Abstract—As online education programs increase their
numbers, autonomous learning becomes more necessary to
achieve academic success. The present research determines the
impact that participating in an online course has on students’
language learner autonomy. To quantify this impact the
Measuring Instrument for Language Learner Autonomy was
applied in the second and last week of the course. By means of a
paired samples t-test, it was confirmed that the students
participating in the course increased their language learner
autonomy. Additionally, the specific behaviors that changed
were revealed to be associated with self-regulated learning.
Therefore, it can be asserted that participation in the online
learning course led to an increase of the level of autonomy of the
students by means of increasing the frequency of behaviors
related to taking charge of their own learning process.
Index Terms—Autonomy, EFL, ESL, online education.
The authors are with Facultad de Comunicaciones, Universidad de Las
Américas, Sede Providencia, Manuel Montt 948, Santiago, Chile (e-mail:
benjamin.carcamo@edu.udla.cl, cperezc@udla.cl).
Cite: Benjamín Cárcamo and Cristian Pérez, "Toward Autonomous Learning: Exploring the Impact of Participating in an Online Second Language Learning Course," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 449-455, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).