The Relationship Between College Students' Positive Interdependence And Their Autonomy In English Learning

About thirty years after the introduction of the concept"learner-centeredness", fostering learner autonomy has now become one of the essential goals in language teaching and learning. Numerous researches have been conducted to make some contributions to the cultivation and promotion of autonomous learning and it turns out that, compared with traditional language teaching mode, cooperative learning is more supportive to autonomous learning, which has been proved to be a creative and effective teaching approach and increasingly become more and more prevalent in China. Under such circumstances, many external factors, positive interdependence, one of the vital components of cooperative learning, for example, must be taken into consideration when exploring the factors influencing learner autonomy, instead of mainly focusing on the internal factors as it was. Yet there are few empirical studies so far on the relationship between positive interdependence and learner autonomy.Therefore, the present study is to investigate the relationship between college students'perceived positive interdependence and learner autonomy in their English learning by answering the following three research questions: 1) What's the current situation of college students'perceived positive interdependence and learner autonomous in their English learning? 2) Is positive interdependence correlated with college students'autonomous English learning competence? If it is, how strong is the correlation? 3) To what extent does each type of positive interdependence influence college students'autonomy in their English learning? The questionnaire employed here is adapted from the Classroom Climate Measure of Johnson and Johnson (1983) and the Non-English Major Undergraduates'English Autonomy Investigation Questionnaire of Xu Jinfen et al (2004). Altogether 272 non-English major undergraduates from Huazhong University of Science and Technology took part in the current study. The results of the study indicated that: first, college students perceive a medium degree of both positive interdependence and autonomy in their English learning. Positive role interdependence is the most frequently perceived type of interdependence in English class. Second, college students'positive interdependence is positively correlated with their autonomous English learning competence, at a medium level though. Third, positive goal interdependence can best predict the level of learner autonomy, with positive resource interdependence coming next and positive role interdependence coming last.