An inherent tension exists in clinical training between supervising learners to ensure quality and patient safety, and allowing learners to practice independently to gain experience. In this issue of Academic Medicine, Biondi and colleagues discuss this tension, highlighting the disconnect between faculty and resident perceptions of autonomous practice for housestaff. They report that each grou...

The paper illustrates how autonomous learning as a concept guides the production of the English Self-Learning Packages (ESLPs) for New Ar rival Children (NAC) It also documents the children's reactions towards this mode of learning, in particular, how they react to the process of improving their English standard by engaging themselves in a self-study mode The production of the packages was fund...

Many researchers have found that there is an inseparable relationship between learner autonomy and metacognitive strategy training, this thesis intends to explore the effectiveness of meta-cognitive strategy training in fostering learner autonomy and English performance in college non-majors learning under the web-based learning environment. The learners involved in the study are classified int...

This paper reports on one aspect of a case study that explores the nature of motivation to learn in an online distance environment. The study adopts self-determination theory (SDT) as a theoretical framework and focuses particularly on the underlying concept of autonomy. This is used to explore ways in which certain social and contextual factors, that fail to accommodate the autonomy needs of l...

English is a compulsory subject in many secondary EFL classrooms; thus the questions that arise for teachers are how to motivate learners in general and how to help them come to appreciate the value of English learning activities in particular. This article is based on the premise that learners benefit not only from becoming intrinsically motivated in what they do, but also when they feel respo...

This paper presents a method for designing, compiling and annotating corpora intended for language learners. In particular, we focus on spoken corpora for being used as complementary material in the classroom as well as in examinations. We describe the three corpora (Spanish, Chinese and Japanese) compiled by the Laboratorio de Lingüística Informática at the Autonomous University of Madrid (LLI...

BACKGROUND Much of the work of teachers and leaders at academic health centers involves engaging learners and faculty members in shared goals. Strategies to do so, however, are seldom informed by empirically-supported theories of human motivation. DISCUSSION This article summarizes a substantial body of motivational research that yields insights and approaches of importance to academic facult...

This article presents an autonomous guide agent that can observe a community of learners on the web, interpret the learners’ inputs, and then assess their sharing. The goal of this agent is to find a reliable helper ~tutor or other learner! to assist a learner in solving his task. Despite the growing number of Internet users, the ability to find helpers is still a challenging and important prob...

For autonomous learners of Japanese language, especially for the overseas’ residents, speaking is the most difficult skill to develop when learning through Internet or e-Learning. To overcome this difficulty, the authors develop an e-Learning courseware which includes modules encouraging learners to speak out-loud, giving confidence on pronunciation and keeping their motivation high. In the cou...