The Relationship between Teaching Styles and Autonomy among Iranian Female EFL Teachers , Teaching at Advanced Levels

The current research aimed at inspecting the existence of a significant relationship between teachers’ teaching styles and their Autonomy. For this reason, two questionnaires with regard to the main variables were given to 175 female English language teachers, teaching at advanced levels. Moreover, non-parametric Mann Whitney and Kruskal Wallis tests were selected to compare the levels of each style in terms of Autonomy scores. The results showed no significant correlation between the two variables.


Introduction
The globalization of English language teaching and learning is booming as never before.Countries all across the globe are actively promoting their facilities and boosting their budget in order to ameliorate public education.English language instruction has been considered a crucial factor in this regard, which has two sides: teachers and learners, each of which profoundly influences the process of instruction.According to Menken (2000), half of all teachers may expect educating an English language learner during their career.In line with that Vieira and Gaspar (2013) assert that teachers are responsible, in terms of education effectiveness, for 30% of the variance on students' achievement.
In addition, learners hold various learning styles and for teachers, it might materialize, to a large extent, necessary to be familiar with these styles and make every effort to tailor their teaching styles and class setting to meet students' requirements, to put it another way, instructors ought to combine their teaching styles in accordance with the diversity of students' needs and content variations.Purkey and Novak (1984, p. 13), believe that "Good teaching is the process of inviting students to see themselves as able, valuable, and self-directing and of encouraging them to act according to these self-perceptions".
In this effort, one of the viable solutions institutions ought to work towards is laying a primary emphasis on the empowerment of their teachers.Melenyzer, 1990 andShort, 1994, argue that the empowerment of teachers is the suitable stage to commence solving the school problems.In this regard, according to Pearson and Moomaw (2006): if teachers are to be empowered and regarded as professionals, then like other professionals, they must have the freedom to prescribe the best treatment for their students as doctors or lawyers do for their clients.This freedom is teacher autonomy.(p.44).
Along the same lines, despite scholars such as Masouleh and Jooneghani (2011) asserted that linguists failed to conclude what autonomy indeed means, in effect, regarding language learning, autonomy is an ambitious objective for practical, pedagogical and philosophical purposes.Street (1988) states that teacher autonomy is "the independence teachers maintain in exercising discretion within their classrooms to make instructional decisions" (p.4).

Autonomy
Over the past few decades, in addition to learners' autonomy, teachers' autonomy has been considered as a major attribute influencing the quality of education.Yet its definition remained obscure.Barfield et al. (2002) believed that in spite of the fact that learner autonomy gained wide-ranging definitions, teacher autonomy still needs a contextually sensitive and more focused definition.
Arguing that 'autonomy, in the perspective of complexity, encompasses properties and conditions for complex emergence, Paiva and Braga (2008) contended it is inextricably linked to its environment'.(cited in Paiva, 2011) Likewise, Masouleh and Jooneghani (2012) claim that its dynamic structure governs the nature of its interactions with the environment in which it is nested.Assor et al. (2002) and Wentzel (2002) acknowledged that an autonomy-supportive teaching style is associated positively with better school adjustment, higher grades, and more school engagement.Teacher autonomy, on the other hand, is "the capacity, freedom, and/or responsibility to make choices concerning one's own teaching" (Aoki, 2000).
Reviewing the related literature, we come to this conclusion that there are many contradictory statements concerning whether autonomy is an internal or external issue and it is yet to be discussed more, however, according to Lynch (2001) autonomy is a concept to be practiced both, outside and within institutional boundaries.On the other hand, Adamson and Sert (2012) alert that autonomy, if exercised to its full effectiveness, needs to be an all-pervading philosophy of life shaping an individual's personal behaviour and cognition within the community

