Learner autonomy has been a buzzword in foreign language teaching in the recent twenty years. In 2001, the Ministry of Education of China published the latest English Curriculum for middle schools, which lays stress on training learners' autonomous learning ability. Related research and studies have indicated that middle school education should be mainly responsible for a student's successful learning of English. To make prominent progress and achievements in the EFL teaching field, it is necessary to have some teaching reforms and do some experiments in middle schools.In accordance with the latest national English Curriculum, we did a one-year English teaching experiment in Pudong Foreign Languages School. By increasing students' learning interest, readjusting the mode of classroom teaching and providing English learning strategy training, we made tentative and meaningful attempts to study and explore the English autonomous learning ability of the pre-junior students. During this process, we made relatively deep investigations on how affective factors, classroom teaching mode and learning strategies could influence the learning outcome. At the same time, we also made significant attempts to explore how ineffective students could learner better and finally become effective learners. By utilizing questionnaires and interviews as the main investigation tools, we conducted comparatively all-round assessment of our experiment.Assessment results showed that this teaching experiment was successful. Under our supervision and instruction, a majority of our subjects increased their learning interest, strengthened their self-confidence, improved the overall English skills, promoted their application of learning strategies and enhanced their autonomous learning ability. In addition, a variety of teaching activities armed with advanced teaching/learning theories also helped raise most of the subjects' comprehensive competence, their understanding about teaching, learning and even life. |