To be Autonomous Language Learners

The concept of "learner autonomy" is rather new in a teaching and learning context in Japan. Recently however, many researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) argue the importance of learner's autonomous state that is interrelated with their motivation of learning and with their more effective target language acquisition (Holec, 1981, Deci & Ryan, 1985, Dickinson, 1995). The aim of this report is to introduce a brief history of "learner autonomy" in the SLA field, followed by an actual example of how students (sophomores in a university) experienced a task of deciding their own topic of writing and took some responsibility for learning which eventually will lead to learner autonomy. In this activity, offered to my students, I paired them to exchange e-mails in English. They were instructed to e-mail each other as frequently as possible outside the class for one month to make dialogues. I told them to choose topics that are interesting to them. Then, each pair of students selected an excerpt from their e-mail dialogues for inclusion in the class anthology. Later as an assignment, I had the students read and write their reactions to the class anthology. In this paper, I would like to introduce some of the writings of my students and reactions toward them that were far from text-like but realistic and original, with their individual voices and experiences. The purpose of this report is to investigate how this activity gives the learners opportunity to express their 'wave of feeling that is compounded of many emotions.' Also, it is to investigate some social affective strategies that are related with learner autonomy and their target language acquisition.