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ability to take charge of one’s learning … to have, and to hold, the responsibility forall the decisions concerning all aspects of this learning’ and the specific decisionshe listed were:■■■■■■■■■■determining the objectivesdefining the contents and progressionsselecting methods and techniques to be usedmonitoring the procedure of acquisitionevaluating what has been acquired.As Benson (2006) notes, variants on this definition appear in the literature, with‘ability’ sometimes replaced with ‘capacity’ (for example, in Little, 1991) and‘take responsibility for’ or ‘take control of’ substituting for ‘take charge of’. Somedefinitions (e.g. Dam, 1995) also include the notion of ‘willingness’ to stress thepoint that irrespective of their capacity, learners will not develop autonomyunless they are willing to take responsibility for their learning. These broadunderstandings of what learner autonomy is, then, seem to be well-establishedin the literature (but see also Benson, 1996 for an analysis of the complexitiesinvolved in defining what learner autonomy means); additionally, following Little(1991), some accounts of learner autonomy start by defining what it is not; Esch(1998: 37), for example, states thatit is not self-instruction/learning without a teacher; … it does not mean thatintervention or initiative on the part of a teacher is banned; … it is not somethingteachers do to learners; i.e. a new methodology; … it is not a single easilyidentifiable behaviour; … it is not a steady state achieved by learners once andfor all.Any consensus in the literature about what learner autonomy is or is not, however,does not imply that teachers will necessarily hold analogous understandings ofthe concept; in fact, given the limited knowledge we have of such understandings,we find questionable some of the pronouncements in the literature about theexistence of generally accepted views about learner autonomy. Holec (2008: 3),for example, suggests that the following list of issues in learner autonomy havebeen ‘provisionally settled’:does self-direction simply mean that the learner will do here what the teacherdoes in traditional other-directed learning environments? What new rolesfor teachers are defined in the approach? What should materials suitable forself-directed learning look like? How can learners be adequately trained toachieve learning competence? How can teachers be trained to adequatelyplay their roles? What are the defining features of self-evaluation? What arethe appropriate representations on language and language learning that bothlearners and teachers should base their actions on?Sinclair (2000) similarly suggests 13 aspects of learner autonomy which ‘appear tohave been recognised and broadly accepted by the language teaching profession’Teacher Beliefs Autonomy | 215