The history of autonomous language learning reaches back roughly four
decades, and it is considered to start with the work done in the Centre de
Recherches et d'Applications Pédagogiques en Langues (CRAPEL) in France in the
1970’s. CRAPEL was created as a result of the Council of Europe’s Modern
Languages Project. After the death of the original leader Yves Châlon, Henri
Holec became the leader of the CRAPEL institute and he still remains as one of
the central figures in the field of autonomous language learning today (Benson
2011: 9). I am first going to discuss the history and changes in society leading up
to autonomous language learning and then I am going to present current
research done in the field.