A Survey Of English Extracurricular Autonomous Learning Of Higher Vocational College Students

Since 1980s, autonomous learning has always been paid great attention to by foreign language educators and researchers abroad and at home. All believed that the ultimate target of education is to foster the independent learner. Autonomous learning contains the autonomy both in class and out of class, which requires learners to control their learning not only in class but also after class. The researches of second language acquisition show that the language acquisition relies more on learner's treatment to language input after class, rather than the formal classroom teaching. But most of our current researches were based on the teaching in the classroom. Most of the subjects were undergraduate students. The situation of English extracurricular autonomous learning of higher vocational college students is not given due attention.Due to the situation, the research surveyed 68 higher vocational college students of the third grade. The survey was processed in the form of questionnaire and group interview, which aims to answer the three questions following:1) what is the degree of vocational college students'English extracurricular autonomous learning? What are the problems? 2) Are there significant differences in the degree of English extracurricular autonomous learning between students of high score group and low score group? 3) What is the relationship between the degree and the score of PRETCO-A? The data of the questionnaire was analyzed by SPSS 17.0. The writer employed Descriptive Analysis, Independent Sample Test and Pearson Correlation Analysis to get the answers to the three questions.The research found that the degree of vocational college students'English extracurricular autonomous learning was very low. The main problems were:the motivation was not strong; the degree of self management was low; the time spent on the learning was not enough; the scope of extracurricular learning was narrow and the ways of learning was single; they seldom cooperated with peers; teacher's concern for their leaning was not sufficient. Secondly, there were significant differences in English extracurricular autonomous leaning between the degree of students of high score group and low score group. The degree of high score group was higher than that of low score group. Thirdly, the degree of English extracurricular correlated with the score of PRETCO-A significantly.