Supporting Autonomy Development in Online Learning Environments: What Knowledge and Skills do Teachers Need?

An ongoing action-research project at the CRAPEL has shown that students at a vocational high school near Nancy have engaged with more or less success in an out-of-school and out-of-curriculum Internet-based foreign language learning scheme (Bailly et al. 2008). The less successful students sometimes lack the necessary skills such as knowing how to choose keywords for a search on the Internet, or how to assess the quality of the learning resources they find. They are puzzled by contradictory in-formation or select unsuitable resources. Personal motivation and accessi-ble online resources are not sufficient conditions to make self-directed learning (Holec 1998) possible or easy for those students, whose learning process is oriented by the social promotion of teaching/heteronomy over learning/autonomy (as defined by Holec 1990; Holec 1991; Little 1991). Autonomous use of the Internet is related to the capacity to look critically at the information and tools it offers (Villanueva 2006). The aim of this chapter is to outline some aspects of online learning, teaching and com-munication that must be taken into account by teachers working in Inter-net-based language learning environments claiming to promote and sup-port the development of learner autonomy