Seven ways to develop independent learners

Richard Cleeve
A woman sat outdoors reading a booklet

What is independent learning?

Students who are actively involved in deciding what and how they learn are typically more engaged and motivated.

That’s not surprising, because independent learners are extremely focused on their personal learning objectives.

, independent learning is “a process, a method and a philosophy of education whereby a learner acquires knowledge by his or her own efforts and develops the ability for inquiry and critical evaluation."

Seven ways to develop independent learners
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In the context of language learning, independent learners can recognize their learning needs, locate relevant information about language and develop the required language skills on their own or with other learners.

There are many advantages of encouraging independent learning among your students:

  • Increased recognition of strengths, weaknesses and progress
  • Higher levels of confidence
  • More motivation
  • Better management of learning
  • Improved performance

Not only will these benefits help your students while learning English, but they’ll also benefit them at school, university and even in their day-to-day lives.

How can I help my students to become independent learners?

Some of your students may already be independent learners; however, most will need your support to become more autonomous.

Here are seven ways you can help:

Make learning goals clear

Sharing learning goals with your class helps students to see what they’re aiming for and they’ll also be able to assess afterwards whether they’ve achieved it or not. This can be done at the beginning of a lesson or series of lessons or even as a lesson progresses.

Although many teachers set the goals themselves, if you want to create a really independent learning experience, elicit them directly from the students. A simple question could be, “What do you think this activity is helping you get better at?”

Personalize learning goals

Another thing to consider is setting different goals for different learners, depending on their strengths and weaknesses. This will be much easier if the students are setting their own goals. For example, when doing a task focused on the speaking paper in an exam course, one student’s objective might be to give extended answers, while another might want to use more discourse markers.

Focus on the process as well as the goal

Once your students have set their goals, they need to start thinking about how they’ll reach them.

One way to help them get on track is to provide them with a set of ‘success criteria’, which acts like a roadmap for the different tasks they need to complete. If your students understand what they need to do to be successful, they’ll progress much faster and be more motivated when they see how far they’ve come.

If one of your student’s goals is to improve their grammatical accuracy in the C1 Advanced speaking exam, for example, you could give them a rubric (like the one below) which they can use to assess their own performance.

Keep your assessment categories as positive as possible (for example, 'solid', 'good' and 'acing it') and link it to the official exam criteria where possible.

Provide opportunities to reflect on learning

Students should constantly be encouraged to reflect on their performance and whether they’ve met their learning goals. This will help them become more aware of their strengths, weaknesses and the progress they’re making. Recognition of progress will help build confidence and motivation.

Opportunities for assessment and reflection don’t need to take a lot of time. Spending two minutes at the end of the class asking students questions like ‘What can you do better now than at the start of the lesson?’ will help learners develop critical meta-cognitive skills.

Offer feedback on learning

Teacher feedback also helps students develop the skills needed to become more independent. Offer feedback in a supportive and sensitive manner, making positive observations alongside any criticism.

Effective feedback should allow learners to understand where they currently are in their learning, where they’re heading and how they’ll get there.

Encourage peer feedback

Feedback shouldn’t only come from the teacher. You should also get students to evaluate each other’s progress during and after an activity. Peer feedback is not only advantageous to the student receiving it, but there are also many reflective benefits of giving feedback to someone else.

Transfer learning decisions to students

It’s impossible for students to become independent learners if you make all the decisions for them. Giving students the opportunity to make decisions about their learning will give them greater autonomy. However, this should be a gradual process and not all students will be ready to take 100% control from the outset.

Start with small decisions first and ask questions such as:

  • Do you want to do the task alone or in pairs?
  • Would you like to use a set of useful phrases for support when doing the speaking task?
  • Would you prefer to discuss questions about this topic or another?

This devolvement of responsibility built up over time will help learners to become more independent.

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  • A teacher sat with a student at his desk, the student is writing and the teacher is looking at him doing this smiling.

    7 ways to individualize your teaching

    By Andrew Walkley
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    There's no denying that tailoring your teaching to individual students is an effective strategy. However, many teachers struggle with finding the time to include teaching moments which address an individual learner's specific needs. So, what's the best way to create an individualized classroom? Andrew Walkley, co-author of Roadmap, explains the benefits of this approach and shares some techniques to ensure that every student gets the most out of your lessons.

    The best of both worlds?

