Research On Vo-Tech School Students' Executing Autonomous English Learning

Our society has entered an epoch with scientific technology developing rapidly, and knowledge keeps being renewed, which demand more for people's learning ability. Not to be eliminated by the speedily changing scientific world, people have to keep learning skills and knowledge throughout their life. Therefore, cultivating learner autonomy has become a buzzword. During the recent thirty years, autonomous learning or self-access learning (SAL) are increasingly focused on. A mass of researchers and teachers have been appealed to exploring and studying how to stimulate autonomous learning and how to cultivate learner autonomy, Gardner and Miller are especially the one who provides guide for concretely executing SALL(Self-Access Language Learning). Though the research on developing and improving learner autonomy has made much progress from theory to practice, most of them mainly focus on university or college students, who have had a certain English foundation and possessed some learning strategies. Whereas votech(vocational technical) school students are short of necessary environment of the language English, lack of strong learning motivation, with poor English foundation, the research on votech school students executing autonomous English learning may be able to solve the puzzling problem, unknowing how to learn and unwilling to learn, and will enlighten to the problem that how to improve English teaching effectively and foster skilled talents as well. Hence, this thesis will specially make a close study of how to execute autonomous English learning in votech schools to fill the gap.This thesis attempts to expound a tentative study of executing autonomous English learning in Vo-tech Schools to promote English classroom teaching effectively and improve learner autonomy by means of questionnaire, teaching experiment and three English tests' result comparison, the conclusion is drawn that executing SAL of English in votech schools can raise students' interest in English learning more greatly, make English classroom teaching more effective and be more successful in improving students' all-round ability than that of traditional teacher-centered teaching.The thesis comprises six chapters:The history of autonomous learning and its theoretical background are given in the first chapter. The second chapter elaborates the current situation of votech school students' autonomous learning. Firstly, the chapter introduces a survey of votech school English classroom teaching and finds that teacher-centered classroom teaching still dominates most of votech school English classrooms, which brings about some disadvantages, and students request student-center English classroom teaching instead of teacher-centered one. Then it expounds the current situation of votech school students' English learning strategies, which influence the executing of autonomous learning. The last section of this chapter mainly introduces the advantages of autonomous English learning, arguing for the necessity of executing autonomous learning.Chapter III introduces the principles abided by when executing autonomous English learning activities: inspiring students in executing learner autonomy activities, cultivating their innovative abilities, directing students' activities and keeping student-centered classroom teaching. Chapter IV presents the executing of various autonomous English learning activities in the experimental group to mold good habits and improve learner autonomy, which in turn attributes to promoting English teaching.In the last part, on the base of the empirical study, the author of this thesis makes a few suggestions on how to develop learners' learning habits and help learners take responsibility for their learning by means of executing various autonomous English learning activities.It is the result of long-term practice and efforts to cultivate learner autonomy, so the author of this thesis questions in the part of conclusion on the quality of the current compulsory education in terms of votech school students' poor autonomy; on the other hand, for the parents being busy coping with their heavy life burden, the question of how to deal with the conflict between their work and education of their children is put forward as well; in addition, as for the problem that it is common that a good many votech teachers still focus on students' scores instead of their lifelong learning abilities, the author suggests authorities strengthen the education aim of votech schools to votech school teachers. It is hoped that the tentative study in the thesis can provide guidance for English teaching of votech schools.