The Development Of College Students' Autonomy

The purpose of this study is to find out: Within one semester, is it possible for Chinese freshmen from an average university to 1) change their beliefs about language learning under teacher's guidance? 2) develop a tendency of control over their learning under teacher's guidance? 3) Does the development of autonomy lead to better language learning?The research subjects are 31 college freshmen in their first semester of college life from an average university in China, who are going through a critical transitional stage from exam-oriented teaching to character teaching.Within 16 weeks research, the teacher adopts lectures, discussions, self-test questionnaires to guide and intervene in learners' beliefs and behaviors and involves surveys, opinion polls, learners' journals, teaching logs, and interview to systematically collect data.Data analysis indicates that learners' beliefs have had a significant change in the role of the teacher and role of feedback. They no longer consider it as the teachers' responsibility to supervise them and begin to depend on themselves. They have realized the importance of feedback (being able to see their progress), but not necessarily obtain it from the teacher. However, other beliefs the teacher has not emphasized show no significant change.Evidence for the growth of learner autonomy is also yielded. All the students have set goals, made plans for their own English learning and put forth some effort to monitor their learner process and fulfill the plans. And they are able to evaluate their learning process accordingly and analyze their problems by now. However, the degree of control varies a lot. Still learners' ability in monitoring their own study process needs to be strengthened.Data analysis indicates that the students with guidance showed better achievement in writing and comprehensive tests than other students in the same department. But only learners' oral test scores show a correlation with the development of their autonomy. Therefore, it's hard to conclude that the development of learner autonomy surely leads to better language achievement.At the end, the paper pointes out some limitations and also provides possible implications of this research to teaching and further research.