On The Influence Of College English Teachers' Role-redefinition On Students' Autonomous Learning Abilities

With the change from teacher-centeredness to learner-centeredness in education, autonomous learning has become a hot topic in the research of foreign language education. Most researchers and educators believe that modern foreign language education should be aimed at cultivating learner autonomy for the benefit of life-long learning.In the process of fostering students'autonomous learning abilities, whether teachers can redefine and realize their roles or not has great influence on fostering and promoting learner autonomy. Some researchers, both at home and abroad, have studied teachers'roles in the context of autonomous learning. But few studies have researched to what degree teachers'roles changing from the traditional ones to the ones in the context of autonomous learning influences students'autonomous learning abilities. Consequently, the present study is of positive significance to College English teaching.So, in this paper, the author focuses her research on the following three questions: 1) how much have College English teachers changed from the traditional roles to the ones in the context of autonomous learning? 2) Does College English teachers'role-redefinition have influence on students'autonomous learning abilities? 3) If the answer is positive, is the influence the same on students of different English levels? If different, to what extent does it vary? In order to find the answers to these questions, the author employed questionnaires, interviews, and classroom observations as the instruments. The whole study lasted three periods: In the first period, the author did a survey of 47 teachers from Chongqing University by means of questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations, and then classified those teachers into 3 groups according to how much they had redefined their roles; in the second period, the author chose 9 representative teachers to make an investigation into their students'autonomous learning abilities; and in the third period, the author surveyed the same students to see whether the redefinition of teachers'roles has influence on their autonomous learning abilities as well as whether the influence remains the same for students of different English levels.Results showed that the redefinition of teachers'roles indeed has influence on fostering learner autonomy and the influence on higher-English-level students is greater than that on lower-English-level ones.