suginaga and Michael Mondejar were thrilled and honoured to meet Phil Benson, one ofthe plenary speakers at the JALT national conference in Tokyo last November. As Phil has
been a writer and researcher at the forefront of learner autonomy for many years, we wanted tointerview him to get some insight into how his interest in autonomy started, how his ideas have
evolved, and what advice he could give to teachers who wish to promote learner autonomy. Sitting
down over coffee, Michael started the ball rolling with an important question…

J
	
  	
  

Michael: So why do you think promoting learner autonomy is important in second language
acquisition?
Phil: I think it’s important in learning and I think it’s especially important in second language
acquisition because of this idea that really there’s no curriculum for a second language. If you’re going
to learn a second language to a high level, first of all you have to do a lot of work outside theclassroom and second, everybody’s going to learn in their own way, anyway. So, it’s that idea that
second language acquisition is a very variable thing already, whether you are introducing autonomy ornot. So, I believe that autonomy is important, because that’s what people need to do – they need tolearn a language in their own way, to use it for what they want to use it for.
Michael: How would you respond to people who have researched first language acquisition and havestated that people’s first language is acquired in stages? Wouldn’t those people say that you have tostructure language learning in a certain way?
Phil: Well, I don’t think that that idea is incompatible with autonomy. I mean, I myself would think that if
I was learning a new language, I would want to learn the tense system, I would want to learn how tomake singular and plural, those basic grammatical things. That’s how I was taught French at school,
and there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think that that’s actually a very small part of learning aforeign language. So, I am not against the structure at all. I think there are some things that are betteras structured. But in fact, I think that that can generally be done in a very short time. It’s thedevelopment - it’s going beyond that kind of beginner, intermediate stage and so on – that takes timeand requires autonomy. In my own experience of teaching myself languages, I’ve started with agrammar book and tried to get on top of the grammar, the basic vocabulary, the kind of vocabulary
you find in a list of common words. That doesn’t take long, but then that’s when the difficult part starts.
I think you can also learn a language autonomously from the beginning. But what I’m saying really isthat autonomy doesn’t mean that you have to learn everything autonomously and everything in a kindof deconstructed way.

