A Joint Effort

I was looking for information on The Net related to learner’s autonomy and learner training and I came across a webpage which dealt with these issues, it was addressed to parents, though. It gives them tips to help their teens grow more independent individuals. I found this page particularly interesting because I discovered many points connected to what we read about learner autonomy in Hedge, so I thought: After all, teachers and parents ultimately want the same thing: for children to become successful adults. In my mindmap below, I will present the 10 tips given to parents and I will develop a bit more those tips which can be applied to help teens develop their learning autonomy. Hope you like it! :)

Source: http://www.collegeboard.com/parents/apply/sending-kids-college/50006.html

The More the Merrier

The following reasons are often given for using pairwork and groupwork in the communicative classroom:

1. It increases opportunities for practising the language: I think that when sts are asked to work in pairs or in groups more true-to-life situations are presented so more skills are required to carry them out. Students need to develop different competences such as discourse competence (cope with authentic texts, use cohesive devices) strategic competence(turn taking) fluency (to deal with information gap), etc. These strategies would note be seen as a necessity from the sts´point of view were them to be working alone. The main point here, is that as we are teaching a language, and a language is meant to be used for communication mainly, we should practise it through interacting with others.
2. It enables students to take risks with the language and to see if they can negotiate meaning: Of course, it does! Working with their pairs usually gives students more confidence as they are not the centre of attention to the teacher. They feel more free and relaxed.Thus, they are more concerned with getting their message across through negotiation of meaning than with them making mistakes.

Some of the disadvantages to this approach could be that students are prone to divert their attention from the main aim of the exercise and in turn this is a more time-consuming task. Another disadvantage may be that monitoring individual performance becomes more difficult with a large number of students.