A Study Of Adult Students' Self-regulated English Learning In Web-based University

The modern distance education is a new style education mode, produced with the modern information technology development. It is the main method to construct the lifelong learning system in the knowledge economic age. In recent years, along with the Internet coming into the people's daily life, the distance education is developing rapidly. In 1999,only four universities opened the distance education. Till 2004, it has been developed to 68 universities, with registered students nearly 2500,000. The distance education has been playing an unique and not substituted role in changing the serious population burden to human resources superiority, in forming the society of lifelong learning for all, in promoting human's full scale development.The essential character of the web-based education is the separation in space and time of the teachers and students. This determines the teaching and learning must take the learner as the center, and the learner must implement self-regulated learning. Therefore, the training of the ability of self-regulated learning becomes more and more urgency. For this purpose, with the guidance of the theory of web-based education, self-regulated learning and adult learning, by questionnaire and interview, the author finds the basic characteristics of adult students: Married serving staff have contradictions between work and learning ; Their level of English is low and they are old; They have a clear English learning purpose and obvious motivation with profit. The author sums up some problems about adult students' self-regulated learning English in the web-based education environment, such as: not good enough network environment, lack of leading of Open Learning Center, adult students' low ability of searching information and lack of awareness of self-regulated learning, bad ways of English learning .These result in failure of their English learning.According to these problems, the author gives the adult students face to face counseling, to adopt the following measures: making them understand the meaning of web-based education and self-regulated learning by instruction; improving ability of using information technology by practice; improving ability of using language learning strategies by practice. In order to make the adult students use proficiently the resources on network and grasp language learning strategies. The author expects to improve the ability of adult students' self-regulated learning English in the web-based education environment.