Teaching for autonomy: what do the students think?

Abstract

The following paper describes an action research project which was carried out with a class of second-year students following the Degree of English Philology at the University of Castilla la Mancha. The aim of the project was to raise students’ awareness of the need to be less dependent on their teachers and to provide the reflective and interactive scaffolding necessary to enable them to take greater responsibility for their own learning. The current paper describes the measures taken, and how students reacted to this process. It concludes by examining the lessons learned and by proposing a number of guidelines to be taken into account when attempting to promote autonomy in a similar context.