On Fostering The English Learner Autonomy Of Senior Middle School Students Through Cooperative Learning

Many senior middle school students are observed being dependent and passive in their English studies, which greatly hinders the students'autonomous English learning ability. The present study explores how to promote senior middle school students'English learning autonomy through cooperative learning. Sixty students participated in the experiment. They were divided into two groups: experimental group and control group. The data was collected through questionnaires and language tests. Data analysis was via SPSS. Results indicated cooperative learning was significantly more effective than traditional teaching approaches in developing some facilitative affective factors such as motivation, anxiety, confidence, self-esteem, etc. which are aspects of learner autonomy in language learning. It was also discovered that cooperative learning improved learner's listening and reading proficiency; however, it is no more effective in developing lexical competence, grammatical knowledge and writing ability. On the whole, cooperative learning is more effective in training autonomous language learners than the traditional teaching approach. It is suggested that attention be paid to appropriate classroom monitoring by the teacher.The whole paper is divided into seven parts. The first part gives a brief introduction about the demand of cultivating the students'learner autonomy, the research questions are also put forward in this part. The second and the third part give a brief introduction about the literature review and the theoretical framework; The fourth part gives the design of the whole teaching experiment, in the design, the subject, the instrument and the procedure are mentioned carefully; The fifth part and the sixth part are the most important two parts in the whole paper, in these two parts, the elaborate analysis of the teaching experiment result is given out, also the elaborate discussion of the teaching experiment result is put forward. The last part is conclusion, in this part, the author inquires into the advantage and disadvantage of the...