A Preliminary Study Of The Effect Of Learner Autonomy Awareness On The Improvement Of Students' Ability Of English Speaking

English speaking is assuming greater importance with the rapid growth of China's economy and opening to the outside world. English has been the most important international language for cross-cultural communication. But the present situation of college students' communicative ability is far from satisfactory. English speaking is a headache for Chinese students. Many college students learn to speak English passively just for passing the oral tests. There exists autonomy crisis rather than intellectual crisis among the English learners, so there is a pressing need to develop learner autonomy among the English learners.The idea of autonomy in language learning originated in the late 1960s. When Holic's Autonomy in Foreign Language Learning was published in 1981, the problem of learner's autonomy began to attract researchers and language teachers' attention. Under the influence of humanistic psychology and constructivist theories, learner autonomy has gained momentum and become the focus of relevant researches in the past two decades. Autonomy can be broadly defined as the capacity to take control over one's own learning. People come to realize that it is essential for language learners to 'learn and practice' the language rather than 'learn about' the language. Researches show that successful or intelligent language learners take responsibility for their own learning and play active roles in practice. Learner autonomy would help shift the responsibilities from the teacher to the learners. The present research attempts to probe into the following questions: (1) What is the level of autonomy of non-English major sophomores in the universities of Guizhou province? (2) Does Chinese traditional culture influence their autonomy in oral English learning? (3) To what extent can developing learner autonomy help improve learners' oral performance?...