Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. We're here to cover the topics that you're interested in. And today we're going to be talking about self regulated learning. I'm joined today by Nathan Thomas, lecturer in TSOL at UCL, Hayo Reindeers, professor of TSOL and director of research at Anaheim University, and Fleur Yovri Hodgson, who's part of the research team here at OUP. So thank you all for joining me today. And as I said, we're going to be talking about self regulated learning.
Hio and Nathan worked on a paper on this recently, a position paper, which you can probably find a link to down in the comments flow is the editor of the paper. So all three of them really know what they're talking about here.
And, yeah, very glad that you could join us today.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: So, I suppose the most important question, the one which everyone watching is going to be asking first, is what is self regulated learning? What do we mean when we use this term?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah, we had some good discussions about this because there's obviously a plethora of terminology out there. Self regulated learning, self directed learning, independent learning, learner autonomy, and they're all sort of related to each other. But in this paper specifically, we focus on self regulated learning. And we look at it sort of quite broadly. And I think we agreed that essentially, in its essence, it's the things that learners do to take control of, take responsibility for all of the different aspects of their learning.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Okay, well, I suppose following up with that, you've all now done a lot of work on self regulator learning and a lot of research around it.
I guess one thing I wanted to ask is how did you first get started with self regulator learning? What interested you about the topic? And, yeah, how did you get involved?
[00:02:03] Speaker C: So, for me, it was actually as a master's student here in Oxford, I was doing a degree on applied linguistics for english language teaching. And one of the modules was on individual differences, different features or characteristics of learners and what makes some unique. And self regulation and language learning strategies was one of the parts of that module that I found really interesting. And I ended up writing my final essay in that course about it.
And from then on, it became my dissertation topic, my doctoral research topic, and then has sort of expanded from there into now supervising research from students of mine that are interested in learning strategies and self regulated learning as well.
[00:02:47] Speaker D: Well, I think I probably wouldn't have used it as a term, self regulated learning but I started getting interested when I was about 16 at school, and I really needed to pass a chemistry exam. And I was terrible at chemistry and I just didn't like it. I didn't understand it.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: I remember that feeling.
[00:03:05] Speaker D: I could not go on to study what I wanted to do until I got this exam. So I thought, right, I'm going to have to work out how I'm going to get to this end goal and what the steps are to get there. And that's how I got interested in it, because it worked. I went through all these steps and I did actually get there and I got a good grade and I could go on to do what I wanted to do, but it was hard work and I used all sorts of things. I used people to help me, I made plans, I drew up timetables, all sorts of different things. And based on that, I sort of used what I'd learned to do that with other subjects afterwards. So, yeah, I'd say round about then.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Makes sense.
Yeah.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Well, for me, it's an interesting one because of where I landed. In the end, I actually started off becoming interested in self regulation, even though, like fleur, I didn't know that term at the time. And when I was in school, especially high school, and really was incredibly bored in the language classes, which really amazed me because I was fascinated by languages and I loved learning languages and trying it out outside the classroom, and I figured out that I could just much more quickly do it myself, which is what I ended up doing. And then later, of course, I realized that there's a term for that which is nerdy, sorry, self regulation. So that's essentially why I started off in the field of applied linguistics is an interest in learning outside of the classroom, which is, of course, where self regulated learning often plays a really important role.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Of course, yeah, that makes sense.
[00:04:37] Speaker D: Yeah. No, I'd say mine was similar because I like languages as well, until I started learning them outside because it was fun and I could do it faster.
Yes, that was good fun. But chemistry, sadly, was not for me.
