The Impact of Practicing Autonomy on Iranian EFL Learners Writing Ability

Whether autonomous learning has any effect on writing processes has long been an important issue in EFL/ESL research. Consequently, the main purpose of the present study was to determine whether autonomy would have any effect on EFL learners’ essay writing. Therefore, the following research questions were stated: Does practicing autonomy have any effect on EFL learners’ essay writing? Do learners perceive that practicing autonomy leads to better essay writing? The participants of this study were 90 out of whom 60 were selected as the subjects of the study. They were intermediate EFL learners who were studying English in one of language institutes in Gonbad Kavous. In order to select the participants and divide them into a control and two experimental groups a writing pretest was given to them. They were matched on a case-by-case basis in terms of their writing proficiency. Each class or group consisted of thirty students. The data from posttest was analyzed using independent samples t-test. The results of the t-test indicated that at the 0.05 level of significance there was a significant difference between the mean score of the non-autonomous group and that of the autonomous group on the writing posttest (N1=30, N2=30, P=.000 0.05). In other words, the writing proficiency of the non-autonomous and autonomous groups differed significantly at the end of the treatment period, (i.e., mean score of non-autonomous group=4.00 and mean score of autonomous group=6.10). The second research question was intended to determine how learners perceive autonomous learning. The results revealed that 85 percent of the participants had positive perception of using autonomous learning tasks. Curriculum designers, EFL teachers and L2 instructors are recommended to solve the problems about essay writing instruction in academic issues.