An Investigation Into The Characteristics Of Chinese Non-English Majors' Autonomous English Learning

Learner autonomy (henceforth LA) may still be a comparatively novel concept for most Chinese teachers and learners, though it was first formally put forward by Henri Holec in 1981. Ever since the birth of this notion, there have been numerous studies on it. But they merely center on the definition of "learner autonomy", the description and analysis of its theoretical bases and the strategies of its application. Empirical studies in the area of autonomous language learning can only be sparsely spotted, most of which are the cases of applying learning strategies to foster learner autonomy for language learning among the students. Few investigations into Chinese non-English majors' autonomous English learning (henceforth AEL) can be found. The only two studies (Wang 2002; Xu et al. 2004) of such kind both failed to distinguish the students according to their linguistic competences and left out students' attitudes towards AEL. As the future college English teaching will be autonomy-oriented and ought to suit different needs of various students, we therefore should and must obtain a clear picture of the AEL characteristics of the students, which is the focus of the present study. In order to make this picture clear enough, the present research classified the students into three different groups, that is, students with higher, average and lower linguistic competence and found out through a questionnaire study and structured interviews the characteristics of both their attitudes towards AEL and their actual AEL situation. The subjects of this research are 300 non-English major sophomores from three different modules (namely, the higher linguistic competence module, average linguistic competence module and lower linguistic competence module) of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, with 100 subjects from each module. The investigation was carried out through a questionnaire study and structured interviews, both of which are mainly based on and also adapted from Dickinson's (1993) description of the characteristics of an autonomous language learner. The results of the study show that there are some significant differences between the three groups' attitudes towards AEL, but all the students definitely demonstrate a favorable opinion on shouldering more responsibility in English learning. As for their actual AEL situation, there are also significant differences between the three groups in terms of both the whole actual AEL situation and some of its sub-items, and generally the non-English major students' AEL situation is not so satisfactory. Additionally, for M1 and M3 students, there are very weak correlations between their attitudes towards AEL and their actual AEL situation (R lower= 0.244, R higher=0.239). However, for M2 students, there is no statistically significant relationship between their AEL attitudes and their actual AEL situation.