An Investigation of Turkish High School EFL Teachers’ Readiness to Promote Learner Autonomy

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate high school EFL teachers’ readiness for promoting learner autonomy in the Turkish educational context. For this aim, both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. A questionnaire developed by Nakata (2011) was administered to 32 high school EFL teachers from different cities in Turkey. The 23-item questionnaire which has two sections investigates the teachers’ perceived importance of certain strategies for promoting learner autonomy and their actual use of these strategies in the real teaching context in the first section, and in the second section it investigates the teachers’ perceived importance of certain strategies for promoting professional autonomy and to what extent they make use of these strategies in practice. To support the quantitative data, a written protocol was conducted with four high school EFL teachers. The data gathered from the questionnaire were analyzed using SPSS. Content analysis technique was used in order to analyze the qualitative data gathered from the written protocol. The overall findings of the study inform us that many Turkish high school EFL teachers appear to be not ready to promote learner autonomy in their learners and to promote professional autonomy in themselves. The study findings indicate a significant difference between Turkish high school EFL teachers’ perceived importance of certain strategies for promoting learner autonomy and their actual use of these strategies. Similarly, the findings point out a significant difference between Turkish high school EFL teachers’ perceived importance of certain strategies for promoting professional autonomy and their actual use of these strategies.