Learner autonomy has been identified as a complicated capacity that potentially has a great impact on personal growth and achievement. Different mediated attributes associated with situational, psychological, cultural and political aspects of this construct have been developed and examined to facilitate the promotion of this educational goal. Taking this into account, this paper adopts socio-cultural perspective to localize the situation of EFL learning in higher education in Vietnam. Personal reflections and part of the data generated from a large-scale project are extracted to illustrate a dilemma of the context where learner autonomy can be either fostered or hindered deliberately within various community constraints. The paper finishes with a discussion on the implementation of local learner autonomy promoting practices and puts forward some directions for further research.