An Empirical Study On Web-assisted Autonomous Learning In College English

Radical changes have taken place in people's lives, work as well as learning styles as mankind steps into the era of knowledge economy in the 21stcentury. For college students, it is of vital significance to change their learning style and arm themselves with the ability of learning independently to keep pace with the times. Recently, cultivating and improving learners' autonomous learning ability is unceasingly attracting people's attention in the field of language education, which aims to be in accordance with the notion of "learner-centered learning" and "life-long education". Furthermore, integrating autonomous learning with web-assisted learning environment is the trend of language teaching reform. Now more and more colleges are building Self-access learning centers to create the web-assisted learning environment for their students. Autonomy is taken as a new learning concept originating from theories of humanistic psycholinguistics and cognitive psycholinguistics. It tends to become a significant topic in the field of educational psychology. In addition, Western educationists maintain that building on students' autonomous abilities is considered as the ultimate goal of education. With the development of humanistic theory, constructivism, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, and meta-cognition, learner autonomy, learning strategies and strategy instruction have attracted much attention in second language teaching and researching.CALL(computer-assisted language learning) and WALL(web-assisted language learning) have been developing fast in the past decades. This is a study on the feasibility and effects of the reform in the College English course by integrating computer and web into the class to explore the attitudes by Chinese non-English majors towards web-assisted autonomous learning, the efficiency of web-assisted learning in achieving autonomy and the correlation between students' performance and web-assisted autonomous learning. It intends to reveal the underlying reasons and to find the possible and feasible solutions to this problem. The writer introduced an empirical study combining web-assisted autonomous learning and conventional class from September 2005 to July 2006. The statistical result seems to suggest that the introduction of web-assisted self-access learning into College English course makes a real difference. The writer partly chose 173 freshmen in four classes from Heilongjiang Science and Technology Institute as the subjects of the study. After one year's web-assisted autonomous learning experience, the study was conducted through English proficiency tests, classroom observation, questionnaire and collective interview.Findings of the study indicate (1) most of the students hold positive beliefs and attitudes towards web-assisted autonomous learning. (2)After a year's experiment, it has been found that there is correlation between learners' English proficiency and web-assisted autonomous learning. (3) There is correlation between web-assisted learning and the students' class performance in the traditional classroom. (4) The students' autonomous learning ability has been strengthened to some extent. (5)Students form the habit of searching and using web-resources in their study both in and out of the SALC (self-assess learning center). In addition, we found that the students are lacking in metacognitive strategies. And some management and technical problems are also found in the study.Based on the above findings, suggestions are put forward in the aim of fostering students' autonomous learning ability in present Chinese context: firstly, teachers' intervention in web-assisted autonomous learning( we should enhance teacher education in order to help teachers complete the shift from lecturers and teachers to facilitators; teacher should give the students web-assignment, and supervise the students to finish them so as to help the students in forming the habit of web-assisted autonomous learning); secondly learners' training in autonomous learning strategies and computer skills; thirdly, cultivating the students' metacognitive learning strategy; lastly, building and managing the SALC well.The new mode has some advantages over the conventional one in College English teaching and learning. It is feasible if the technological barriers are removed and conditions permit. Web -assisted autonomous learning may play an important role in the future College English teaching and even in the ELT field.The thesis is an empirical study based on the SALC. This dissertation consists of five chapters.Chapter one briefly introduces the background of the present study, the purpose and significance of the study, and the structure of the dissertation.Chapter two offers a review of research in autonomous learning theory, and language learning strategies theory, and theories of CALL and WALL.Chapter three focuses on the present study, data collection and data results.Chapter four summarizes the findings of the research, and gives further discussion.Chapter five includes a conclusion followed by limitations and future research.