[00:04:49] Speaker C: No, for me, it was quite interesting to kind of have a bit of an opposite way of approaching it, because it wasn't until I actually started teaching English that I started thinking very carefully about strategies and how to be more effective and more efficient. Maybe I wasn't the best language student when I was in school. Like Hill, I didn't consider myself that self regulated, but it was in trying to help students to teach them more effectively and so that they could learn outside of class. But again, I think it was that putting the term to what was going on in my head. It didn't happen until I had that exposure to it quite academically. And actually at the time I was a little bit critical of it because I saw myself as a language teacher and I wanted to control the classroom and I wanted to plan out what the students were going to learn as the expert. And it wasn't until actually many years later or several years later, working on various papers and especially this position paper where we've kind of taken a view of self regulated learning that is quite holistic, that involves more than just the self or more than just one individual learner. And I'm quite happy with that direction. And I think that relates a lot to my academic exposure to the term itself and then also my practical experience that led to thinking about strategies and regulation of learning in general.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I suppose following up on that, I imagine many teachers, they hear about this idea of helping learners take control of their own learning and I imagine some of them will find it quite daunting. So I suppose my next question is when you were first getting started with this, when you were first helping learners self regulate or experimenting with ways or exploring ways to help learners take control of their learning, how did you get to grips with it? Was it something you were good at or was it something that just fell apart? What mistakes did you make and what did you learn?
[00:06:48] Speaker B: For me it was a necessity because my first teaching experience was as a volunteer teaching refugees in Holland and teaching them Dutch as a second language. And, well, the nature of course, of refugee learners is that they're transitory, so you never know how long they're going to stay and how long you'll be able to support them. So it became very clear to me very quickly that if I wanted to really do something meaningful for them that I would have to show them how to continue doing the stuff that we were doing together by themselves. So I guess in a way I've thrown into the deep end, if you will, to figure it out on the spot.
[00:07:26] Speaker D: Yeah, I wasn't very good at it, I have to say. Looking back, I wish I'd done it differently. I think I was teaching secondary school students and I sort of assumed that they would think the same way I did from an adult point of view. And of course, some of them are only 1415. They needed a lot more support and I didn't always appreciate that and I just thought, why aren't you being good at this? I don't understand and just got frustrated. So if I had my time again, I would certainly do things differently and put in more support and bear in mind their age as well, that they're not adult necessarily.
[00:07:59] Speaker C: Yeah, I agree. I think that's a really interesting point about the mindset of the teacher and the mindset of the students having to come into some kind of alignment with a similar goal in this regard. I think my first few years of teaching felt mainly like crowd control.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: I'm sure many people can relate to.
[00:08:15] Speaker C: That, the idea of these self regulating, autonomous, independent learners. I just said, where are these learners? I don't know if I have any of those in my classroom. So I think a lot of that was inexperienced on my part. It was contextual conditions and the type of schools and students that I was teaching at the time. And it was no one's fault, really. It was just kind of the context that we were in. And I think that, again, looking back, as you mentioned, if I could go back and do it again, I probably would have a bit more of an informed point of view now in terms of how to carve out a bit of time for some of this or trying to instill some motivation to take this learning outside of the classroom rather than just trying to control and to make it happen while we're all together, which was kind of what I was doing at the time. I think a lot of novice teachers maybe have similar situations where definitely because.
[00:09:08] Speaker D: You'Re aware of the curriculum that you've got to get through it or you're working towards high stakes exams, you've got to get through that as well. So all these things crowding in on you in a class of 2030 plus, and then you think, well, where do I fit in? Helping them with their learning?
It's not easy.
There's only so much time in the day.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Not to get ahead of ourselves, but I think it's interesting that our own experiences have informed quite extensively the paper as we came up with it, and especially the framework, because we'll probably talk about this more later. But what the very, very first pedagogical practice that we include in the framework for teachers to encourage and learners to develop is the ability to motivate oneself to help our learners to actually see the point of all this. Right? Because it's one thing to say you should learn by yourself, et cetera, but if a learner doesn't understand why you are encouraging them to do that, or even what it is that you're asking them to do and how it relates to their personal interests or their future goals, they're unlikely to do it. Right.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: So that's why in the framework, that's the very, very first thing that we included.
[00:10:18] Speaker D: You've got to have a goal, haven't you some goal in mind that you're aiming towards that's going to motivate you, because without that, it's really difficult. I mean, it could be a major exam or it could be a project you're doing with a partner, anything. There's got to be some goal in mind and then you can work towards it.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah.
