Autonomy and the building blocks of self-regulation

Although not all of the students felt that they are completely autonomous language learners, they all considered some activities, which are typical of self-regulation, part of their everyday routine (however, as a matter of fact, they never referred to these activities as self-regulation). There was no mention of the different stages of self-regulation (planning/goal-setting, monitoring, control and reflection) at an abstract level, but certain organisational issues (management strategies) were discussed.

The most important points to mention in this section are the various concrete steps (i.e., self-regulatory strategies) the students took in order to be or become self-regulated learners, as well as the extent to which they already considered themselves self-regulating and autonomous.

The most common aspects that were mentioned were all concrete activities that the students did without the teacher or concrete encouragement, which means that to them self-regulation meant without the teacher or on their own. These are as follows:

 listening to music, checking and translating lyrics: Adél, Ábel, Betti, Bori, Brigi;

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 reading books, usually graded readers: Adél, Ábel, Betti, or authentic stories:

Brigi (only beginning to read), Flóra;

 watching films (with or without subtitles, sometimes films they already knew well) or watching TV in general: Ádám, Adél, Ábel, Bea, Buda, Betti, Bori, Brigi, Flóra;

 learning words by reading or watching films: Adél;

 translating: Ábel (news articles from the BBC website), Brigi;

 talking to foreigners: Flóra;

 using the internet as a resource (e.g., Facebook applications or dictionary):

Flóra;

 having a native penfriend: Ádám (but subsequently abandoned due to lack of interest on the part of the penfriend).

These activities were mentioned by the students of their own accord, and there was no pre-prepared list to choose activities from. Therefore, the above can be considered reliable information as to what they were genuinely doing, without the teacher‟s encouragement to improve their English; it is of particular interest that Ábel mentioned peer influence as a prompt to his translating short news articles from the BBC website, since a classmate of his had told him that “he does it” and it seemed Ábel liked this way of learning English, even making note of unknown words in a separate vocabulary notebook. From the above list, films, music and books were mentioned as popular forms of improving English, and interestingly enough, the internet was mentioned on only two occasions. Out of the eight activities mentioned, five were done by one student only, which means that in essence only three ways of independent learning were well-known to these students. It should be highlighted again that self-regulation to these students mostly equalled the lack of the teacher during the activity.

178 These concrete forms of extra-curricular activities, which cannot be considered self-regulation per se, can be translated into self-regulatory strategies. The following strategies were identified:

Behavioural control:

 seeking help (Pintrich, 2000): Ádám, Ábel, Bea, Betti, Flóra;

Contextual control (Pintrich, 2000); environmental control (Wolters, 1999):

 regulation of academic tasks (Pintrich, 2000): Ábel, Betti (both: organising how to study for a test);

 student-initiated control (Pintrich, 2000): Flóra (choosing who to work with and assigning roles in group work);

Control of motivation and affect:

 maintaining a mastery-oriented focus (Pintrich, 2000): Ábel (translating news articles about social issues, e.g., sports events or Haiti hit by an earthquake);

 increasing task value (Pintrich, 2000): Flóra (translating and interpreting between family members and friends);

 increasing intrinsic motivation (Pintrich, 2000): Bea (understanding topics on TV).

The most common strategy employed was seeking external help, usually by approaching the teacher, a knowledgable family member, or the internet (Flóra). Their peers were not mentioned, although it is believed that peer modelling and groups in general are an effective way to generate motivation and in turn improve language skills (Crookes & Schmidt, 1991; Dörnyei, 1994a; Williams & Burden, 1997). The following quotes witness help-seeking, and also prove that the students equated autonomy with a situation in which they are „alone‟ in the learning process:

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“at home I can learn it on my own, if there‟s something I don‟t understand, I ask the teacher or my god-mother, who‟s an English teacher too, so I‟m independent enough I think” (Ábel)

“I like doing it on my own, but I need a framework, so if I don‟t understand something I need someone or a source to turn to. […] to me the teacher is still the main source if I need something” (Flóra).

The students considered themselves autonomous learners, and in almost all cases stated this firmly in the interviews. However, when this was not the case, for example with Bea, this is potentially because these students were at the beginning of their English studies. This hesitation as to how autonomous they are is in line with Mezei‟s (2008a) tentative conclusion that self-regulation builds up continuously and is a matter of maturity as a learner. This idea was strengthened by Bea:

“Interviewer: So you rather rely on her in learning?

Bea: Yes.

Interviewer: Is this because you started a short time ago or because you rely on the teacher in the case of other subjects too?

Bea: Uh, it‟s a difficult question, I don‟t know […].”

As opposed to Bea, other students were more confident about their independence in learning:

“some time ago […] I always called my mum to help me […] but now I‟m independent enough” (Ádám)

“It‟s enough for me if the teacher tells me what the test is going to cover […] it‟s perfectly enough for me [to get prepared]” (Buda)

“I‟ve always felt independent, sometimes instructions seemed only an obstruction […] so why do they have to tell me how to go about something? […]

I sometimes have technical problems and I need only to learn how to find the solution, but how to solve it effectively, well, I like to come up with the solution myself” (Flóra).

These students, in general, seemed to know (i.e., they said they knew) what they needed in order to become independent and autonomous in learning English, and they made an effort to move in this direction. This could mean decreasing their dependence

180 on the teacher, as in the case of Bea above, or Bori and Brigi (not cited), or being almost completely independent, as in the case of Flóra. Ádám expressed his view on how this changed during the years: “I think it‟s in connection with the fact that I‟ve come to like English, the lessons and what we do in class” (cf. Mezei, 2008a). This illustrates another point, where teacher intervention is possible and required by way of motivational strategies, or teaching students how to use learning strategies and motivate themselves. However, it is not clear why self-regulation, in the students‟ view, corresponded to „learning alone‟ or an extension of it, and nothing else. This mismatch, combined with the relatively low scores of the Learning experience scale, points to the fact that no matter how autonomous the students believed they were, they were far from self-regulation per se.