Teachers' beliefs and practices regarding learner autonomy

Abstract

This paper describes a project about the beliefs and practices regarding learner autonomy (LA) held by English language teachers in a university language centre. A distinctive feature of this project was the manner in which professional development workshops for the teachers were informed by prior research about these teachers’ perspectives on LA. Following a brief rationale for the project, we outline its research component before illustrating how this shaped the teacher workshops. The model for relating research and professional development we illustrate here is one that we believe can be applied more generally in supporting teacher development and institutional change in ELT.