Abstract:
Learner autonomy (henceforth LA) has become a buzz word in education in general and language education, in particular, for more than a decade now. Focusing on investigating Iranian EFL teachers’ conceptions of LA, the current study, taking a mixed method approach, attempted to illustrate how Iranian EFL teachers’ conceptions of leaner autonomy mapped out. To that end, 7 teachers, purposefully cluster sampled, were interviewed. After data saturation, the result of the interviews and the data gleaned from the literature were fed into the development of a questionnaire. The questionnaire, having being validated through a pilot study, was administered to 585 EFL teachers snowball-sampled, 2 of whom were, later on through negative case analysis, interviewed, and were required to provide the researchers with a narrative. Running a number of factor analyses, the researchers modeled the participants’ mindsets toward LA, which can be quite significant as it can have some theoretical and pedagogical implications, including, inter alia, situating LA promotion into the pedagogy of TEFL in Iran by running LA promotion workshops as well as developing a pool of LA promotion activities and software programs available to the stakeholders, especially the teachers.
Machine summary:
However, ever since the Socio-Cultural Theory of mind proposed by Vygotsky (Swain, Kinner, & Steinman, 2011) gained momentum in education in general and language education in particular, new definitions for language, language learning, language teachers, and language teaching have been proposed.
It has now become an accepted assertion that what teachers believe can influence their practice (Borg, 2003) and that understanding teachers’ conceptions is an important part of understanding teaching and of supporting the professional development of teachers which has remained the uncharted territory and little is known about what LA means to language teachers in various contexts and educational settings around the world (Borg, 2011) with the exception of Balcikanli (2010), Borg and Al-Busaidi (2012), Camilleri (1999), and Chan (2003), who have endeavored to investigate teachers’ conceptions in promoting LA from various aspects or fields.
The researcher explored LA with regard to student involvement in classroom management, assessment, homework tasks, and so forth from the student-teachers’ perspective by administering a questionnaire and conducting follow-up interviews, whose results indicated that student-teachers maintained positive attitudes and a "clear view of LA and the involvement of students in the learning process", and "the student teachers would probably feel ready to pass onto their future students some responsibilities and choices" (Balcikanli, 2010, p.
(View the image of this page) <H4>Participants and sampling for the narrative analysis and the second interview phase</H4> The final group of the participants comprised of two teachers selected by the researchers based on their comments in the first interview phase, those who strongly agreed or strongly disagreed with LA which is technically referred to as negative case analysis (Ary et al.