An Empirical Study Of Cultivating Learner Autonomy In University

Learner autonomy (LA) plays an important role in English learning. However, former researchers found that students in university were not good at managing their English learning. Since college life supplies university students with much freedom, if students are not able to take control of their own study, i.e., not able to make good use of free time, college education would be a problem. So firstly this paper is intended to find out to what degree university students are learning English autonomously. It is aimed at finding out whether LA helps to improve students' integrated language proficiency.A comparative experiment was carried out in relation to research questions. Two classes were involved in the experiment, one as the control group, and the other as the experimental group. Both classes were taught by the same teacher. For the control group, they had classes as usual. Both classes had to finish a questionnaire and a test before the experiment, which helped the author understand students' present situation of autonomous learning and their levels of English. Then the experimental class received a training of learning autonomously at the very beginning of the experiment. In the following three months, they were asked to report their own English learning situation every week. Also 6 workshops were held to cater for students' different needs. They were free to attend workshops. At the end of the experiment, another questionnaire and test were finished by both classes. Once statistics were collected, data were processed by SPSS 16.0. The result showed that the experimental class had improved in learner autonomy. And so did their integrated language proficiency. However, the control class improved their learner autonomy as well, although not as prominent as the experiment class. The SPSS result showed there was no significant difference between the two classes in their English level. After a specific discussion, it can be concluded that there is a certain type of relationship between learner autonomy and communicative language teaching. Higher degree of learner autonomy would do good to English learning. Students who enjoy a high level of learner autonomy tend to have a high level of language proficiency. In turn, good English learners are usually the ones who know how to learn English efficiently. Through the discussion, we find that LA and CLT are similar in some way. LA mainly talks about learning from students' perspective and CLT centers on teaching from the students' perspective. But both aim to improve learners' language proficiency, which is also the ultimate goal of education. The improvement of LA will also help the implementation of CLT in classroom.