Teachers' Teaching Styles
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, teacher's teaching style is one of the most efficacious features when language learning and teaching are considered.According to Grasha (1996) teaching styles represent the pattern of beliefs, needs and behaviour shown by teachers in the classroom.One teaching style involves a complex mix of beliefs, attitudes, strategies, techniques, motivation, personality and control.Gregorc (1979) also holds that teachers' teaching styles are their personal behaviours and the media that they have been using are for transferring data and information to students.On the other hand, Chapman, et al. (2001) acknowledged the role of gender, seniority and time in influencing their teaching.Furthermore, Peacock (2001) declared that teaching styles used by teachers, to a large extent depend on the teacher's ethnicity.He, in addition, discovered that the purpose and design of courses, norms of learning institutions and research results are the other elements that impact teaching styles.Grasha (1996) defines the teaching styles as the pattern of belief, knowledge, performance and behavior of teachers when they are teaching.He divided the teaching styles into five dimensions which are the expert style, formal authority style, personal model style, delegator style and facilitator style.Peacock (2001), on the other hand asserted that the teaching style is the way a person teaches by nature, habitual, inclination or even a custom that is used to convey information and skills in the classroom.
Reviewing the related literature reveals that so much information is available regarding teachers' teaching styles and their implications for teaching and learning, much of which is confusing to follow: Williamson & Watson (2007) claim that meeting the needs of students is essential if educators desire to make considerable progress towards the objective of developing lifelong learners.Hence, it is of paramount importance for teachers to choose the best teaching style for various situations and different students.

Statement of the Research Question
Is there any significant relationship between teaching styles and autonomy among Iranian female EFL teachers, teaching at advanced levels?

Participants
In this study, 129 female teachers teaching at advanced levels in the age range of 22-45 at various language schools inter alia, Asre Zaban Language Academy, in Tehran, Iran, cooperated with the researcher and accurately completed the questionnaires.The selection was based on willingness to participate and teachers were selected non-randomly based on convenient non-random sampling.The oarticipants of this study possessed at least 2 years of teaching experience.

Grasha Teaching Style Inventory Questionnaire
Grasha's Teaching Style Inventory: Version 3.0 (1994), was employed in this research The researcher asked English language teachers to fill out the instrument concerning their teaching preferences.

Teacher Autonomy Survey (TAS)
Pearson and Moomaw's Teacher Autonomy Survey (2005), is comprised of 18 questions originally designed so as to elicit the extent to which teachers consider themselves autonomous in the following areas: (1) instructional sequencing and planning, (2) personal on-the-job decision-making, (3) selection of activities and materials, and (4) classroom standards of conduct.The options vary from "Definitely True" to "Definitely False" and "More or Less True" and "More or Less False" appear in between.Moreover, items 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 were recoded so that the high score denoted increased autonomy.

Procedure
The procedures in a descriptive study need to be completely and accurately described so that its replication is possible for other researchers (Best & Kahn, 2006).The researcher, at the onset of this research, administered two instruments namely Grasha's Teaching Style Inventory: Version 3.0 (1994), and Teaching Autonomy Scale (Pearson & Moomaw, 2005) among 175 female English language teachers teaching advanced students in different Language institutes inter alia Asre-Zaban Language Academy.The participants were asked to complete the questionnaires during non-instructional times at their convenience, enclose and return them to the researcher within 1 week of receipt.Teachers responded anonymously to the instruments, and, in total, 138 questionnaires were returned to the researcher.Afterwards, following an in-depth verification, 129 questionnaires -which had been accurately and completely filled out, were selected.
In the next stage, the responses of all the partakers were meticulously scrutinized and scored.Afterwards, the relationship between the two variables underwent statistical analyses..

Testing the Null Hypothesis:
There is no significant relationship between Iranian EFL teachers' Autonomy and their teaching styles.
In order to test the above null hypothesis, the frequencies of teachers' teaching styles -Expert, Formal Authority, Personal Model, Facilitator and Delegator, were calculated, which are presented in Tables 1 to 5. As can be seen in Table 6, the mean for Autonomy is 52.7519.On the other side, the minimum and maximum statistics are 42.00 and 68.00 respectively.In addition, the Since the teaching styles are categorized into low, moderate, and high levels, each teaching style is considered as a nominal variable.Moreover, as the autonomy is on an interval scale, the choice of statistic to measure the relationship between one nominal variable and one interval variable is eta.However, since the frequencies of some of the styles' levels are quite low, the researcher chose to select non-parametric Mann Whitney and Kruskal Wallis tests to compare the levels of each style in terms of autonomy scores.The reason for choosing non-parametric tests was that the test of normality results in Tables 12 to 16 indicated non-normality of the data (p <.05).

