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This chapter discusses the development of alternative learning both in and outside the classic PBL format aimed at preventing the phenomenon of erosion and to ensure continued stimulation of independent learning. Topics covered include various learning formats within a conventional PBL environment, PBL with study teams, and PBL with expert teams.

This chapter considers how ePortfolio technology and pedagogy can be used to enrich the best of more traditional pedagogical practice. The chapter describes how an ePortfolio has been integrated into language courses in the English Language Centre of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University with the aim of providing learners with rich independent learning opportunities, and how the feedback from stakeholders can be used to overcome implementation challenges.

This chapter presents three new perspectives, namely critical adaptive learning, community and collaboration, and affect and cognition, on independent language learning. These are explored with reference to three studies against a background that this chapter expresses as having undergone ‘fundamental shifts’ with regard to our understanding of independent learning. The chapter argues that the way to extend the current independent learning research paradigm is to focus on critically adaptive learners, the role of affect and the part communities play in the processes of independent learning — three aspects to which other chapters refer to later in the book.

This methodologically focused chapter discusses some of the main issues relating to affect and outlines reasons why the study of emotions is important to understanding the processes of language learning and teaching. It also explores the difficulty of investigating emotions and suggests methods for doing so that might be the most effective. The chapter outlines how her experience of using think-aloud verbal protocols has persuaded her of their value as a tool for revealing participants' thought processes.

This chapter looks at higher education in the Neo-Confucian paradigm. Neo-Confucian academy pedagogy was intentionally designed to focus the students’ learning much less on the teacher’s knowledge and more on the students’ interaction with the classical texts. In other words, Confucius, Zengzi and Zisi (the assumed authors of the Great Learning and the Mean, respectively), Mencius, and Yan Hui—the latter the most accomplished disciple in the Analects—were the real teachers. Following several years of basic schooling, the (roughly) three years a student typically spent at a Confucian academy should have allowed him to find his own moral voice. This voice became his own through the combination of study and interpersonal practice. Each student in an academy took his stand in tutorials and on essay questions so regularly that all students had ample training in how to continue as independent learners for life.