摘要：The areas of autonomy and technology in language education have a potentially very close but in practice often also uneasy relationship. In a narrow sense, technology is a tool that helps learners and educators to achieve certain educational goals. Autonomy can be one of those goals. But it can also in itself be an instrument towards the achievement of other educational goals. Process and product often get confused, especially when talking about the influence of technology on the development of autonomy. In the 1990s, for example, a common argument for the use of technology in the language classroom was that technology (e.g., the Internet) would give learners access to authentic examples of the target language and thus ‘increase’ their autonomy. We now better understand that unrestricted access to information, without proper guidance and feedback, can in fact inhibit learners from taking more responsibility (Murray, 1999), and thus developing themselves as autonomous learners.
