Page 159 - Beyond Methods

Promoting learner autonomy 147
6.1.9 Where appropriate, challenge your students to discuss whether the information given in the table is too much of an overgeneralization to be of use.
6.1.10 Design a task that you might want to give them as homework (e.g., ask them to write a brief report on the learning preferences of other students that they would like to develop themselves and what they may have to do to achieve their goal).
Microstrategy 6.2: Inferencing as a Learning Strategy
6.2.0 This microstrategy is designed to help your students know whether and how well they use inferencing as a strategy for improving their reading comprehension. You may design similar microstrategies focusing on other learning strategies appropriate to your students. Keep in mind that, in this and in any similar microstrategy on learner autonomy you may design, your task is to probe the how rather than the what of learners’ responses, that is, focus on the thought processes underlying their answers rather than on the answers themselves.
6.2.1 Put the following passage on an overhead transparency and ask your students to read it quickly. Tell them not to be bothered, at this stage, by any new words they may come across. The passage is taken from Runaway World. It was written by Antony Giddens, director of London School of Economics and Political Science.
A friend of mine studies village life in central Africa. A few years ago, she paid her first visit to a remote area where she was to carry out her fieldwork. The day she arrived, she was invited to a local home for an evening’s entertainment. She expected to find out about the traditional pastimes of this isolated community. Instead, the occasion turned out to be a viewing of Basic Instinct on video. The film at that point hadn’t even reached the cinemas in London.
Such vignettes reveal something about our world. And what they reveal isn’t trivial. It isn’t just a matter of people adding mod- ern paraphernalia—videos, television sets, personal computers and so forth—to their existing ways of life. We live in a world of trans- formations, affecting almost every aspect of what we do. For better or worse, we are being propelled into a global order that no one fully understands, but which is making its effects felt upon all of us. Antony Giddens (2000, p. 24–25)
6.2.2 Have your students read it again, this time jotting down all new words.