On The Cultivation Of Students Learning Autonomy In The HVC's English Teaching

Helping students to be autonomous learners is one of the important goals of school education, including the HVC (higher vocational college) education, which has become the focus of modern teaching research. The modern cognition psychology believes that, human's cognition activity is both a extremely complex thinking process and the problem solving process. Language learning is the cognition activity on a high level, and it needs a series of cognitive psychological process, Therefore, cultivating the learners' autonomous language learning ability is vital to the promotion of learners' language learning.This thesis first introduces the background of the research on learning autonomy and the research that has been made by psychologists and linguists, explore the nature, the research content of learning autonomy, then put forward an experimental hypothesis of fostering vocational students' learning autonomy through learning strategies training after analyzing the learning characteristics of the vocational college students.In order to further understand the autonomous language learning ability and the using of learning strategies of the vocational college students of English majors, two questionnaire surveys were made in both the experimental class and the controlled class on these two aspects. The data from the former survey showed that the autonomous language learning ability of the students from the two classes is as low (below 60 points) as not able to fulfill their learning task well; and the data from the later survey showed that students from both of the two classes do not use learning strategies well and often, especially cognitive strategies and memory strategies., In order to investigate the relationship between autonomous language learning ability and the academic record, an examination is made in the two classes before the experiment and the result showed that the average result is 40.26 and 41.01 respectively in the two class. Also, the data from both the questionaires and the pre-experimentation examination showed the difference between the two classes is not obvious and so they can be taken as the experiment subjects.Then the learning strategies training was carried out in the experimental class, following the process of presentation—teacher's modeling strategies—scaffolding— evaluation—expasion, and giving priority to cognitive strategies and memory strategies training. The aim is helping the students have a better habit of using learning strategies.The results of the data collected in this teaching experiment showed that, comparing with the controlled class and the experimental class before the experiment, students from the experimental class (1) can use learning strategies more frequently; (2) are more autonomous in their language learning; (3) can do better in examination. So the author concludes that the learning strategies training can noticeably help to improve the students' learning autonomy, and thus improving their academic record, which bears out the experimental hypothesis and is consistent with the result of other researchers.Due to the limitation of time and experiment condition, there still remain some problems in this experiment: the autonomous ability of the vocational college students is tested by the students themselves, thus inevitably reflecting the subjective consciousness of the students, not the actual fact. So how to foster the students' learning autonomy is still an issue that needs more study. Also, fostering the students' learning autonomy needs a long period of time even a person's lifetime, so in such a short period of several months, it is not really enough to foster such an ability, and the increase of the students' academic record may reek with haphazardly, thus need further probe in future.