Non-ELT Students’ Cognitive Autonomy in Choosing and Attending Applied Linguistics Course

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-054-1_57How to use a DOI?

Keywords

cognitive autonomy; elective course; applied linguistics

Abstract

This study investigates undergraduate students’ experience on their enrolment to the elective Applied Linguistics course in an English Department in Indonesia. The focus of the course is on the practical application of research findings in linguistics to the teaching and learning of ESL, which is suitable for the ELT cohort. However, students of non-ELT cohorts—the linguistics and the literature ones—also enrolled in the course, and a final enrolment of 44 non-ELT students was in class. Based on the teacher’s personal evaluation of their class performance, she suspected that the non-ELT students did not make sufficient effort. One main reason was that students might not choose the elective course based on their cognitive autonomy, of which the five multi-faceted components were: evaluative thinking, voicing opinions, making decisions, self-assessing, and comparative values. Set within this context, the purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how students practiced the five elements of cognitive autonomy in choosing and attending the course. An in-depth open-ended questionnaire was distributed to all 44 students via email after the final assessment of the semester. Another research tool of one-on-one in-depth written interview using WhatsApp was utilized to probe and ask follow up questions. The findings revealed that most non-ELT students did not optimize their cognitive autonomy, except for few who had aspired to build their career in language teaching. This indicates that students need more guidance to decide what elective course to choose for their individualized career choice. For those who are already registered in the course, they need to start with improving their academic literacy skills and goal-directed behaviour, in order that they can independently and successfully exercise their cognitive autonomy.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Siusana Kweldju
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/05/18
TI  - Non-ELT Students’ Cognitive Autonomy in Choosing and Attending Applied Linguistics Course
BT  - Proceedings of the 20th AsiaTEFL-68th TEFLIN-5th iNELTAL Conference (ASIATEFL 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 670
EP  - 682
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-054-1_57
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-054-1_57
ID  - Kweldju2023
ER  -