Teacher’s Practices in Fostering Learner Autonomy in a Thai University Context

Abstract

Despite the widespread interest in autonomy and its inclusion in many teacher education programmes, if and how teachers foster autonomy in the classroom is not well-known (Nasri et al., 2015). Especially, in-depth studies of teachers’ practices and the factors that influence these are thin on the ground. For this reason, this study was conducted to investigate four teachers’ practices, drawing on classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, and a focus group interview, to identify how they fostered learner autonomy and the variables which affected their classroom practices. It was found that the teachers placed greater emphasis on certain dimensions of autonomy, specifically favouring the psychological and technical dimensions over the political and socio-cultural ones. The teachers’ decisions to foster learner autonomy were influenced by contextual factors, such as students’ language proficiency levels, as well as teacher-internal factors, such as their beliefs about fostering learner autonomy and their own prior learning experiences. We draw from this a number of pedagogical implications for how learner autonomy may be fostered in the language classroom.