The Correlation between Teacher Trainers' and Pre-service Teachers' Perceptions of Autonomy

Autonomy has been a very popular subject in language learning as of late. It can be defined as taking responsibility for one's own learning, as an ability to take charge of one's own learning (Holec, 1981), as a personal agenda for learning (Little, 1991) or awareness in language (Lier,1996) and as the learner's willingness and capacity to control or oversee her own learning (Dam, 1990). People are qualified as autonomous when they independently choose aims and purposes and set goals; select materials, methods and tasks; exercise choice and purpose in organising and carrying out the chosen tasks; and set up criteria for evaluation. That is why the main aim of this study is to investigate the correlation between teachers' and pre-service teachers' perspectives of autonomy and to explore these perspectives by asking primarily what teachers' views of their roles and responsibilities are in language leaming/teaching; secondly what they think of the roles of the students; thirdly, which opinions and evidence teachers have of their students' autonomous learning; fourthly, what teachers' attitudes are towards activities, both inside and outside the classroom, which are thought to help in the autonomy development; fifthly what teachers' and pre-service teachers' interpretations are of learner autonomy; sixthly what they think of the teacher autonomy and finally whether teachers believe the course curriculum helps or hinders the development of learner autonomy. 10 teachers and 60 pre-service teachers at the Faculty of Education participated in the study and they were administered the semi-structured interview and the questionnaire by Camilleri (1997). The results show that there is a correlation between the teacher trainers' and pre-service teachers' perceptions of learner autonomy, however, they have different perspectives in terms of teacher autonomy. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd