A study into pre-service FL teachers’ perceptions of their willingness, ability and opportunity to promote learner autonomy

Abstract

Learner autonomy (LA) represents one of the most important educational goals in FL education. Nonetheless, its development is still far from being a prominent goal in the practice of FLT and one reason for this is the lack of teacher education initiatives aimed at preparing teachers to foster LA. The aim of this study was to investigate 24 pre-service FL teachers’ perceptions of their willingness, ability, and opportunity to implement pedagogy for autonomy (PA) in their future teaching after completing a pre-service teacher education initiativewhich was designed to introduce the trainees to the notion of LA in FLT and show them how to promote PA in the FL classroom. The data (obtained by means of the completion of a questionnaire) revealed that the participants were willing to promote LA in their teaching and they were convinced that they would have the opportunity to work on PA. However, most of them had doubts about their ability to foster LA, underlining their need for gaining more confidence and getting practice in the development of PA.