A Study Of English Teachers' Perceptions Of Autonomous Learning

Autonomous learning is no longer unacquainted in the field of language education, and it is a topic that has been paid great attention by scholars in the English as a foreign language (EFL). The previous studies show that autonomous learning is significant in language acquisition, and also indicate it is important to foster students to be autonomous learners. However, this paper switches the focus to the teacher. The purpose of this research is to study students'learning autonomy from teachers'perspectives. It is going to find the teacher's attitudes toward autonomous learning, how they value such ability, how they cultivate the students with such abilities, and the factors that influence teachers'beliefs.This study finds, 1) Most English teachers of middle schools in China do not clearly know the notion of student autonomy. However, they believe that student learning autonomy is helpful in their classroom teaching, and they are aware of some teaching methods to promote students'abilities of learning independently. 2) Teachers are indispensable in cultivating students'autonomous learning, and there are certain ways to achieve the aim. 3) Among the factors which can affect teacher perceptions of student learning autonomy, age, gender and the number of students within the class are obvious factors.This paper can be divided into five parts. The first part is an introduction to related researches both home and abroad in resent years and the objectives of this paper; the second part is divided into four sections to review some research done by other scholars; the third part is to present the methodologies applied in this paper; the fourth part is to make a discussion based on research questions; the last part is the conclusion of whole passage.The study is different from other studies instead of investigating teacher perceptions and student learning autonomy from the qualitative perspective traditionally. A different research method is adopted in the study, which is based on both quantitative and qualitative approaches to investigate the English teachers'beliefs of student learning autonomy within China.