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Teaching English has been one of the subjects deeply affected by the lockdown and physical isolation period caused by COVID-19, and schools around the world had to switch to online instruction at short notice. Students engaged in this distance learning process with different autonomy levels; some adapted to the new learning system easily, while others felt lost and depended solely on what the teachers said. This descriptive study aims to discover the perception of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers on learner autonomy levels of Turkish EFL learners during online instruction throughout the lockdown period; what the biggest barriers that blocked their students’ autonomous study habits were; and what strategies teachers/ instructors followed to enhance the students’ autonomy levels. In order to analyse the data collected through an online questionnaire from 66 teacher participants, a descriptive study design with a mixed method approach was adopted. Correlational analysis was performed on the quantitative data, and qualitative data was open coded with content analysis. Findings showed that Turkish EFL learners were perceived to be autonomous at a rate of 55% by their teachers during the online instruction period, and self-access materials, technology, motivation, and the affective factors played a significant role in the development, degree, and perception of autonomy in online learning.

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One’s identity formation process as a learning advisor is inevitably determined or molded by her or his personality features that stand out. It is often these prominent characteristics that dominate her or his understanding of and attitude towards the science and practice of language advising although it is very likely that the formal advisor training content often helps surface relatively dormant qualities as well. In this respect, the focus in this visual message board is how nineteen learning advisors from Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University School of Foreign Languages (AYBU-SFL) and one from the Middle East Technical University School of Foreign Languages (METU-SFL) define their advisor selves with reference to their most prominent characteristics as reflected in their end-of-the-course thank you and appreciation cards designed by their trainers.

This study investigates the bond between the learning advisors and advisees that is presumed to be established by building rapport in the very first advising session through the use of intentional reflective dialogues. Applying basic advising strategies with the assistance of a structured dialogue eases the process of building rapport between the learning advisors and learners. Investigating this bond in terms of discursive functions of the talk between the advisors and advisees during advising sessions gives the opportunity to explore the concept of building rapport from a linguistic perspective. With respect to methodology, a corpus-based discourse analysis was adopted, and the analysis was performed on the recorded and transcribed talks of eight participants in four different advising sessions. The results of the study confirmed that rapport between the advisors and advisees can be built even in the very first advising session employing various rapport-building discourse functions. The results also provide insight and useful feedback to the learning advisors in the field as well as being input for the advising discourse.