Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The Third European Conference on Language Learning, Brighton, İngiltere, 1 - 05 Temmuz 2015, ss.141-161
In last decades, being autonomous language learners has been the spotlight of researchers and accepted as crucial and worth to think carefully about its applications in teacher training institutions. As a consequence, the Ministry of Education in Turkey always emphasises the learner autonomy in their language curriculums and official documents related to language learning. Even in European context, especially in CEFR, it is also stressed that to learn a language, an individual should be autonomous and monitor his own language learning process. Autonomous learning has been defined by Holec (1981, p.3) as "to determine objectives, to define the contents and progressions, to select methods and techniques to be used, to monitor the procedures of acquisition and to evaluate what has been acquired". One of the results taken into account is being autonomous learner while learning a language really helps and speeds up learning process. In this context, the main question of the study is "What are the views of academics working in an English Language Teaching (ELT) department about 'learner autonomy' and how they implement it in their classes?" This study was designed as a basic qualitative research. The study group was consisted of six teacher trainers of ELT department of a state university in Turkey. Results indicate that teacher trainers know the importance of autonomy, value it and try to implement and foster it. They also thought that they are supporting students to become autonomous and to some extent they are successful in doing so in spite of difficulties. [This paper was published in: "The European Conference on Language Learning 2015: Official Conference Proceedings" (pp. 141-162).]