A Study On Autonomous Learning And Its Application To EFL Writing

The humanism and constructivism have exerted profound influence on China's educational domain since 1990s. Learners and learning processes have received much attention in the teaching practice; learner autonomy has become one of educational objectives. Where foreign language instruction is concerned, some ideas of humanism and constructivism have been put into practice. For instance, communicative language teaching and task-based instruction, which are popular in EFL teaching, are founded on the learner-centered view. However, they have influenced positively the teaching of listening, speaking, and reading. Writing skill has long been downplayed so that many learners' writing levels do not correspond with years of language learning. To improve writing skills and foster learner autonomy, this thesis attempts to set forth the idea of autonomous learning of EFL writing: students learn to write by taking responsibilities of self-direction during writing processes. The author addresses the following research questions: the relation between the level of autonomy and writing achievement, the difference in the level of autonomy between different age groups, and the effect of the training of autonomous learning on writing achievement and on individual students' awareness and behaviors of learning autonomy.The following discoveries are made from the empirical study: the level of autonomy is positively correlated to writing achievement; the level of university students is higher than that of middle school students' autonomy; the students trained with autonomous learning perform better than those without training; and some changes in autonomy in writing.Hopefully the findings of this thesis will be enlightening to educational practitioners.