The Study Of College Students' Autonomous Learning Of English Listening In The Pattern Of Zero-class-hour Teaching

In recent years, the cultivation of students'English listening and speaking competence has received much more attention than ever before. However, the students'progress in their English listening and speaking is still a long way off satisfaction, and the efficiency of the listening teaching in class is undoubtedly low, which spontaneously affects students'progress in speaking. Thus how to promote college students'listening competence has been a highly concerned problem for both the learners and teachers.Currently, universities'enrollment in China has increased a lot while there are comparatively few English teachers, so it is quite pressing a task to find an approach to improve the learners'listening competence while reducing the teachers'workload.The concept of "learner autonomy" has long been a hot issue in the field of foreign language teaching ever since its birth in the 1980s.A lot of experiments done by researchers home and abroad show that "learner autonomy" is a feasible and effective method to promote learners'second language acquisition. Thus, based on the theory of "learner autonomy", the author adopted the zero-class-hour listening teaching model in the research, using questionnaire survey and quantitative analysis, intending to find out:whether learners can improve their learning autonomy through getting more control of their listening process and being more involved in the decision making.The subjects (n=146) of this study are non-English majors enrolled in Harbin Institute of Technology at Weihai in 2009, who were studying English for the second term in college during the research. The subjects were divided into the experimental group (n=70) and the control group (n=76), both of the two classes were instructed by the researcher. The traditional way of teaching listening was applied in the control group while in the experimental group, it was the zero-class-hour model.These two groups used the same listening text book and were tested on the same tests. Totally, there were five tests, including the pre-test, three monthly tests and the post-test.Three instruments were used in the research:listening tests, questionnaires and an interview. After the experiment, all the data were analyzed by SPSS 13.0.The results of the pre-test and post-test, and the result of three monthly exams were analyzed to find out the learners'learning effect; and the time the students from the two groups spent on after-class listening practice before and after the experiment were compared to sort out whether they made more efforts or not and to find out how autonomous they became; some students were randomly chosen to have an interview to have better realization of the students learning process, motivation, autonomy and their opinion and suggestions to the new model of listening teaching.The main findings of the research are:1) after four months study, both of the two groups made certain progress, but the students in the experimental groups made much more progress than those in the control group, moreover, those students in the experimental group whose scores were below average in the pre-test made quite great progress; 2) the questionnaire and the interview indicate that learners did hope to have much more control of their listening study progress, and they thought it would be a quite helpful method for them to improve their listening competence and to form the habit of autonomous learning; 3)students in the experimental group spent much more time on their listening practice after class than they did before the experiment, which indicates that they worked harder and became more autonomous. The research indicates that more control and responsibility should be given to students in the teaching process so as to foster learner autonomy.