The Impact Of Cultural Factors On The College English Independent Learning Ability

Autonomous learning attracts the widespread attention of the educators. Mc Devitt (1997) pointed out: the ultimate goal of education is to train out the persons who have the compentence of autonomous learning, and the compentence to deal with things independently. Autonomous learning means learners take part in learning activities actively, and in the whole learning process learners have the capacity to charge of their own learning. In the process of training self-learning competence, learners may be influenced by many factors, including cultural factors which cannot be ignored.By inquiring the document, the author found that the theses of "how cultural factors affect autonomous learning" were not as many as those of other studies. Most of the current studies on cultural factors are about cultural appropriateness. In this paper, the author designed and implement a research to test how the Chinese cultures affect the competence of Chinese university students'English autonomous learning after studying relative theories. The main issues of the research are:1. What cultural factors affect students'autonomous learning competence?2. Which are helpful factors?3. Which factors are not helpful?This research includes a questionnaire survey and interviews. The author chose 100 non-English major university students to finish the questionnaires, interviewed 10 students and 6 teachers, and recorded and analyzed the results. The analysis shows that the students'self-consciousness and self-beliefs are very strong. But they are deeply influenced by Confucianism, the "face" concept, "teacher's authority" concept, and "respect for teachers" concept. Collectivism may impede individual self-study to some extent, but it's helpful to carry out group cooperative learning. Traditional teaching pattern, especially examination-oriented education system, led to most students' learning motivation as the tool-based one. According to the problems found in the research, the author has done a comprehensive study and put forward specific recommendation.In short, autonomous learning is necessary for learners in lifelong learning. It is also important and necessary to develop and improve students'foreign language self-learning competence. As China's educators, they should pay attention to all the factors which can affect the student's autonomous learning competence. Although autonomous learning is closely to learners, cultural factors shouldn't be ignored. The ultimate purpose is to take advantage of favorable cultural factors to develop and improve China's university students'English autonomous competence.