Towards A Combination Of Autonomous And Cooperative Learning Strategies

In recent years, with more and more attention drawn to learner-centered teaching styles, autonomous learning and cooperative learning have aroused great concerns. Autonomy and Cooperation, in their literal senses, appear to be two contradictory concepts which can never be integrated into a teaching strategy. However, the author have made a study of the two approaches for a long time and found that the two approaches are not isolated or independent, nor are they unrelated with each other. On the contrary, they are interdependent and inter-complementary. In fact, their close relationship makes it possible to combine them in English teaching for adult students. In this study, the author set up a project to combine autonomous learning strategy with cooperative learning style into one with a view to the characteristics of adult students. The participants are the first-year adult students at Shaowu Radio and TV University who were learning English as their non-major subject. They were organized in groups of 4 to 6 members for cooperative learning. As group members, they were encouraged to take part in autonomous-cooperative learning and cooperative-autonomous learning activities which included cases such as E-mail exchanges and reading circles. At the same time, the author implemented a series of management measures. The project lasted one year and the experimental group displayed a significantly higher reading proficiency improvement and overall achievement. The affective factors of the experimental group were more facilitative to language learning. The result of the experiment showed that the formation of autonomous learning skills facilitated the development of cooperative learning strategies, while the implementation of cooperative learning greatly depends on the students' ability of autonomous learning and in turn enhance the development of learners' autonomous learning ability. Thus it can be concluded that autonomous-cooperative learning will enhance adult students' learning effectively so that the teachers will spend less time on instructions while the students learn more independently and benefit more from individual differences.