Learner Autonomy & English Reading In Senior High School

How to teach English reading effectively is always a major concern in English classroom in China. Most English teachers tend to give instructions all through class, while students'initiative seems to be ignored. Besides, the lack of adequate evaluation means also hinders the progress of the learners to solve these problems, I try to introduce autonomous reading to English classroom. The essence of learner autonomy lies in that the students are the masters of their study. It is necessary to make learning English a joyful process and, thus, the students may regard learning English as a desire from the inside. So, the objective of the research is to help the students to form an automatic habit of reading English, to read actively not passively, and to solve problems in the reading strategically.Based on teaching theories and considering the physical and psychological characteristics of senior school students, I adopt various ways to do the research. First, I make a survey of the students'reading habit and ask the students to report their ideas in class. Then I conduct one-year experiment on autonomous reading in the experimental class and select another class as control class.In the experiment, the reading process is divided into three stages—pre-reading, while-reading and post reading—the teaching of intensive reading focuses on reading strategy, which enables the students to master basic reading skills; the practice of extensive reading provides students with chances of employing reading skills; reading short stories offers students opportunities to practise and create. In the first stage, the students are asked to make a plan for their reading and choose proper materials to read. In the following stage, the students are required to adjust and supervise their reading process. And after reading, the students are suggested to do some reflective thinking on their reading.The research involves 108 subjects ar.d lasts a year. The data are collected through tests and questionnaire, and processed by SPSS. With the comparison of the experimental and control class, the result proves that autonomous learning is effective in cultivating students'English reading strategies and improving their ability of reading English.