Secondary school EFL teachers' perceptions on learner autonomy

Learner autonomy plays a crucial role in learning a foreign language as the ability to take control of one's own learning. Teachers are considered to have the primary role in developing autonomy in learners; it is always the focus of several studies about their perceptions on learner autonomy and considered as incompletely explored, yet. Therefore, the purpose of this mixed type study is to sort out the secondary school EFL teachers' perceptions on learner autonomy, teachers' role in promoting learner autonomy, desirability and feasibility of learner autonomy, and the challenges teachers face in promoting learner autonomy. This study was conducted during the second term of 2019-2020 academic year. The participants of this study are 43 EFL teachers from 23 different secondary schools in Kozan province of Adana, Turkey. A questionnaire and a structured interview, which are designed by Al-Busaidi and Borg (2012) are applied to 43 ELT teachers. These participants, who are selected by purposive sampling method, are given the questionnaire including 60 items and 10 of these participants are volunteers to take part in the structured interview. At the end of 6-week treatment, the data collected through the questionnaire were analyzed with Statistical Package for Social Sciences 26.0 (SPSS 26.0 version) software and the data collected through structured interviews were exposed to qualitative thematic analyses. Findings from these data collection tools reveal that secondary school EFL teachers are familiar with the term of learner autonomy and agree that learner autonomy contributes to learning a second language; nonetheless, they disagree that learner autonomy is feasible at state school environments because of the curriculum and time limitations.