The Cultivation Of Extracurricular Autonomous Reading Abilities For Non-English Majors

In our present college teaching, the traditional model of emphasizing knowledge learning instead of cultivating learning abilities stilt takes its position. Students. tend to receive knowledge and information passively, and are not used to getting involved in classroom language input and output activities, let alone to mention their autonomous learning activities. Owing to the lack of communication and discussion between the teacher and students about students' learning, learner autonomy is usually neglected. The present autonomous learning situation in colleges is not pleasing. With limited class time and high pressure of workload, classroom teaching becomes hard to meet the requirements of both teaching-and leaning.Reading is one of the four skills that students need to improve in their English learning. As its convenience to attain materials, variety of contents, and flexibility in implementing, reading can be listed top of the way for. learners to directly get involved in a real language context. Thus, the features of reading itself determine its possibility and feasibility for extracurricular learning. Whether students can fulfil their extracurricular reading tasks mainly relies on the degree of their learning autonomy. Autonomous language learning as a new way of language learning requires a fundamental change in perceptions from both learners and teachers about how languages are learned. Just as an old English proverb goes: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the net and he won't bother you for weeks." Or as in other more popular words, "show me I will remember; involve me I will learn." Teachers should thus change their perception of roles, as to help students build up reading confidence and interest, guide students to set reading goals, make plans, illustrate reading strategies; while under these guidance, students need to learn to take control and responsibilities of their own reading, assessing, analysing and evaluating the whole reading process out of class.Learner autonomy in foreign language learning and teaching has been a popular concern since early in the 1980s. In 2004, the Chinese Ministry of Education pointed out that schools should take developing students' autonomous learning ability as the primary goal. Students should be taught how to learn, and learners are the central agent of the learning process. It demanded that colleges should put emphasis on student-centeredness, individualization, and autonomous learning. Researches of autonomous learning in China have flourished in recent years, mainly in two aspects: one is to introduce and explain the progress achieved by foreign researchers, including the concepts, rationales, practical achievement and its value to foreign languages teaching in China; the other is surveys and empirical studies on Chinese college students' autonomous learning situation and methods of fostering their autonomous learning abilities. However, much of the attention among the researches on learner autonomy has been paid to the second or foreign language learning as a whole and much less focus has been devoted to autonomy with specific reference to the EFL reading, not to mention the EFL reading outside the classroom.On the basis of questionnaire surveys to 55 non-English majors from Chengdu University of Information Technology and Sichuan University about their situations and problems in extracurricular autonomous reading (EAR), this thesis is to put forward some methods of cultivating students' EAR abilities, with the contribution from valuable researches that were made by other experts and peers, in the hope of making louder the voice of cultivating students' EAR abilities, and of making efforts to further studies.