On Fostering Students' Autonomous Learning Ability Of Oral English In Higher Vocational Colleges

With the continuous development of English teaching, related theories are gradually acknowledged by Chinese educational circles, and the focus of teaching model also gradually shifts from teachers' teaching to students' learning. In English teaching, the cultivation of students' autonomous English learning abilities has become a hot issue for education in recent years. In modern society, oral English plays an essential role in English learning, so it is of vital importance for students to improve their oral English. The core of oral English teaching in Higher Vocational Colleges is students' fully development of oral communicative competence, which is determined by Higher Vocational Colleges' teaching objectives and the desire of students. At present, oral English teaching based on traditional teaching method in higher vocational colleges is still not satisfactory. Most of them are poor in English without strong learning motivation or good learning habits. Therefore, it seems more important to cultivate the autonomous ability of oral English for higher vocational college students.The research is based on the theory of constructivism and metacognition, the purpose of which lies in exploring how to foster students' autonomous learning ability of oral English in higher vocational colleges. The author selected 100 students majored in accounting from two parallel freshman classes of Changsha Commerce and Tourism College. One class was chosen as the experimental group for autonomous oral English learning, and the other as the control group, following traditional approach. Before the English autonomous learning implementation, the pre-test was conducted to ensure both classes instructed in traditional method. In order to understand higher vocational students' beliefs of teachers' role, motivation and learning strategies in oral English autonomous learning, the author asked students to complete a questionnaire, to have a pre-test and a post-post and an interview. The thesis aimed to finding out the problems of oral English autonomous learning and investigating the cultivation of oral English autonomous learning among higher vocational students.The thesis proved the feasibility of autonomous learning development in oral English teaching at the level of theories. The difference of teaching results between the controlled group taught by traditional method and the experimental group based on autonomous learning proved the validity of oral English autonomous learning in higher vocational colleges. Based on it, it tried to find the relationship between the development of autonomous learning and the improvement of oral English proficiency. The thesis tried to solve issues of the following three aspects by the method of combination of both theoretical research and empirical research:1) What is the current situation of the students' autonomous learning of oral English in higher vocational colleges?2) How could the students' autonomous learning ability of oral English be cultivated/fostered in higher vocational colleges?3) To what extent have the students improved their autonomous learning ability of oral English after the training?Based on the literature review and combined with actual teaching, the author selected two classes majored in accounting. They had 14 weeks oral English training. One was the experimental group for the implementation of oral English autonomous learning; the other was controlled group taught by traditional teaching method. The research design included a questionnaire, two oral tests and an interview as the instruments for two groups. The author used software SPSS to analyze the communicative competence, fluency and accuracy of the students' oral English according to the data collected from the pre-test and post-test.What the research statistics collected from the research were shown as follows:1) Higher vocational students had poor capacity for oral English autonomous learning;2) Changing teachers' role, arousing students' learning motivation and developing students' learning strategies can effectively cultivate oral English autonomous learning ability of higher vocational students.3) No significant differences of communicative competence, fluency and accuracy existed in the results of the pre-test between the control group and the experimental group. The results of post-test indicated significant differences of communicative competence and fluency of the students' oral English, but there is no significant difference of accuracy between the two groups.4) The after-class interview further verified the oral English autonomous learning played a positive role in higher vocational students' oral English learning.However, there are still some limitations of the study. The author hopes the results of the study can be helpful to oral English teaching of higher vocational college students and to the cultivation of their autonomous learning abilities.