An Empirical Study On English Autonomous Learning Ability And Achievements For Non-english Major Ethnic Minority Students Under Blended Learning

Blended learning is the product of reflection of the disadvantages of the e-learning and combination ofthe advantages of traditional learning and e-learning during the process of the rapid educational technologydevelopment, which is based on informatization and networking.Under the present situation, blended learning can provide some new thoughts and solutions to theproblems of shortage of the teaching resources, poor teaching quality and teaching inefficiency caused bythe expansion of universities and the students during the process of the high education popularization.Yunnan is a multinational border province of China, more than one third of their populations are ethnicminorities, and more than seventy percent of the area is minority autonomous regions. Ethnic minoritystudents take a large proportion in universities, especial in local universities, such as in Hong He University.In recent years，limited by their political, cultural and economic development, the distance of the Englishlearning between Han and ethnic minority students has been increasingly enlarged. This kind of phenomenabegan to retard development of the whole university and the enhancement of the teaching quality.This study is an empirical study attempting to find out the effect of blended learning on students’English autonomous learning ability and English achievement, and the correlation between Englishachievements and English autonomous learning ability. The research subjects are60ethnic minoritystudents from two intact classes (30in each) which were selected randomly from the45College EnglishⅠclasses through the computer elective system. Class one was chosen as the experimental class randomly,and was provided with the blended learning model; class two was chosen as the control class randomly, andwas provided with the traditional model. The research instruments included:(1) questionnaire formeasuring of subjects’ English autonomous learning ability.(2) the scores of College Entrance Examinationand the final examination for measuring subjects’ English achievements.(3) interview for complementingof the questionnaire.Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were adopted in the study. Quantitative analysis mainlyincluded independent samples T-test, and correlation analysis. Qualitative analysis is mainly involved in theinterview analysis. The effects of the blended learning model to the subject’s English autonomous learningability and English achievements were revealed through the analysis of independent samples T-test of thepre-test and post-test between the experimental class and traditional class.The research results showed that: (1)Blended learning can improve the ethnic minority students’ English achievement.(2) Blendedlearning can improve the ethnic minority students’ English autonomous learning ability.(3) There is apositive correlation between students’ English autonomous learning ability and their English achievementunder the blended learning.(4) The interview results showed that students in the experimental classgenerally welcomed the blended learning model; they think that the blended learning model is helpful forcultivating their English autonomous learning ability, and they have possessed certain of Englishautonomous learning ability after a semester’s of blended learning. However, most students in thetraditional class think that there is no obvious difference between college and senior-middle school inEnglish learning, except for more freedom in learning and daily life, and the students who think hadpossessed a certain degree of English autonomous learning ability are much less than the students in theexperimental class. What’s more, most subjects in both the experimental and control class think that theclass is too large to have full interaction in class for them, and it increases the difficulty for the teachers tomonitor the students learning.The research gives us some suggestions and pedagogical implications for our teaching. Teaching isalways in the process of changing and development, as a teacher, we should always keep on learning tokeep up with the advancement of the education, especially the educational technologies, such as thetechnologies involved in the blended learning model so as to make our teaching more convenient andeffective.The research was only a tentative one about the application of blended learning in college Englishteaching. Limited by factors such as research time, small number of subjects, the difference of subjects’English level, their ability of using the computer and internet; the long-term effect of the blended learningmodel needs further research.