Autonomia na aprendizagem de inglês: um estudo de caso com nativos digitais sob as lentes do caos e da complexidade

Abstract

The present paper is an ethnographic case study within an interpretative approach that aims at understanding the learning experiences, more specifically, the development of autonomy in the English language learning of a group of high school students from a federal school located in Rio de Janeiro. Based on the language learning narratives of this group of digital native students, I intend to explore, in the light of chaos/ complexity theory, possible relationships among particular attractors (modes of behavior) and digital natives autonomy in the context of English language learning. To illuminate the data discussion and be able to contribute to the studies on chaos/ complexity in Applied Linguistics, primarily, the issue of autonomy as a complex adaptive system, the theoretical framework of this research is organized as follows: a review of literature on the theoretical paradigm of complexity and another on autonomy in teaching and learning languages. The results show that: (1) a full body of evidence concerning the development of autonomy emerged from an attractor (negatively evaluated teaching practices, positively evaluated teaching practices and extracurricular sociocultural practices); (2) the new technologies or the affordances from the use of the new technologies by themselves did not promote the development of autonomy; (3) only the attractors that converged on a positive attitude to foreign language could promote the development of autonomy; (4) the development of autonomy in systems with attractors that converged on a negative attitude to foreign language only emerged when there was an attractor that converged on an attitude positively to the foreign language; (5) the development of autonomy of digital natives emerged, fully or partially, in informal learning contexts rich in affordances such as the Internet.