Junior College Students' Perceptions of Learner Autonomy-Based Instruction on EFL Writing

Abstract

This paper describes a year-long English composition course syllabus designed both to ease Taiwanese EFL (English as a foreign language) writing teachers' heavy burden of correcting students' written work and to produce self-reliant, autonomous student writers with the willingness and ability to continue to hone their English writing skills by themselves beyond the classroom throughout their lives. This ”learner autonomy-based” course was conducted over the 2005-2006 academic year in a two-year program at a junior college of continuing education in northeastern Taiwan. In order to investigate students’ perceptions of the course design and their preferences for the components of the course syllabus, a survey questionnaire using a five-point Likert Scale was administered in November 2006 to the 40 second-year English major students who had taken and finished the required English composition course. The results of the survey indicate that the students generally held highly positive views of the course design. The pedagogical implications and limitations of this study are briefly discussed in the last section of this paper.