Developing EFL Teacher and Learner Autonomy through Teacher-Initiated Action Research
Sada A Daoud
Isra University, Jordan

This paper reports on a teacher development project carried out in a university context in an Asian developing country. One aim was to develop teacher learning autonomy using an action research approach, while the main objective was to promote learner autonomy. With twenty teachers participating in the project, the researcher investigated the relationship between teacher-initiated action research and teacher autonomy as well as the relationship between teacher autonomy and learner autonomy. In doing this, she used various tools, including recordings of the teachers’ oral research reports, feedback questionnaires, classroom observation, and interviews with a number of selected participants. Findings indicate a clear relationship between teacher-initiated action research and teacher autonomy, on the one hand, and between teacher and learner autonomy, on the other. There were constraints, however. These include teacher overload and the leadership style in the particular research context. The paper concludes with implications for similar projects in the future.

Supporting and Developing SALL: The Need for a Core Team
Richard Pemberton, Sarah Toogood, Susanna Ho and Elza Tsang
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Without ongoing and expert support, self-access centers (SAC) can easily become places where learners are left to sink or swim. At Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, SAC team members found themselves unable to devote sufficient time to supporting self-access language learning (SALL) as teaching loads and materials-writing responsibilities increased. Our solution was to propose than an SAC core team be set up with four (nearly) full-time members.

In this paper we address a range of issues relating to the setting-up of a full-time SAC core team. We look in particular at three areas:

• how we convinced the institution to allow for and support the team
• how we work as a team
• how we promote SALL to colleagues developing and teaching on Language Center courses.

Team-Teaching as Negotiating Autonomy and Shared Understandings of What We Are Doing
Jonathan Shaw
Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand

This paper explores the proposition that teacher autonomy might be realized where teachers are empowered by their institutional context to learn about student learning, and act upon that learning. This was something my colleagues and I have talked about a lot during recent years, culminating with their dispensing with a timetable altogether in recent collaborations. The measure of autonomy is then found in the discourse of team teachers by what they assume, what they question, how they reinvent a course or a program, and how they come to shared understandings of what’s happening, and how they might impact upon those processes. Tasks then are ideally always appropriate to the moment.

This paper examines teachers’ interactions on two intensive pre-masters programs. The approach is interpretive, making use of interview data, accounts and action research methods.