A Teaching Research On Autonomy Of English Majors Promoted By Meta-cognitive Strategies

Increasing emphasis is put on the learners'autonomy in foreign language teaching, and autonomous learning has become hot in education field at home and abroad in recent years. That learner autonomy should be highly paid much attention to has been widely accepted. With the development of the research about learner autonomy in applied linguistic field, a variety of strategies training to learners'autonomous learning ability has become one of the researchers'interests.Learner autonomy is not an abstract concept, but a capacity acquired by a series of specific strategy trainings, and can be developed continuously. Foreign language teachers have the responsibility to provide students with scientific and systematic strategies training to help them learn and practice these strategies, and then to improve their learning ability. As we all know, classroom teaching activities include a variety of cognitive processes, and meta-cognition is the highlight in the cognitive process. Numerous research results in foreign countries show that:meta-cognition plays an important role in reading comprehension, writing, memory, attention, problem solving and autonomous learning. In foreign countries, the trainings of cognitive learning strategies become the mainstream in autonomous learning.In this study, the author uses theories of autonomy and meta-cognition, by questionnaires and quantitative analysis to explore whether the training of meta-cognitive strategies is feasible in Zunyi Normal College, and tried to solve the following questions: 1. Whether the training of meta-cognitive strategies in Zunyi Normal College is feasible or not?; 2. What factors can affect learner autonomy?. The writer conducted questionnaire survey of 67 students and trained them by meta-cognitive strategies, and through the analysis and discussion of statistics results, got the conclusions:meta-cognitive strategy training in Zunyi Normal College received good results; in addition, the investigation showed that the main factors affecting the learner autonomy can be divided into internal and external factors. Internal factors include learners'casual attribution, learning motivation, learning attitudes, learning strategies and learner self-esteem; external factors include the impact from teachers, peers and society.