Developing Learner Autonomy In Senior Middle School English Teaching

In China, the traditional model of foreign language teaching has fundamentally been the teacher-centered model of knowledge instilling, in which students as objects, are always in the position of passively receiving knowledge. Students have to follow what teachers teach, therefore, they can not adequately bring their conscious activities into play. This model has been confining students' imagination and creativity as well as the teaching quality. Therefore, education reform is definitely needed. Promoting and developing a new interactive education model between teachers and students, which is led by students' self-motivation and teachers' guidance, will be the urgent needs for education reform. The author states that motivation enhancement and the strategy training are the two main aspects of developing students' autonomy in their English learning, and she advocates that direct instruction and guidance in the English classroom is an effective approach to promote the students' autonomy and to improve their English learning efficiency. This dissertation also attempts to help teachers to teach their students how to learn and how to become autonomous in their own English learning by combining learning strategy instruction with the content course of English.In this thesis, the author first defines the term learner autonomy and reviews the current relevant literature and research at home and abroad, then summarizes the factors that influence it and discusses the necessity and feasibility of developing learner autonomy in senior middle school English.After that, a questionnaire is designed to examine the degrees of the students' autonomy and to get information from the students in Wuhan NO. 14 Middle School about their present situation in their autonomy of learning English. According to the results, the author analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the present conditions of the students' autonomy. The author finds that the students in her school have different degrees of ability in different aspects of autonomy.The author puts forward some strategies to improve the learners' autonomy ability by enhancing their motivation and training their learning strategies. At last, the author points out that there exist three problems in the practice of the self-access English teaching and learning model in middle school: the textbook design, the teachers'autonomy and the evaluation system. These are also the areas that the author will probe in the future.