A Study Of Freshmen’s Adaptation To College English Learning

This dissertation is an attempt to resolve the adaptational problems of English learning during the first year of non-English majors in a Chinese university and to help them to successfully adapt themselves to college English learning. In China, the adaptation to college English learning during the transitional period from high school to college is particularly stressful for freshmen because of various disconnections or differences between the two stages. This has received long and ongoing attention from researchers and administrators for the past decades. However, most researcher seem to pay more attention to the adaptational difficulties caused by inconsistency and disjuncture in teaching and curriculum and developing effective measures to bridge the gaps with little consideration of their individual factors. Since research on college students and the present situation of Chinese ELF education has revealed that some impediments caused by individual factors have resulted in freshmen’s failure in their adaptation to college English learning, such a study provides both teachers and first-year university students with possible solutions and constructive strategies to solve the adaptational problems. In addition, it enriches and supplements the findings of previous studies in this field.Within the framework of learning theories such as constructivism, humanism, and based on empirical studies in the fields of education in general and Chinese foreign language education in particular, this study is aimed to explore the effects of individual factors on academic adaptation, including learning motivation, beliefs, use of learning strategies as well as prior English proficiency. Specifically speaking, this study has been designed to address the following research questions:(1) What are the adaptational difficulties caused by individual factors (i.e. learning beliefs, motivation, use of strategy, and language skills) in non-English major freshmen’s adaptation to college English learning? (2) What effects does the intervention program have on learning autonomy (LA), English as foreign language (EFL) adaptation and language proficiency of non-English major freshmen? (3) How does improvement in LA correlate with the improvement in adaptation to EFL learning and language proficiency?In correspondence to the above-mentioned research questions and purpose, a combination of survey and intervention experiment was adopted in this study. The survey. which was designed to diagnose the difficulties encountered by non-English college freshmen at college, provides an empirical basis for the later intervention study. The intervention study was designed to experiment with and testify the effectiveness of a model which was designed based on the results of the former survey combined with the findings from literature to facilitate students’adaptation.In the survey part of the study, a questionnaire was administered in the first place to 985 non-English major freshmen from a regional university in Shandong province to find out the individual factors such as learning beliefs. motivation, and strategies, and language and vocabulary competence which may have influence on their adaptation to college English learning, and then 18 subjects were chosen from the students in the experimental group for an interview which was aimed to find out the difficulties the students might encounter and their learning needs in their adaptation to college. The results show that the sample freshmen are unprepared for required skills in language learning at college. that they have low self-efficacy, and that lack of independent learning skills is the key hindrance to the first year university students’adaptation to college English learning, especially under the new computer-aided instruction model. The factors that may influence adaptation include autonomous learning beliefs and skills as well as the prior English language proficiency.In the intervention study,264 non-English major freshmen,20 of whom were excluded from the analysis for the reasons given in Section 5.2.3, were either participants (123 students) in the one-semester systematic instruction program to facilitate their adaptation or students (121 students) receiving the regular English language course for comparison. This intervention program. focused on learning autonomy through training "learning to learn" skills as a key aspect of facilitating students’adaptation from high school to college, included course orientation, metacognitive strategies training, independent-learning skills training and the implementation of "3+1+2" class schedule. Both quantitative data from the language test and the questionnaire survey, and qualitative data from three case studies on pre-post test basis, were used to examine the effectiveness of the intervention program. Results show that (1) the intervention program could facilitate freshmen’s adaptation to college English leaning. The experimental group outperformed the comparison group on learning autonomy, English proficiency and EFL adaptation level in the post-test; (2) the improvement in freshmen’ learning autonomy can account for their improvement of English proficiency and adaptation to college English learning in the new context of web-assisted teaching and learning; (3) monitoring and evaluating of strategy use and learning process are two strong predictors of improvement of adaptation and language proficiency; and (4) It has been found from the case studies that while group averages on learning autonomy, adaptation to EFL learning and language proficiency indicate that the intervention program is effective, a general scheme may have different effects on each individual subject. Given this limitation and effectiveness of this program, a modified model which incorporates personalized attention and support into the intervention program is proposed at the end of the study.This study is significant for transition and adaptation research theories as well as foreign language teaching and learning. First, it helps broaden the perspectives of research on EFL transition and adaptation issues and may be a supplement to the "streamlined" teaching model proposed by Chinese researchers by focusing on individual learner factors. Secondly, the intervention model with its effectiveness in students’ adaptation to college English learning may provide college foreign language teachers with some constructive insights for how a foreign language should be taught and learned and it may be, with some modifications, applied to their teaching practice. Finally, the vocabulary test and questionnaire for the measurement of freshmen’s adaptation to college EFL teaching and learning may serve as effective tools for diagnosing the difficulties encountered by non-English majors in the transition period from high school to college.