Schwienhorst(2003)

In this paper, Schwienhorst(2003) points out 5 misunderstandings about the learner autonomy and 3 useful perspectives on learner autonomy. They are individual-cognitive perspective,social-interactive perspective and experimental-participatory perspective. Individual-cognitive perspective emphasizes on improving the learners' existing constructs especially for their language and linguistic awareness. As mentioned by Schwienhorst, the process may be difficult and even painful. I think if we need to change our learning habit, it needs a lot of practice and psychological changes. It is really hard and it will cause a lot of tensions for learners. As to social-interactive perspective, it is based on Vygotsky's zone of proximal development(1978). Learners can learn better and improve themselves by working with their classmates through interpersonal interaction and collaborative work. Social interaction can increase consciousness through scaffolding (Bruner & Ratner, 1978)and corrective feedback(Kohonen, 1992). Students need scaffolding when they do the interaction and collaborative work otherwise they will be out of track or chatting since they don't know how to do. Corrective feedback especially written feedback can make students understand better how they have performed so that they can perform better next time. As for the experimental-participatory perspective, learners are encouraged to take control and responsibility of their learning. They should monitor and evaluate their learning process. All these three perspectives share a concern for reflection. Also, the medium of writing also plays a main role in these perspectives.
In this article, the writer also mentions one example of implementation of learners autonomy which is tandem learning(Little & Brammerts,1996).In tandem learning, two learners of complementary L1-L2 combinations are brought together in a tandem pair and they communicate via face-to-face, emails, audio or video conferencing, etc. There are many advantages and problems in this program, however, it provides empirical data for study about synchronous and asynchronous communication media.