College English Teaching And Students' Autonomous Learning Development-An Empirical Study

Autonomous learning, according to Holec (1981), "the ability to take charge of one's own learning" nowadays has been of increasingly popularity. Particularly, in the present English teaching reform at all levels, it has been regarded as the primary concern in students' learning strategy development and it has been considered as the most important factor in improving students' learning outcome.So far a large number of researches have been done concerning autonomous learning both home and abroad mainly on its significance, concepts and its relevant factors at all levels of teaching and learning in china, what roles it plays in college English teaching and learning activities, few researches with this question have been done so far. Thus, this dissertation intends to carry out an empirical study concerning autonomous learning.By means of questionnaire survey, interview and an empirical study concerning the relation between college English teaching and students' autonomous learning development has been carried out. The empirical study, with 150 non-English major students selected randomly, divided into 2 groups, one as the experimental group; the other as control group, lasts for 3 months. By analysis of the data got from the study with SPSS 12, we can apparently see: promoting students' ability of learning autonomy in language teaching & learning has significant value in improving teaching and learning outcome. Thus, the conclusion of the thesis has been: both EFL teachers and students should, first of all, be aware of the importance of autonomous learning in their teaching & learning, at the same time, they should be trained on autonomous learning strategies so as to apply them in their teaching & learning practice.