Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the project of building a learning community across cohorts with the aim of fostering learner autonomy, involving 10 students of Japanese at a university in UK, and presents what types of learning occurred in the discussion on their learning methods.

Paper long abstract:

Since the importance of learner autonomy was asserted by Holec (1981) in the 1980s, a number of attempts have been undertaken aiming to provide learners with resources and opportunities to use a target language (Benson, 2013). Nowadays, however, the challenge of language education has shifted from providing resources to supporting autonomous language learning because the development of information and computer technology (ICT) has enabled learners to gain linguistic resources easily.

In order to facilitate autonomous language learning, I conducted a project to build a learning community involving students across cohorts, consisting of 10 volunteer students from Year 1 to Final Year who studied Japanese at university in the UK. In the language classes, students tend to create connections among themselves. However, opportunities to discuss learning among senior and junior students are usually limited, despite the possibility that senior students could give junior students useful advice that teachers might not provide.

This project was conducted in the spring semester 2019, consisting of an individual meeting with each participant and three discussions. This paper presents the outline of the project and focuses on the first discussion on learning methods. Analysing the video and the observation notes on the discussion, it was found that: 1) although senior students tended to provide more information than juniors, the latter occasionally took the role over, for example, introducing new learning tools; and 2) questions from juniors triggered seniors' reflection on their learning experiences. In addition, the interviews conducted after the project revealed that the participants evaluated this project positively because it enabled them to gain information about new learning methods as well as to review their language learning and their Japanese courses in an objective way. Based on these findings, this paper will also discuss how to build a supportive community across cohorts to facilitate students' autonomous learning.