How EFL Pre-Service Teachers Perceive Autonomy Supports: Implications for Developing Learner Autonomy

The development of autonomy-supportive teachers, nurturing students’ learning autonomy, is experimentally associated with autonomy-supportive pedagogy, promoted throughout their pre-service teacher education. It emphasizes the significance of how pre-service teachers view pedagogy that supports autonomy. As has been scantily documented in the body of literature, this study explored how Indonesian EFL pre-service teachers value their teacher educator's autonomy supports and how their perceptions of these supports may have affected the development of their LA. This case study recruited a cohort of Indonesian EFL pre-service teachers taking a reading course. A final class survey and gradual retrospective reflections on the four months of study were gathered, resulting in 3 sets of quantitative data and 231 pieces of qualitative data. Grounded in self-determination theory, the research elucidates their viewpoints, observing and appreciating their teacher educator's supportive and inclusive instruction, despite some challenges encountered. They ruminated that the autonomy supports could facilitate their capability to govern their language learning. Implications for pre-service teachers’ professional growth, including the need to provide more visible autonomy supports, tailored scaffolding, and fine-grained adaptations during instruction are discussed.