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  Michael: I wanted to ask you something that occurred to me when I read your book, Teaching andResearching Autonomy. Students who are already very motivated to learn a language, wouldn’t they
automatically become autonomous?
Phil: Well, I don’t think they would automatically become autonomous, because that’s something that
schools and universities can discourage. I think institutional education often demotivates students. The
biggest risk in education is that you will actually discourage the students rather than encourage them.
But there is a link between motivation and autonomy, so I would agree that autonomy is perhaps more
for motivated students than for less motivated students.
There are also unmotivated students, right? There are students in language classes who really don’t
want to learn those languages. I think autonomy means that students should be free to not learn alanguage, free to spend their time learning something else instead. We can take a step outside
language learning and look at autonomy as having a choice about the kind of subjects we want tolearn.
This is the thing with English language teaching though, isn’t it? Everybody has to learn English,
particularly in Asia. In Europe and the West, we talk about language aptitude – that is, some people
are better at learning a language than other people. But in Asia, you rarely hear people talk about
language aptitude. It just seems that everybody has to do it, and it’s how hard you work that
determines your success.
Jackie: Why did you first become interested in autonomy?
Phil: The reason why I got interested in autonomy was because I myself would prefer self-instruction. I
prefer to teach myself than to go to classes. I’ve learned Spanish, Portuguese and Italian in this way. I
tried to learn Japanese and Cantonese too but had a lot less success with those. So, I guess I am
pretty autonomous myself. That’s how I got interested in, first of all, self-access because when I went
to Hong Kong it was to help set up a self-access center in Hong Kong University. I thought that that
was a really great thing for me because this was the kind of thing that I would love to have myself. So,
to help set something like that up for students was really interesting.
Michael: Could you tell us more about the self-access center?
Phil: Well, that was in the early 1990’s, and at that time they expanded the university education
system. These were all English-medium universities, so when they expanded by about 20%, they
were very concerned about the level of the English of the students. They gave a lot of funds to theuniversities for what they called “language enhancement”. Most of the universities at that time set up
these self-access centers, with various degrees of success. I think the ones that have worked
particularly well were City University, The Science and Technology University and the Polytechnic
University. The one we worked in at Hong Kong University, it’s been OK, but we had a lot moredifficulty than the other universities in terms of trying to integrate the self-access and the teaching
together. I think other universities were more successful in doing that.
Jackie: Would, for example, students research their own projects at the self-access center? And wasthis combined with some classroom teaching?
Phil: Yes, we tried various things. For example we had a course where 60% was classroom teaching
and 40% of the course was actually set up so that you could do what you want. You could choose tocomplete a project yourself, you would set targets or carry out the learning yourself, and keep a record,and so on. That kind of approach was less successful because there was a lack of connection
between what students were doing in the classroom, which was mainly academic writing, and what
they were doing in the self-access center, which would often be at a much lower level. At otheruniversities they developed programs that were 100% self-access, and you could get credit for that.
Michael: So there was no classroom instructor, or no classroom time?
Phil: In some cases. There was a program called the Independent Learning Program at City
University, where students could opt for that. The students had to take an English course, but they
could opt to take it in a classroom or they could opt to take it through self access. If they opted to take	
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 	  it through self-access, I think there was no classroom instruction. There may have been a kind of alearner-training workshop, but there was no curriculum, no set of skills that you had to improve – it
was all self-directed.
Jackie: But there was a teacher there for guidance?
Phil: Yes. So, say if it was a classroom course, you would have 20 students in your class. If it was aself-access course, you would also have 20 students who you were responsible for.
Michael: Was there any research in, say, gains in language proficiency?
Phil: I’m pretty sure there wasn’t research on language proficiency, no. It would be really difficult to do
because they were pretty short courses and the students are pretty advanced already when they go in,compared to other levels. At this age in Hong Kong, they have already done about 15 years of English
classes, so it’s very difficult to measure their language proficiency anyway, and then if you are looking
for an improvement over 10 weeks. There are some interesting articles written by Jean Young and hercolleagues about that course.
Jackie: With regards to teacher autonomy and learner autonomy, do you think that they areconnected in any way?
Phil: Well, I should say that I understand what learner autonomy is. I am not sure that I, or anybody
else, really understands what teacher autonomy is, in the sense that there are a number of ways thatyou can use that term, teacher autonomy. You can talk about whether teachers are autonomous
learners or not, so that’s a sort of learner autonomy of teachers, they are autonomous in their learningto teach. Then, there is teacher autonomy in the sense that they have a freedom to do and to makedecisions in the classroom. So, you know, there are so many different ways to define it that it’s difficult
to say. I am a lot less comfortable with teacher autonomy than I am with learner autonomy.
The other problem with the idea of teacher autonomy is that if teacher autonomy means teachers
having more freedom in the classroom, is that an end in itself? If teachers have more freedom in theclassroom, they can use that freedom any way they want. It might not necessarily be to promotelearner autonomy. So, the way I prefer to look at the whole issue is in terms of the specific constraints
that prevent teachers from allowing students to be more autonomous rather than more general
constraints on their own behavior.
But not everyone would agree with that. I’d be very reluctant and slow to take on this idea of teacher
autonomy. I understand what people are talking about, but I think our priority here is learner autonomy,
and then teacher autonomy. Yes, there’s a link, but it also takes you off into other areas aboutteachers’ lives, professional work, etc. which are not necessarily related to learner autonomy.
Michael: What do you think about this idea of filling students with knowledge, like pouring water into a
vessel, versus nurturing them like a seed, providing them with the necessary conditions in which togrow?
Phil: Well, I prefer the second, but I am not sure how helpful these kinds of metaphors are. I don’tknow if this is a metaphor, but I like to think of students as people. I don’t want to be critical about how
other people conceptualize things. But for me, I find it very important to remember that students arepeople. They are people like me, they are just as tired as I am, and they have the same kinds ofconcerns that I have. I think it is easy for teachers to forget that and treat students like they don’t havelives or that they don’t have their own particular concerns. Particularly in language learning, that’s
important. That’s where you begin: the idea that students are learning languages for particular reasonsor for a particular purpose and so on, and if you can help them develop those reasons and purposes,
then that’s good teaching. That’s teaching for autonomy. That’s like the seed growing - so it’s not abad metaphor. I think the idea that learning is growth is a valid idea. Otherwise, you’re going to see
the learner as an empty vessel, and you’ve got to try to fill it up. So we are all looking for alternatives
to that idea of filling up an empty vessel with knowledge.
Michael: Isn’t this idea still prevalent in Asia? The idea that the teacher has to bestow this knowledge
upon the learner and then the learner has to absorb it?