[00:10:35] Speaker C: And I think within the curriculum we can set up or help learners to set up manageable goals because a common issue, again, we'll probably touch on this a little bit more later as well, but teachers having to cover certain content and they have to teach the book and there's a certain test on certain content. But I think with the idea of a more informed approach to self regulated learning, it's not about setting very lofty goals, about becoming an expert user of the language, but even goals directed towards curriculum aims that can incorporate self regulated learning can be quite powerful.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
And also, I think giving the learners a framework, like a mental framework, a perspective of an understanding of what all of this is about. Right. Because a lot of it can sound, even to us as teachers, quite abstract, like monitoring progress and revising your goals, et cetera. And as teachers, we probably have an idea of what that means. But for a learner, those are fairly abstract concepts, and especially because there's lots of them, because, as we point out in the paper, self regulated learning is obviously not one thing. It's a range of different skills and attitudes that somehow have to come together meaningfully. And so helping learners to see the bigger picture is really powerful. And I've had this experience and I'm sure many of our listeners and viewers will have had similar situations where I would try and encourage learners to maybe make some decisions for themselves about what to learn or how to learn. And they would say, well, you're the teacher. I had several people tell me over the years, you're the one that's being paid for this, so do your job.
But then there's many ways of which, of course, and I'd love to hear whether you've had any experiences with this, that you can deal with this. And one strategy that I found useful is to bring in either more senior students or even depending on the age of the learners you're working with, graduates, people who are in the workplace and just get them to come into class and say, well, what does your life look like now? Right. And does what you need to do for your job, for example, does that change sometimes? Oh, yeah, it changes all the time. Well, who teaches you how to adapt to that? No one. I have to do that myself. And then suddenly you can see in the student's eyes, you're like, now I get it.
[00:12:58] Speaker D: Light bulb. This is why that is very motivating, seeing real people come in who aren't teachers and they're considered more real, aren't they, if they're not a teacher and basically explaining how it's helped because it's so true. I mean, at work, and we all know that employers want employees who are self starters, who are motivated, who can adapt to change, who can just get on with stuff and not pester their manager all the time. That is what you want. And if you've managed a team, you know, you don't want somebody in your team who's saying, what do I do every five minutes? It drives you insane. So if that can be got across to students by someone else coming in, then that's great. And then they can see its relevance.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I can see that.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: Yeah, I think just to kind of piggyback on that idea, I think that, well, both of those, really, because the idea of a more competent or more knowledgeable other is quite powerful, that kind of learner role model. But I think what you mentioned there as well, about employers and what they're looking for in putting together the resource pack, what's it called? The toolkit. The toolkit for this position paper, I was thinking of different activities that we could do to kind of incorporate this into the classroom or that teachers could use. And one of the activities that I'm a bit disappointed I wasn't able to formulate in a way that could be included was some kind of look at job advertisements and the kind of desirable skills or attributes that employers were looking.
[00:14:23] Speaker D: For, that would be interesting.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: Yes, I know. I wish I could have gotten it in there.
[00:14:27] Speaker D: That can be for the second one.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Maybe second edition, part two, the sequel. Yes, that's right.
[00:14:32] Speaker A: But I think that is really important in that an activity like that connects it very tangibly to the life outcome that you're aiming for.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: It also highlights, and we talk about this in the paper, that the idea of self regulated learning actually also ties in with a lot of other aspirations that schools have or requirements, in fact, that are placed on teachers in schools, such as the need to teach digital literacies or critical thinking.
And of course, on a broader level, also the need to prepare learners, and it might be worth just briefly going on a tangent here, but preparing learners both for lifelong learning, which most of us are familiar with, the idea that at some point you are not there anymore as a teacher, and learners will need to be able to sort of manage their own learning, but also livewide learning, which has not received as much attention. And that relates to the idea that learning doesn't of course, just take place within the formal context in which a learner, a student might be operating, but also in different aspects, in different contexts and spaces within their lives. And if we can help our learners in some way to capitalize on the opportunities that exist there, whether it's in online social media or in games or wherever the case may be, then we are really, really sowing a seed, if you will, to help learners to capitalize, to learn from all the different spaces that they operate in.
[00:16:03] Speaker E: Thanks for listening to this episode of talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it. You can also get practical advice and resources on this topic by downloading our position paper. Just follow the link in the description.
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