Language Learning Autonomy

However, in another study which was carried out by Asmahanim (2013), her findings in relation to whether there is a relationship between autonomous learning and gender, contradict with the findings from the earlier research. The aim of her study was to identify the language learning autonomy among Malaysian ESL tertiary learners among 60 ESL tertiary learners in a college located in a local public university in Selangor, Malaysia.

The findings revealed that the students were confident in planning and organizing their language learning but were only fairly confident in regards to monitoring and evaluating their language learning. With regards to gender, findings indicated that there was no significant difference in the mean score between confidence level and gender.

Besides that, findings also revealed that the students were reliant on their teachers in language learning but there was no significant difference in the mean score between male and female students’ reliance towards their teachers. Those students perceived their teachers as the experts of the language but they looked forward for more opportunities to give their opinion about classroom materials and activities.

Similarly, Shokrpour and Shouraki (2016) who conducted a research with three objectives which were to determine whether the learners? autonomous learning is related to motivation, whether motivation can increase the autonomous learning of Iranian EFL learners and improve their self-determination for learning and lastly whether the Iranian EFL learners’ gender affects their autonomous learning at Azad and Payamnoor University in Bousher, Iran, obtained a similar result as found by Asmahanim (2013) in relation to gender.

The participants of the research were second year undergraduate students from the faculty of humanities. The respondents consist of 45 males and 52 females. All students were non-native English speakers and they were students of bachelor of art (BA) and their age ranged from 18 to 25.

The results of the study showed that the learners’ motivation significantly correlated across autonomous language learning while the learners’ gender did not significantly affect autonomous language learning. This study indicated that when learners were motivated, they were more autonomous in their learning and they could better control their language learning.

One important conclusion that could be drawn from this study is that although motivation can have an impact on autonomous language learning, gender does not impact the autonomous language learning. Besides that, gender does not have any significant impact on motivation and autonomy. Therefore, the Statistical analysis of the collected data revealed that motivation has a significant positive effect on developing autonomous language learning of Iranian EFL learners but gender of learners had no significant effect on developing autonomous learning.