ENHANCING EFL LEARNERS' INDEPENDENT LEARNING THROUGH PROMOTING NEW SKILLS AND COMPETENCIES

One of the new educational realities today is that education can no more provide knowledge without providing the means to acquire it in an autonomous way and on an individual basis. We need to move from assessing content and outcomes of learning towards guiding the learning process for the acquisition of useful skills for the future. We need to re-think teachers’ roles, teaching methods, contents and assessment as they are challenged by new global trends and innovation in education.

In this view of things, it appears essential to create a learning environment where students are trained to become skilled learners, by showing them how best to learn and by introducing innovative pedagogies to obtain the most of their learning.

My presentation will, therefore, attempt to discuss some of the influential aspects that need to be taken into account while designing pedagogical instruction, in view of facing the challenges that the twenty first century education is confronted with. It will also summarise and describe the results of a research work I have undertaken in the field of EFL learning at higher education, that sought to investigate the correlation between the introduction of a ‘learning how to learn’ instruction -based on the teaching of skills and competencies- and the development of students’ autonomy and independent language learning.