Discussion
The aim of this study was to put a major emphasis on teachers and their attributes; in this regard, the researcher opted for teachers' various teaching styles and their Autonomy as the two major and influential factors in the field of teacher education.At the outset of the study, following the gathering of data through two aforementioned questionnaires, responses were all scored and a painstaking data nalysis was performed.As a consequence, it was proved that there was no significant correlation between teachers' autonomy and their teaching styles.Simplistically put, no significant correlation was detected between teachers' Expert, Personal Model, Facilitator, Delegator and Formal Authority teaching styles and their Autonomy.Hence, the null hypothesis was retained.
The results of a study conducted by Hosseinzadeh and Baradaran (2015) on the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers' autonomy and their Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) suggested that exclusive of General autonomy which was positively and significantly related to NLP, other sub-categories of autonomy-Curriculum and Total --were not correlated significantly with NLP.In addition, the findings of a research done by L Carolyn Pearson and William Moomaw (2005) were to some extent in line with the results of the present study, in that teachers' autonomy was found correlated with professionalism, on-the-job stress and empowerment; in addition, a decline was observed in on-the-job stress when the Curriculum autonomy maximized,, but only little correlation was found between job satisfaction and Curriculum autonomy; the study, also proved that as General autonomy increased, so did professionalism and empowerment, but no correlation was found between autonomy and teaching level (elementary, middle and high school).
Furthermore, regarding teachers' teaching styles, Hosseinzadeh and Baradaran (2015) on the relationship between English language teachers' teaching styles and their Neuro-linguistic Programming revealed that teachers' Expert, Formal Authority, Facilitator, and Delegator teaching styles and their NLP were significantly and positively related; a closer look at the descriptive statistics of these teaching styles also revealed that the moderate category of the above teaching styles are of higher NLP in comparison to their low categories.Moreover, Baradaran and Hosseinzadeh (2015), in their research on the relationship between Iranian EFL teachers' teaching styles and their Curriculum and General autonomy, concluded that there was a significant and negative relationship between teachers' Expert, Personal Model, and Delegator styles and Curriculum autonomy; however, no significant relationship was detected between these styles and General autonomy.

Conclusion
Based on the findings of this study, it was proved that teachers' various teaching styles and Autonomy were not significantly related to each other.In addition, it is important to emphasize that this research sustained the following limitations which are expected to be removed in the future, Firstly, the researcher based his selection of the teachers on available sampling.The replication of the study is recommended provided that procedures that allow a greater degree of randomization and eventually more generalizability are employed.
Secondly, owing to the similar nationality of all the participants -Iranian, the results cannot be generalized to teachers of other countries.

Figures 1
Figures 1 to 5 present the results on Autonomy scores across the various categories of teaching styles.Evidently, the categories of Expert, Personal Model, Delegator and Facilitator are significantly different from Formal Authority in terms of Autonomy.However, no significant relationship was detected between different categories of teaching styles and Autonomy.To put it bluntly, none of the teaching styles namely Deligator, Facilitator, Personal Model, Expert and Formal Authority are significantly related to Autonomy.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Comparing autonomy across categories of expert

Table 1 .
Expert frequency statistics Table1to 5 illustrate that113, 33, 25, 81, 120teachers in Expert, Formal Authority, Personal Model, Facilitator and Delegator teaching styles, respectively, held the moderate level of the styles.In addition, Personal Model with 104 respondents had the highest number of low category by contrast to delegator style with 9. Furthermore, two teachers possessed a high level of Expert teaching style which was, in fact, the only style with a high level Table6to 10 also provide the descriptive statistics on Autonomy scores alone and in terms of different levels of each teaching style separately.

Table 7 .
Table shows that the skewness and kurtosis for Autonomy are .396and .028respectively.Descriptive statistics on autonomy for different levels of expert teaching style

Table 8 .
Descriptive statistics on autonomy for different levels of formal authority teaching style

Table 9 .
Descriptive statistics on autonomy for different levels of personal model teaching style

Table 10 .
Descriptive statistics on autonomy for different levels of facilitator teaching style

Table 11 .
Descriptive statistics on autonomy for different levels of delegator teaching style Facilitator teaching style with 52.1042 has the lowest mean, by contrast, Delegator teaching style possesses the highest mean with 55.4444 regarding the low level.On the other hand, in terms of the moderate level, Personal Model teaching style with 52.4800 has the lowest mean while Facilitator teaching style with 53.1358 owns the highest.

Table 12 .
Tests of normality regarding expert