ABSTRACT
The authors of this chapter entered the field of autonomy in the 1990s, more than a decade after the publication of Holec’s seminal Council of Europe report. Since then, the need to revisit and redefine autonomy in the light of changes in the global landscape of language learning has been a persistent theme in their work. Most recently, they have begun to reconsider the meanings of autonomy in the context of what has been called a ‘multilingual turn’ in applied linguistics. Presenting their ideas in the form of a dialogue, the authors reflect on challenges to Holec’s understanding of autonomy in an age in which the idea of ‘learning a foreign language’ is being replaced by those of ‘becoming multilingual’ and developing ‘plurilingual multicompetence’.
