Introduction

I have a deep and abiding interest in the lives of learners. In fact, during the 1970s and 1980s, I built my teaching practice on learners’ perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and ideas as revealed through their stories. It was through listening to my learners and trying to understand and interpret the learning process from their point of view that I came to embrace the concept of learner-centredness. In a book I wrote back in the 1980s, entitled The Learner-Centred Curriculum, I made the point that in terms of planning, implementation and evaluation, a learnercentred curriculum will contain elements similar to what many good teachers have always done (in fact, the concept of learner-centredness goes back a long way – all the way back to Socrates):

There is also a long-standing tradition in general education that places the learners and their experiences squarely at the centre of the learning process. This is the experiential learning tradition, which has diverse origins, drawing on Dewey's educational progressivism, Lewin's work in social psychology, Piaget's work in child language development, Kelley's cognitive theory of education and the work of Maslow and Rogers in the field of humanistic psychology.

My favourite contributions to the literature on experiential learning in the field of language education are the book by Legutke and Thomas (1991), and a chapter by Kohonen (1992).