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RQ4: To what extent do teachers feel their learners are autonomous?In the questionnaire we asked teachers about the extent to which they feel theirstudents are autonomous. We avoided a yes/no approach to this question (i.e. areyour students autonomous?) given that, as Nunan (1997) argues, autonomy is notan absolute concept but, rather, can exist in different degrees. Our prompt thusasked teachers whether they felt their students had a fair level of autonomy. Alsoin this question, because we were aware that the teachers taught students ondifferent programmes at the LC, we asked them to respond to this question withreference to the programme they worked on most.The results here were interesting: 41.7 per cent of the teachers disagreed thattheir learners were autonomous, 18.3 per cent were unsure, and 40 per centagreed. Also, teachers’ opinions did not correlate with the level of learners theytaught. These findings suggest that the teachers had differing expectations of whatautonomous learners were able to do and there was also some evidence of thisin the interviews. One teacher, for example, explained that she felt her studentsdemonstrated some autonomy becauseAt least, they’re aware of the ideas, whether it’s ‘Ok, I need to make my ownschedule’, or ‘I need to plan’, things like this. Or ‘I need to be doing more outsideof the classroom than just the required homework’. I see students that are atleast aware of that, and at least they claim to be doing those things, even thoughmaybe not all of them surely are.In this case, the teacher felt that autonomy was manifest through the awarenessstudents displayed of what they needed to do (even if they did not actually do it).Another teacher cited more concrete evidence of her students’ autonomy:Once you have introduced skills like skimming and scanning and getting themeanings of vocabulary and you give them certain approaches to the way youcan do it, some like looking up the difficult vocabulary first, introducing them,others like just reading and guessing the vocabulary at the end. So I have giventhese possibilities to them and so what I do is, because different students havedifferent ways of doing it, I would put them into groups and say, ‘Ok who likes tostudy the vocabulary first and then read?’ and, so I find that students are able tomake decisions like that. It is because they have seen how best they can operatewith certain abilities.In this example, the teacher’s judgement that her students had some autonomycame from their willingness and ability to make choices about how to carry outclassroom activities. The activities themselves were defined by the teacher, but thestudents had some say in the procedures they adopted.One final example here of the evidence teachers’ cited to support the view thattheir students had some autonomy was the following:I would say, with Level 5 because that’s the level of class that I have experiencewith, students do have [autonomy], because they’re doing the presentationsand they’re doing some of the essay writing choosing the topic. They weren’t232 | Teacher Beliefs Autonomy