    First of all, what does individualized teaching mean? It's the concept that students will learn most effectively when the activity is specific to their needs and the language they are using is appropriate for their level. This concept is sometimes seen in opposition to coursebooks and class-based learning, where students are all expected to follow the same syllabus. However, class syllabuses and coursebooks have the following benefits:

    • Providing students with common goals
    • Encouraging learners to follow an unfamiliar topic that then opens new doors of learning
    • The learning opportunities in peer-to-peer explanation

    When we talk about individualized teaching in the classroom, we want to exploit the benefits of learning together while also providing opportunities for more individualized development. So, how can you, as a teacher, combine the two approaches?

    1. Involve students in choosing your route

    All classroom groups are different and made up of people from different age groups with distinct needs and interests. Roadmap can help in two ways:

    1. There is a fast and slow track. The fast track focuses on language input and speaking. The slow track has additional skills lessons at the back of the book that are thematically linked to the corresponding fast track lesson.
    2. Each lesson has a clear goal and final task. For shorter courses, get each student to choose three tasks they would definitely like to do. Based on the results, you can prioritize those lessons.

    At the start of the course, make a point of asking about students' learning priorities and then plan accordingly. Once you've completed an input and speaking lesson, you can ask the students if they want to further explore the topic through the skills lesson.

    2. Make use of tasks

    Open tasks, where students exchange their own ideas in a meaningful way, are a key part of individualized lessons. In essence, they are self-differentiating because each student will attempt to complete the task using whatever language they are able to use. In Roadmap, each of the main lessons ends with a clear task connected to a Global Scale of English (GSE) can-do statement. However, there are also lots of other speaking opportunities without a 'speaking' label (under vocabulary or reading, etc.), as well as the conversation that typically occurs in any lesson, all of which can be treated as open tasks.

    3. Give individualized feedback and then share it

    In a group setting, it's impossible to give individual feedback on every single task. However, you can give individual attention to different people throughout the lesson. Make yourself available to give students the language they need as it arises during an activity. Then, when they've completed the task, write some of these examples on the board, but leave a gap for the keywords. Elicit these keywords from other members of the class. If they can't get it, ask the student(s) you helped to explain the missing language. You might then repeat the task, but this time, pay attention to a new group.

    4. Check what vocabulary students know

    All coursebook writers and teachers make choices about what vocabulary to introduce to students. In the case of Roadmap we are guided by the GSE and teachers might like to experiment themselves using the GSE Teacher Toolkit. However, all students will have their own lexicons. You can individualize learning better by asking students to rate the words you aim to cover in a unit according to whether they know them or not. For example, 1 = it's completely new, 2 = the meaning is familiar but I don't use it, 3 = this is part of my productive vocabulary.

    5. Get students to create their own word lists and cards

    This knowledge will enable you to encourage students to focus on their individual vocabulary needs. They can reinforce learning by developing a word list or making flashcards using a web tool such as Quizlet. For new words they may have a word/collocation with an L1 translation.

    With familiar vocabulary, they could have cards with a keyword on one side and varied collocations or common examples on the other (also in English). It's worth setting aside some time in class to do this at the start of a course. If your students are engaged and motivated, it can become a regular discipline for learning new vocabulary.

    6. Ask more open questions about usage, not just meaning

    When we do vocabulary tasks from the course material in class, we can use open questions to individualize learning with the following two techniques. Firstly, as you go through the answers, rather than going in order 1 to 8, you can nominate people to give the answer that they're most unsure of and want to check. Secondly, we can ask the rest of the class open questions which focus on how words are used. For example, take these questions from different vocabulary exercises in Roadmap B1+:

    • What (other) things might you spill?
    • Why might a character in a series be killed off?
    • What (else) can you describe as reliable?
    • What can someone do to stay calm?

    You could also ask questions such as, "What's the opposite of staying calm?" or "What might you say if you spilled something?"

    When you ask these questions, you are checking meaning, but more importantly, you are also pushing students to reveal how well they know a word. Do they know the collocations of spill and reliable? Do they have the other language they might need to talk about the aspects of a TV series or help someone who is in a panic? You can then encourage students to choose how much of this potentially new language they want to add to their word lists.

    7. Provide open homework tasks and make time to share the results

    Homework is another opportunity to individualize learning. Give students a wide choice of tasks based on the material of the course or beyond, for example:

    • Choose any number of exercises they want to do from workbook material
    • Find and read one article they are interested in (in L1 or L2)
    • Write five things they want to learn how to say in English (perhaps using Google Translate)
    • Write up an interesting conversation they had in English (the conversation could be originally in L1 or L2)

    Whatever task they choose, the key is to dedicate some classroom time to discussing which homework task they did and why. Encourage them to explain their answers and what they learned through the task, and whether or not they would choose to do a similar task again.

    For a more detailed introduction on how you can individualize your teaching, check out Andrew's webinar:

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