Autonomous Learning Of English Based On Professional Needs

The new Curriculum Standard for Secondary Vocational School English Teaching issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education requires that one of the major objectives for foreign language teaching in secondary vocational schools is to cultivate students' comprehensive language competence, especially in professional field, to foster their autonomous learning capability and to cultivate more practical interdisciplinary talents. Teachers are thus required to renew their teaching ideology and adopt new teaching methodology. A transfer from the traditional teacher-centered model to the relatively new student-centered model is required. More specifically, the students are encouraged to change from the passive receptive learning to the active autonomous learning. The application of the new curriculum thus makes it urgent for foreign language teachers to take action accordingly.According to the gap between the social demand and the actual language competence of vocational school graduates, the author explores in the dissertation the possibility of narrowing the gap by advocating learner's autonomy. Many linguists have made considerable researches on autonomous learning in Second Language Acquisition in theories and teaching experiences. They suggest that learner's autonomy can promote students' motivation to learn, help students to self-regulate, control and assess their own studies. But few researches have been made on autonomous learning based on professional needs. The author attempts to find ways to improve the situation via exploring the possibilities of effective autonomous learning from the perspective of ESP. The tentative practice is carried out in the following ways: Firstly, students are trained to establish their awareness of their learning objectives. Secondly, students are encouraged to explore individual learning resource. Thirdly, learning approaches for higher learning efficiencies are suggested. Lastly, the students are trained to evaluate their learning process themselves. Through a series of surveys, interviews, literature review, experiments and observations, some useful findings are gained from the exploratory study: students thus trained 1) have more confidence in their self-adaptation to the employment; 2) have stronger awareness of autonomous learning; 3) are more effective in later, life-long learning. The research implies that autonomous learning training in ESP helps to improve students' comprehensive capability and promote their whole-person education.