A Study On ESL Autonomous Learning For Non-English Majors From A Perspective Of Intersubjectivity

With the development of humanism and cognitive psychology, the modern educational conception of autonomous learning has become a hot topic, as well as one of the modern educational revolution goals. In College English Curriculum Requirements, it is clearly pointed out that the new educational model in education revolution should develop towards autonomous learning.Autonomous learning focuses on learners'autonomy during the process of learning, including "self-design, self-implementation, self-control and self-assessment". According to Holec's definition of learner's autonomy, the learners should have "the ability to take charge of their own learning". Constructivism provides the theoretical basis for theory and practice of autonomous learning, claiming for construction of knowledge, and taking knowledge as the result of meaning construction. During such a process, learners construct meanings actively, instead of receiving the knowledge passively. Therefore, as the subject in meaning construction and real meaningful learning, learners are to be the center of learning activity. During the process of active meaning construction, the learners construct their own knowledge system.However, the fact is that the process of learning and teaching depends on and gets realized through teacher-student interaction. It is inappropriate to merely emphasize students' subjectivity, which would lead to a misunderstanding of the process of learning and teaching. With the development of modern educational conception, the philosophical notion of intersubjectivity gets to catch educators'sight. The intersubjectivity theory emphasizes the interactive relationship among the cognitive subjects. Meaning construction does not only happen within the single cognitive subject, but is fulfilled during the interaction of all cognitive subjects. Therefore, meaning is endowed with distinct features from individual subject, and at the same time, gets its further development and construction among all cognitive subjects. From the perspective of intersubjectivity, as for its implication for pedagogy, the relationship between the teacher and learners involved in the same activity of learning and teaching is not of order-giving and order-obeying, or guidance-giving and guidance-following, but a relationship of intersubjectivity with equality and interaction. And this thesis focuses on intersbujectivity theory's inspriation and implication for ESL learning and teaching.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the present research about autonomous study and its limitations, and then proposes the necessity of the research about the teachers'and students'inter-subjectivities for the improvement of students'autonomous study ability. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical frame of this thesis, including autonomous study theory, constructivism theory, inter-subjectivity theory, and the discussion about the teachers'and students' subject-participation degrees. Chapter 3 is the empirical study. It describes the experiment design, the experimental procedure, instrument and so on. Chapter 4 is the analysis and discussion of the data. Chapter 5 is the conclusion and puts forward the limitations of this research.