Promoting Learner Autonomy in Pre-service Teacher Education

This paper aims to deal with ways of how to promote learner autonomy among student-teachers, during their passive and active teaching practice through keeping and enriching their portfolios under the model of EPOSTL (European Portfolio of Student Teachers of Languages), bearing in mind that pre-service teacher education needs serious attention of the whole society and especially of the universities preparing teachers. This paper also aims at answering the following questions: What is student-teachers‟ perception of learner autonomy? What are the differences and commonalities between learner autonomy and teacher autonomy? Does autonomy move the focus from teaching to learning? How can EPOSTL promote learner autonomy? Having autonomy in mind, how does EPOSTL make use of self and peer assessment? How does learner autonomy encourage peer support and cooperation? What are the relation between learner autonomy to problem solving and reflective teaching/learning? Does learner autonomy depend on teacher autonomy? How to put some milestones for promoting learner autonomy among student-teachers? The answers to these questions are carefully gathered and analyzed and interpreted through interviews and questionnaires on these issues. So, with this study it is aimed to put some milestones for promoting learner autonomy among student-teachers, who will be in the near future teachers of English, trying to focus on learner involvement, learner reflection, and learner language acquisition, and how all these might be implemented in practice, thus combining both learner autonomy with teacher autonomy as the student-teachers need to have both of them.Keywords: learner autonomy, EPOSTL, pre-service teaching education, student-teacher.