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  Phil: My impression is that it is prevalent in education systems. It’s odd, actually, because when you
look at policies and curriculum documents and so on, that idea is not there. It’s all learner-centered,it’s all lifelong learning, it’s all communicative and task-based and so on. But it seems that at the levelof the way that schools organize things, you tend to get that filling-up-the-vessel idea, and I think it’s
got a lot to do with the big high-stakes public examinations. I think that once you get that, it
encourages a lot of conformity.
Hopefully, in Hong Kong at the school level, it’s changing a little bit because they’ve just introduced a
lot of in-class, in-school assessments. But we have a system where you have one examination for thewhole territory, for the whole city. In principle, I should be able to go into a school on Tuesday, forexample, and see what’s happening in that school and I should be able to go anywhere in the city andsee exactly the same thing happening. That’s the ideal situation, but I think it’s impossible and they
can’t enforce it. It just doesn’t work. And that’s irrespective of the level of the students. You’ve got
really good students and really weak students, and they’re all supposed to be doing the same thing.
The driving force of that is the examination. So, I guess within educations systems, you have a lot ofdifferent drivers and they conflict sometimes.
But this is the case all over Asia. We have these education policies, particularly at the school level,
which are in favor of learner centeredness, communicative teaching, autonomy, etc., but it seems thatthe school systems themselves and the examinations systems conflict with that – they disconnect.
And this is why you can talk to teachers about autonomy. This is why they want to talk about it. It
creates a kind of fertile ground where you can actually have a discussion. But at the end of the day theteachers are quite likely to go away and say “yes, but I can’t do anything”. So, I feel that it’s importantthat we try to address that problem.
Jackie: How has your thinking towards autonomy evolved?
Phil: Well, I think there’s a big autonomy and a smaller autonomy, and the big autonomy is reallyabout education reform, about really changing the whole approach to language learning and language
education. And then there’s a small autonomy, which is what teachers can practically do withoutchanging the whole system. If you work in teacher education or even when you are speaking atconferences like this, it’s not really helpful to tell teachers that the entire education system shouldchange, or even that they should change it. Well, maybe they can do that, but they can’t do it
tomorrow. So, I think that we try to put that idea in their minds that it would be great if the whole
education system would change, but there are also things that you can do now that will be good foryour students.
Michael: How do you feel about democratic schools such as Sudbury – where they promote a
Rousseau-like curriculum, where the learners have more freedom to explore different kinds of stimuli
and take up whatever interests them? Also, learners have a stake in deciding the rules in the school;
they can propose rules and have the same voting power as school staff. There are several of theseschools even in Japan. I’m wondering how successful they are?
Phil: This is a whole informal education system in the States, right? I think every big city, every state
has one or two of these schools and some are better known than others. The impression I have of
these schools is that they generally serve kids who are dropping out, who are failing in the statesystem. So in a sense, as a parent, you only send your kind there when they fail everything else. It’s
really a last resort. If they fail there, it doesn’t really matter because they’ve failed everywhere else. It
does seem that they work for many of those kids. You’re talking about kids who have taken almost no
responsibility for their learning, and are very, very demotivated. These schools can have an effect inmotivating or empowering the students.
Michael: Do you have any experience working with these schools?
Phil: No, I don’t have any experience, no. To my knowledge, there was a well-known one in England –Summerhill. If you’re interested, get the book (http://www.amazon.com/Summerhill-School-New-ViewChildhood/dp/0312141378). A.S Neill was the headmaster – he wrote the book on it. It was one of thefirst of these free schools in the 60s. There were no rules, you didn’t have to go to class, you could doanything you wanted. Well, what they claimed was that normally the kids would just sort of lie around	
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JALT学習者ティヘロフメントSIGの会報	 	  and do nothing for six weeks, and then they would get bored. They started going along to lessons
because they were interesting. There have been a number of very well-known graduates. But whether
that’s a model for an entire education system – I don’t know. These schools have a particular role
within the mainstream education system in that they are taking up the kids who really can’t cope withmainstream education.
Michael: Do you think technology has had an effect on learner autonomy, particularly with increasinguse of online and mobile technology? Anyone can access any kind of information in the blink of an eye.
Phil: Yes, I think it’s had a massive effect, actually. I think that it is probably the most important thingthat is influencing autonomous language learning, especially in countries or in situations wherestudents don’t have direct access to the language they’re learning. The Internet has really quite
radically changed that situation because kids are spending hours every day on it. It’s like that’s
another country that they live in. All the research I’ve seen which has looked at students, the language,
and the Internet is really showing that they do access, particularly in English, the foreign language thatthey are learning out of class on their own. They don’t tell the teachers. It’s not part of homework.
They just do it. Whether they connect it to what they’re learning in school or not, I don’t know, but I
think often they don’t.
Jackie: What about the situation in Hong Kong? Do students access the Internet to learn English?
Phil: The major complaint that I’ve heard in Hong Kong year after year is the students don’t practiceEnglish outside class, but actually they do now. We know that they do, especially at the secondary
level. They get into things on the computer, and they’re doing it all the time, even if only they’re playing
games. Maybe it’s very different in Japan. In Hong Kong, very few people play video games in
Chinese. Most people play in English because of the quality of the games. So Japanese games comeout in an English version and a Chinese version. But normally the English version is much better thanthe Chinese version. It’s much more sophisticated. It’s because the Chinese game is a copy, it’s notunder license. It’s not exactly the same game. Actually, it’s not just the language, but the game itself.
The English games are always ahead. They may even be a year ahead of the Chinese games. That’s
why more people play games in English instead of Chinese. But lots of kids are finding ways to use
the Internet in a foreign language, so I think that’s really going to have a very big impact.
Michael: Do you think technology will have an impact on the role of the teacher in the future?
Computer-assisted language learning is still a relatively new field. Do you think it may change ourgoals?
Phil: If you’re teaching English to students in Japan, or you’re teaching English to Japanese students
who are at a British or American university, the approach would be very different, right? To
oversimplify, you’ve got a foreign language approach and a second language approach. So, what I’m
thinking is that in foreign language situations, the Internet is making English more of a second
language. So I think it’s that kind of adaptation - you have to adapt teaching to account for the fact thatstudents have so many more opportunities to talk to people or do things outside of class. And the idea,
for example, that we take all the text into the classroom for the students for reading – we find the text
and give it to the students – is so unnecessary now. It is very easy to ask the kids to go out and go
find a text for themselves. If they’ve got mobile phones they can even do it while they’re sitting in theclassroom.
I think this applies particularly to the self-access context. People involved with self-access are alreadyrethinking this. You don’t have to provide all of the resources anymore. It’s probably more important tobe knowledgeable about the resources that are available on the Internet. Students don’t necessarily
have to come to your self-access center. To a certain extent, self-access is maybe becoming
redundant as well. Self-access centers may become more like social centers for people interested inlearning foreign languages.
Jackie: What have been the most crucial moments in developing your own thinking about researchingand promoting autonomy?
Phil: Well, I started off in self-access with the idea that autonomy was about self-instruction, aboutproviding people with resources for self-instruction. And I think the major way in which my thinking has

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  developed is that it shifted from the idea of providing resources in a particular place to looking at typesof learners and to what extent they are autonomous inside and outside the classroom. So, that’s been
the biggest development over 20 years or so. And I think a lot of other people in the field have gone
through a similar development as well.
Michael: What advice would you give for teachers seeking to promote learner autonomy in anenvironment where teacher-centered instruction is still the norm?
Phil: My advice is – and you can quote me on this – do what you can and don’t worry that you are notachieving the really big goal. Try to do small things that you can do and that won’t get you into toomuch trouble. Like a lot of people, I thought of learner autonomy as a kind of goal, something you’retrying to achieve with students. That’s fine, but sometimes I just have to prepare my next lesson.
When I do that I can just think about ‘how am I going to teach this stuff’. But if I add in autonomy, I
think ‘how am I going to teach this stuff’ and ‘how am I going to introduce some autonomy in thecourse as well’, and I will prepare in a different way. The way I prepare it may not achieve the goal ofautonomy in the end, but it will be different – it will take autonomy into account. So going back toadvice for teachers, when you’re planning lessons, when you’re planning a course, just think about
where autonomy can fit in. If you think about autonomy, will you do this a little bit differently?
There’s an interesting thing that Kumaravadivelu (2003) says - I was actually quite strongly influenced
by him and his ‘post-method pedagogy’. He has ten principles, ten things you should think about
whenever you’re planning a curriculum or a course. What struck me is his idea that autonomy is one ofthese principles. So, I’m excessively interested in autonomy, but for everybody else, autonomy is only
going to be one of ten things to consider. So, in terms of practically making autonomy work in teaching– just factor autonomy into your planning. There will be a very small number of people who actuallyplan their courses to achieve autonomy, but for everybody else, what we can hope is that they
incorporate it in one way or another.
Jackie: How do you factor autonomy into your courses?
Phil: Mainly by trying to create spaces where the students can have more choices and make moredecisions. People expect my classes are really autonomous, but they’re not, actually, because of thesituation I teach in. For example, in one class I have 160 students in a lecture hall. I’m supposed togive a lecture – that’s the way this course is structured. So I do little things in the lecture to try to givethem choices, try to get them more engaged, but it’s still a lecture; it’s still not the best way to teach.
Jackie: How about learners who prefer the teacher to do everything for them and think they’re toobusy to be autonomous?
Phil: Actually, that’s a real problem. My kid goes to an international school where they do a lot ofproject work. It’s progressive in the sense of having the students more actively involved in what they’re
doing. But the number of things he has to keep in his head and managing the workload is challenging
because he’s involved in many project groups. You can handle one or two…but what if you have fiveof those? Five different subjects, five different groups to manage? You’ve got to plan everything andso on. So I think, in schools that adopt that approach, the problem that they face is the complexity ofmanaging learning. My feeling is that the filling-up-a-vessel approach is very efficient in terms of theamount of knowledge you can pour in, but if you’re going to have more of a constructivist approach, I
think there’s a trade-off: You have to say that they’re not going to learn quite as much – their learning
may have to be more focused. The benefits that you get in terms of the student’s development oflearning skills outweighs the number of words they know. It’s quality versus quantity.
But this is a very difficult argument because people think it’s important that autonomous learners
should get to the same level of proficiency as non-autonomous learners. And I think they may not,actually. We may have to accept that and persuade people that there are more important things thanlevel of proficiency – for example, relevance, usefulness of what you learn. When we measureproficiency, we are very often measuring useless, trivial knowledge. There may be other things wehave to consider, personal relevance in particular. These things are difficult to weigh and measure.
Michael: So while autonomy may be an ideal, it doesn’t always mesh well with current beliefs andgoals.

