A Survey Of Factors Influencing Autonomous Learning Of Non-English Majors

As the rapid development of contemporary society, especially the extensive expanding of information technology, human beings step into the era of knowledge economy. In order to adapt to the development of the times, human beings must have the capacity for life-long learning. With increasing globalization, English is increasingly becoming an important international language, and closely relates to people's lives and work. Therefore, how to foster learner autonomy becomes a hot issue of education and research at home and abroad. Only learners master the ability to learn independently, will they be able to independently acquire new knowledge and learn new technologies. Therefore, cultivating English learning autonomy is an urgent and important task.Success of cultivating autonomy depends on many factors, not only including the learner's own factors, such as achievement, belief, motivation, out-of-class English learning activities, but also including educators' own factors, such as how to improve the educators' own autonomy to promote learner autonomy. In this thesis, the author uses questionnaires and interviews and takes quantitative and qualitative methods for studying the factors influencing learner autonomy. The participants are the sophomores majoring in Preventive Medicine and Pharmacy and English teachers in Shandong University. The researcher collects data using SPSS statistical software to obtain valid data, and then uses the interview data as a supplement to answer the following three questions:1. How do personal information (gender, major, achievement, age of starting English learning, whether taking lessons after school or not, whether talking English with family member or not) relates to autonomous learning?2. What is the relationship between autonomous learning and learning belief, motivation, out-of-class English learning activities? 3. What the roles should teacher act as in the cultivating learners' autonomous learning?Data analysis shows that both the teachers and students have a correct understanding of the autonomy. Generally speaking, students have moderate ability of autonomous learning. Their autonomy needs further enhancing. Students' English learning background information have no significant correlation with autonomy, but achievement has significant positive correlation with autonomy, age of starting English learning has significant negative correlation with autonomy. The higher the autonomy is, the better the achievement is. Out-of-class English learning activities has closest correlation with autonomy, followed by belief, and then the motivation. Learners have a correct understanding of teachers' classroom teaching, neither over-reliance on it, nor ignore it. Classroom teaching and teachers play a very important role in improving learners' autonomy.In this thesis, the author gives some implications on how to make use of these factors to enhance learners' autonomy as conclusion. First of all, we should enhance language learning belief of students and improve their awareness of autonomous learning; second, we should stimulate their motivation to learn and sustain English learning motivation, to urge the students to finish their study plan; and then we should encourage students to take part in more out-of-class English learning activities in English, make more use of the Internet resources; finally, teachers should improve their own autonomy. Teachers should often make self-reflections in the teaching procedure to promote student learning autonomy.In this thesis, the author has initial findings about learner autonomy. There are some limitations such as inexperience and time, etc., but the author hopes that this study can give some enlightenment for other researchers who engage in a foreign language and can motivate them to do further research in this field.