Teachers' Roles In Self-access Learning

The concept of"autonomous learning",which first stemmed from debates about the development of life-long learning skills and the development of independent thinkers, has been a topic under widespread discussion for many years now. Learners and learning processes have received much attention in the practice; learner autonomy has become one of educational objectives. However, even in those areas, where a blooming development of the research conducted on self-access learning have lasted for a considerably long time and are propped by valid experimental or empirical evidence, studies of teachers'roles and their belief in self-access learning are scarcely published. The relevant studies in Mainland China are in the weaker situation. But in fact, self-access learning is also a kind of teacher-guided learning. Therefore, it is important for us to analyze teachers'needs and help them to adjust themselves to their new roles in self-access learning. This is the main reason why UNNC (the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China) has achieved success in promoting self-access learning, while most tertiary schools in China have invested a great deal of money and human resources in the infrastructure of self-access learning center, yet has not achieved corresponding learning outcome. Therefore, the author has conducted a contrastive study between UNNC and three tertiary schools (Jiangsu University, Yangzhou University and Zhejiang University of Sciences) in China. The analysis of the collected data through questionnaire and individual interviews will not only indicate different roles taken by language teachers and the factors causing difference in teachers'roles in self-access learning between UNNC and three tertiary schools, but help us to put forward a few tentative suggestions as how to implement teachers'roles in self-access learning.Hopefully, the findings of this thesis will be enlightening to educational practitioners.