A Study Of Learner Autonomy And Strategies Based On The Self-Access Center

With the application of Information Technology to education, it enables the content, means and ideology of education to make fundamental change. The Foreign Language teachers pay a growing attention to how to employ Web-based technology as assistance in teaching and how to foster learners'self-access learning. Meanwhile, its boosting trend also poses an increasingly hard task on the instructors about how to enable the language learners to acquire effectively and efficiently. Apparently, to succeed in learning language under the computer-based self-access environment must require the learners to possess certain skills or strategies. Although the language researchers have done much in the field of Computer Assistant Language learning (CALL), there have been few studies on the learners'learning experience combined with their learning strategies in a large scope up to now.This paper reports on a study which examines the extent to which specified cognitive, social, and metacognitive strategies are used by language students when working with computer-based materials (CBMs), in self-study contexts outside of the language classroom; particularly in a self-access center (SAC). Data were collected using questionnaires, interviews and snap-shot observations from freshman students in the City College of Wenzhou University. The data identify the frequency with which students use a SAC and the value they attach to computers for language learning. The data then examine the types of strategies students use and the extent to which learner autonomy is being fostered. The vast majority of participants were found to have positive attitudes towards computer-based material (CBMs) and language learning despite frequent use of L1, furthermore they were found to use cognitive strategies and to apply certain metacognitive awareness in their use of such CBMs. Students believed CBMs assisted with learning and demonstrated conscious applications of a range of strategies while learning in an electronic environment. However, the study also found that less than half the students used social strategies in the target language and this raises a number of issues.By interviewing learners, we find out that our Chinese students have their own specific strategies different from those listed in traditional SILL (Strategies Inventory for Language Learning). Memory strategies seem the most frequently favored by the Chinese students because the test-oriented system leads them to employ more memory strategies than others.Also there appear some problems when the learners are using the SACs which needs to improve and modify afterwards, for example, what materials to select in the SAC and the learning environment.In the end, the paper also presented some pedagogical implications in accordance with the results reflected in the study. A systematic Self Directed Learning (SDL) is designed to improve learners'metacognitive awareness, help them to set goals and make plans.