The Study Of Developing Vocational College Students' Learner Autonomy In EFL Teaching

Learner autonomy has been attracting more and more attention in the field of second language teaching and learning. With people's acceptance of lifelong learning, there are also many studies to show that learning process should place importance on the role of learner. Autonomous learners should be responsible for their own learning.Nowadays, in China, with the improvement of vocational colleges, learner autonomy plays a very important role in these colleges. However, the vocational college students are observed to be dependent and passive in English learning, which greatly affects EFL learning and teaching. It is urgent to change the situation. Recently, training learners to be autonomous has become an important area of language research. The present thesis aims at developing the vocational college students' learner autonomy in EFL teaching and learning.The present study takes the form of the combination of a quantitative and qualitative study. Two parallel classes of 100 second-year non-English majors taught by the author are assigned into a control class and an experimental class. The study lasts for nearly one year. The instruments used in the experiment are a questionnaire and three test papers. The Experimental Class was trained to learn autonomously. The Control Class had the regular classes. All the data were input into computer in a form of Excel Sheet. Statistical analysis was carried out with the help of the computer software package SPSS 10.0 for Windows.The research tries to answer the following questions:1) Can learner autonomy be cultivated?2) Can the cultivation of learner autonomy improve the students' English learning achievement?The findings based on statistical analysis are:1) Learner autonomy can be cultivated. The students of Experimental class had positive attitude towards learner autonomy; they were highly motivated to learn English and they mastered some language learning strategies.2) The cultivation of learner autonomy can improve the students' English learning achievement. There is significant difference in English achievement between the Experimental Class and the Control Class. This means that the development of learner autonomy is efficient.This thesis also recommends several effective ways to develop vocational college students' learner autonomy. They are: raising teachers' and learners' awareness of learner autonomy, fostering students' motivation, developing learners' language learning strategies in the classroom, cultivating group-work learning, changing the roles of teachers and students and establishing a self-access center.