Teachers’ Beliefs About Learner Autonomy in Collaborative Online Learning: Insights from a University in Vietnam

This article aims to explore teachers’ perspectives about learner autonomy (LA) and specifically, it explores how collaborative online learning (COL) may aid English language teachers at a Vietnamese university in fostering students’ capacity for LA as part of their instructional approach. This mixed methods paper presents the findings obtained from an online questionnaire and individual interviews with 47 teachers from a Vietnamese university. The results show technical, psychological, and political interpretations of autonomy in language education, which reveal two distinct yet interrelated perspective of autonomy among teachers: independent and interdependent learning. Furthermore, the research demonstrates the role of language teachers in COL and identifies some limitations pertaining to the promotion of autonomy in virtual classrooms.