An Effective Way To Cultivate Learner Autonomy At Vocational School

Under the education background of China, teacher is the authority of knowledge and the center of the classroom, and the students are passive learners. In recent years, the demand for the reform of English teaching has been higher. The main aim of education should be how to teach the students to learn and help them to become autonomous learners. Once the students have the ability to learn by themselves, they will be able to master new knowledge, new technology, face new challenges and tasks. Learner autonomy has attracted many researchers' attention. There have been many researches on learner autonomy, which mainly focus on the definition of learner autonomy, learners'attitude and learning strategies, and the role of the teachers.Problem-based learning is a totally new learning method and teaching method, which focuses on the central position of learners and questions. Its main theoretical bases are constructivism theory and humanistic theory, so its learning theories and teaching principles are close to those of constructivism. PBL advocates that by solving the practical or authentic questions in daily life, students will show their learning interest, master the relevant knowledge behind the questions, form the skills to solve the problem, develop their higher-order thinking skills and improve their autonomous learning ability and creativity. As a reform of teaching, PBL has been fruitful at home and abroad, which is popular in the education of nature science. Based on the previous research findings, this paper is designed to test the effectiveness of PBL on cultivating learner autonomy at vocational schools.In order to test the effectiveness of PBL, this paper adopts the literature survey and an experimental method. The subjects are 60 first-year non-English majors in Qingdao Qiushi College. The experiment lasted a semester. They belong to two classes, one is the experimental group and the other one is the control group, each of which has thirty students. In the experimental group, the teacher adapted the PBL teaching method, while the control group still used the traditional teaching method. A questionnaire and a test were conducted respectively at the beginning and the end of the experiment to test the learners'autonomous learning ability and language proficiency. SPSS 17.0 was used to analysis the collected data. The result of the comparison of the data between the two groups proves that:1) PBL can be an effective way to cultivate learner autonomy. After a semester's study under PBL, the learner autonomy of the experimental group have been greatly improved.2) With the development of learner autonomy, the students in the experimental group can perform better than the students in the control group. The development of learner autonomy does help improve the academic achievement.At the end of the paper, the limitations of the study and some implications for the English teaching were put forward. This paper also proved some suggestions for the further study in the future.