Promoting autonomy by employing pedagogical strategies in a language teacher education programme

Autonomy has now become a key idea in language education policy internationally and in Hong Kong. Although quite a number of studies have been conducted to investigate the development of teacher autonomy by engaging in-service language teachers in action research and reflective practice, there is a dearth of work exploring issues of autonomy in pre-service language teacher education. While teacher education programmes have a crucial role to play in developing teachers to be autonomous in their own learning and teaching, to date there have been very few reports delineating how these programmes attempted to promote autonomy by employing pedagogical strategies. This project investigates the impact of the introduction of pedagogical strategies for autonomy into several modules taken by the English majors at HKIEd. The study is based on classroom observation and collection of evaluation data within these modules. The expected outcomes of the project include an interactive website where resources in developing learner and teacher autonomy are provided, and good teaching practices are shared by publishing the module lecturers' reflective accounts of their understanding of the processes involved in preparing students for autonomy-oriented teaching that can contribute to the improvement of language teacher education programmes in Hong Kong and internationally.