An Investigation On Junior School Students' Reflective English Learning

According to the new English Curriculum, the teacher should guide students to acquire the autonomous ability and the life-long learning ability with efficient strategies. Many researchers find that "reflective English learning" is one of the most efficient ones to help students cultivate these two kinds of ability. So some teachers have been already trying to adopt this strategy in their teaching process. The students of junior school are growing to be mature, and experiencing a crucial development of physiology and psychology. Their meta-cognitive monitoring ability and the reflective ability are going to be formed. If the teacher can guide them to study English by reflection, their ability of reflection can be improved and the habit of life-long learning and reflection can take shape. Thus, in this paper, the present author aims to investigate the current situation of students'reflective English learning.Firstly, the paper investigates the subjects'understanding of this strategy by asking them to write a diary with the assigned topic. Comparing their contents with the early studies of "reflective learning" and "reflective English learning" by researchers, the paper qualitatively analyzes the students'degree of understanding about this learning strategy. Secondly, the students'reflective awareness and reflective ways during the English learning process are surveyed by a questionnaire. Through quantitative analysis of the data, a comparison is made among reflective situations of the three different contents (learning targets, learning process, and learning results and effects), and the similarities and differences of different grades are discussed. Finally, the paper analyzes the reasons of the current situation, and makes some suggestions.The investigation shows that the present situation of junior school students' reflective English learning is not very good:the students lack strong reflective awareness and cannot use reflective strategies efficiently to implement this learning strategy. Based on the reasons, the paper makes some suggestions together with some specific examples of reflective strategies which can help students implement the "reflective English learning" strategy.