	
  

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 	  Phil: Well, no, if you’re looking at the bigger picture, and you look at education policies, it does meshwell. I think what doesn’t mesh well are the education policies and the systems. It’s theinstitutionalization of education that is the problem, which makes it difficult to implement these policies.
There seems to be a willingness among people who are at policy decision-making levels, but it’sdifficult to put it into practice, and it’s difficult to get people to practice what they preach.
Jackie: That’s something for us all to think about. Do you have any last words to say?
Phil: I think it’s what I said before: Please think about autonomy when you’re planning your teaching.
Keep it in mind.
References
Benson, P. (2011). Teaching and researching autonomy(2nd ed.). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited.
Hafner, C. A., Fisher, D., & Young, J. (2007). Integrating
independent learning: Lessons learned and implications
for the classroom. In D. Gardner (Ed.), Learnerautonomy 10: Integration and support (pp. 33-55).
Dublin: Authentik.
Hafner, C. A., & Young, J. (2006). From teacher tofacilitator: Developing perspectives. In L. Miller (Ed.),
Learner Autonomy 9: Autonomy in the Classroom (pp.
104-127). Dublin: Authentik.
Hafner, C. A., Young, J., & Fisher, D. (2007). Shifting sands: Supporting teachers in facilitating
independent learning. In A. Barfield & S. H. Brown (Eds.). Reconstructing autonomy in language
education: Inquiry and innovation (pp. 196-208). Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond methods: Macrostrategies for language teaching. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Neill, A. S. (1996). Summerhill school: A new view of childhood. New York, NY: St. Martin's Griffin.
Sudbury Valley School. http://www.sudval.org/01_abou_02.html
	 Note
The photo on this page shows Robert Moreau, Phil Benson and Jackie Suginaga.

	
  

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