The Perspective on Learner Autonomy in Real Teacher’s Practices in the Context of Higher Primary Polish EFL Education

In the past 30 years there has been a marked interest in learner autonomy in the context of Polish education. Changing roles of the teacher and learners in the classroom and particularly in the EFL classroom, cognitive method, communicative approach to language teaching as well as a few unconventional methods of teaching foreign languages motivated Polish teachers and language educators to produce empirical as well as theoretical papers devoted to autonomy.The aim of this paper is to present the perspective on learner autonomy in Polish EFL classroom and demonstrate the potential difficulties why autonomy is still a taboo issue in Polish education despite clear ministerial requirements in the core curriculum of general education.This paper is supported by the empirical study devoted to learner autonomy in a Polish higher primary foreign language classroom, which encompassed long-term classroom observations as well as the interviews with the learners and the teachers, who were also asked to fill in an extensive questionnaire. The respondents were over a hundred language learners at the age of 11, 12 and 13 and four female English teachers with varied experience in foreign language teaching.This paper concentrates on the results from the first phase of the study (class observations) as well as the outcomes of the interviews with the teachers and the questionnaires they filled in. This part of the study demonstrates the teachers’ views and attitude towards autonomous learning in Polish state schools and verifies their methodology in a real classroom setting.