The development of autonomy and self-regulated learning (SRL) has been described as essential to children’s development, especially in the global networked society. Hence, it is considered a desirable outcome of any educational system.

The concept of SRL is defined as the capacity to engage actively and constructively in our own learning processes, regulating cognitions, motivations, behaviours and environment (Boeakerts & Corno, 2005). Although SRL have been originally conceptualised as strongly related to metacognition and cognitive regulation, current developments have included motivational aspects, such as autonomy and goal orientation. Increasingly, the models of SRL have included guidelines to promote this ability in the classroom through the provision of challenge, encouragement of group-work, capacity of self-evaluation and promotion of mastery orientation through adequate feedback (Meyer & Turner, 2002; Pintrich, 2000; Whitebread et al, 2005)

On the other hand, self-determination theory of motivation looks at autonomy as part of the SRL process, and focuses on the contexts that foster the development of autonomy, including in educational systems. These studies have been mainly focused on observation of classrooms looking at how the autonomy support could be observed in specific teachers’ behaviours (e.g. Reeve, 2009; Reeve & Jang, 2006; Reeve et al, 2008; Stefanou et al., 2004).

Bridging the two perspectives together, It has been suggested that classrooms which are autonomy supportive foster and promote students through helping students to set their own goals, seek challenges, direct their behaviours, being more active and flexible, being persistent, and experiencing more positive feelings about their learning (Reeve, 2002). There is evidence showing that when teachers and parents are high in autonomy support, students become more intrinsically motivated and more effective in self-regulating their performance (Grolnick & Ryan, 1989)

Looking at the theoretical roots, we have found that both perspectives seem to converge more closely in the concept of cognitive autonomy support, proposed by Stefanout et al (2004) which refers to the encouragement of students’ ownership of their own learning processes and It is related to teachers’ behaviours such as asking students to explain their way of thinking or problem solving paths.

Despite the efforts to create adequate ways to observe and analyse autonomy and SRL support, up to now the focus has rather relied on the isolated behaviour of teachers, without necessarily looking at the interaction as a unit of analysis. We think that this kind of interactional approach could be very beneficial to look at the ways in which teachers really engage students in their learning and the ways in which they adapt to students’ needs in terms of content knowledge, strategies and motivation.

The main questions guiding the study are the following: Do Chilean primary teachers foster the autonomy and self-regulation development during instructional activities? How do they engage their students in processes of cognitive autonomy and self-regulation? Thus, the present paper presents the findings of a descriptive study focused on teachers and students interactions within primary classrooms in relation to the promotion of cognitive autonomy and SRL.

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