Correlation Study Between Cultivating Autonomous Learning And Improving Their Performance On Reading Comprehension Among Non-English Major Students

As early as two thousand years ago, our ancient educationalist Confucian had pointed out that "Give a man a fish, you have fed him for today; Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime." His argument has, in fact, shown the importance of developing learner autonomy. With the change from Teacher-centeredness to learner centeredness in education, learner-centeredness and learner autonomy have become a hot issue in the research of foreign language education. Most of the researches and educators hold the same point of view that fostering learner autonomy is one of the most important goals in language teaching. Similarly, in China, the development of learner autonomy had received more and more attention.In China, autonomous learning is not a new concept, many researcher are studying how to cultivate autonomous among learners. But to the present condition of College English teaching in Gansu, it still leads to the teaching of reading comprehension as the center of the teaching course. What's more, reading is the effective way of accumulating knowledge and improving the other skills such as listening, speaking, writing and translation. So, in the study I put emphasis on cultivating students autonomous learning and improving their performance on reading comprehension.This thesis is made up of six parts. According to the theories on autonomous learning, the author did quantitative study using data analysis by SPSS13.0 from questionnaire and three-tests on reading comprehension. The results show that if we cultivate students' autonomous learning, students' performance on reading performance can be improved accordingly. In this study, the author tried several ways to cultivate autonomous learning in reading comprehension, for example: help learners' understand their role in learning, make them possess the motivation and positive attitude, encourage students to set goals and make reading plans, create atmosphere of autonomous learning as much as possible, train students to use reading strategies autonomously, choose English reading materials by themselves sometimes, finally help students learn to evaluate their learning results. So, in order to make students learn successfully, not only do teachers need to cultivate autonomous learning among students, but also students need to learn how to learn autonomously.