Fostering foreign-language teaching at university by developing students’ autonomy: The exploratory experiment

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of activation of the process of foreign-language acquisition by means of fostering students’ autonomy. The author characterises and analyses the nature and components of foreign-language communicative competence and autonomy. It proceeds with justifying the appropriateness of using particular diagnostic tests and specifies the components of autonomy that are manifested during foreign-language teaching and learning at university. The methods employed include statistical relevance check based on the criteria of Mann–Whitney, Wilcoxon rank correlation, analysis by Spearman and factor analysis. The findings confirm the interconnection between intensity and quality of students’ foreign-language communicative competence development and their autonomy. The research identifies three levels of foreign-language communicative competence and the levels of autonomy corresponding to them. The article concludes with an outline of the stages following the exploratory experiment and further recommendations.

Keywords: Learners’ autonomy, foreign-language communicative competence, monitoring learners’ autonomy, foreign-language acquisition, English as a second language.