A Study Of The Cultivation Of Students' English Autonomous Learning Ability In Higher Vocational Colleges

Autonomous learning has become a "buzz-word" with the context of language learning. It is a truism that learning process should place the importance on the role of the learner. Autonomous learners are expected to assume greater responsibility for, and take charge of their own learning.Most language learners in the current higher vocational colleges in China learn English with passive attitudes. This negative situation has been caused not only by the learners' motivation problems, but also by the problems of learning strategies, the inadequacy of evaluation systems and teachers' inappropriate contribution to their teaching process.Autonomous learning is the focal topic of study, relevant with some dominant approaches to knowledge and learning, whose theories are cognitive adaptation, constructivism, social interactionism, and social constructivism. Constructivism holds that rather than internalizing or discovering objective knowledge, individuals reorganize and restructure experience. Social interactionism is an approach within the humanities and language studies, shares with constructivism the view that knowledge is constructed rather than discovered or learned. Moreover, it argues that knowledge does not reflect reality, but rather comprises competing ideological versions of that reality expressing the interests of different social groups. Within this approach, learning concerns issues of power and ideology and is seen as a process of interaction with social context, which can bring social change. Social-constructivism supports and extends to cover psychological versions of autonomy that appertain to learners' behavior, attitude, motivation, and self-concept. As a result, social-constructivist approaches encourage and promote self-directed learning as a necessary condition for autonomous learning. Autonomous learning can't exit without learning strategies and motivation strategies. At the same time, autonomous learning does not mean that the teacher becomes redundant, giving up his or her control over what is happening in the language learning process.In order for learners to be actively involved in the learning process and to be autonomous, the author suggests some methods based on the theories listed above, for example, fostering students' motivation, developing learning strategies, and setting up group-work learning.In order to test the feasibility of the above methods, the author has a one-year experiment on cultivating students' autonomous learning in a higher vocational college in Hunan. Because autonomous learning is a long-term, dynamic process, the experimental nature of longitudinal design could be better to study the conditions and the results of autonomous learning of learners. In view of the above reasons, the author carried out this positive experiment, namely, launching a comparison and analysis on the study effects of learners in different levels with a view to supplementing domestic researches in this field and to answering the following questions:1) Can autonomous learning under the audio-visual network mode positively influence the promotion of learners' comprehensive abilities of higher vocational college English?2) Are there any salient discrepancies among the assessment results in different levels?3) Which kind of content or skill is most saliently improved among listening, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and oral English bylearner autonomy?The results show that the subjects of this experiment have improved their comprehensive English a lot, especially in vocabulary, grammar and listening. But they have less improved in spelling, and even have a little decreased in oral English, which may be mainly caused by those students' improper attitude, behavior and instant motivation. Therefore, it will be long and complicated to cultivate higher vocational college students' English autonomous learning, which is worth further researches in this field by English teachers in higher vocational colleges.