The history of autonomous language learning originated in the 1970’s with the
preliminary work Henry Holec did with adult learners. I am going to present
the history leading up to this through two main sources, Benson, and Gremmo
and Riley. Benson (2011) has written an extensive and recently updated history
of autonomy in language learning and Gremmo and Riley (1995) offer a
description of the social changes leading up to autonomous language learning.