Astudy Of Students' Autonomous Learning In Vocational College Oral English Learning

With the continuous development of cognitive psychology, humanistic psychology and constructivism psychology, the focus of teaching model in school gradually shifts from teachers'teaching to students'learning. In English teaching research, the cultivation of students'autonomous English learning abilities has become a hot issue for educational workers in recent years. After studying and summarizing a large amount of research literature, the author finds that: the studies of autonomous learning are more about comprehensive English teaching than oral English teaching, and more about university students than vocational college students; at present oral English learning of Chinese vocational college students isn't satisfying, and most of them are poor in English, without strong learning motivation or good learning habits, which makes them unable and afraid to speak English. Therefore, it seems more important to cultivate autonomous oral English learning in vocational college students, so as to better achieve the objectives of English teaching in vocational college. Therefore, this paper aims to make a tentative study on cultivation and practice of autonomous oral English learning of vocational college students.Adopting current advanced teaching theories, at the basis of studying and analyzing many teaching theories of abroad and Chinese educationists and a large amount of research reports, this paper tries to solve issues of the following three aspects by the method of combination of both theoretical research and empirical research: Firstly, reveal the problems in autonomous oral English learning of vocational college students; Secondly, analyze main factors affecting the autonomous oral English learning of vocational college students; Thirdly, pertinently practice and cultivate autonomous oral English learning and explore effective strategies to improve autonomous oral English learning of vocational college students.The author chooses some non-English major freshmen of 2010 in Taishan Vocational Technology College as experimental objects, with a class of 30 students as experimental class and another class of the same major which also has 30 students as comparative class. The author first arranges English speaking tests for both experimental and comparative classes respectively with PETS level 2 oral test part, to detect if there is obvious difference of oral English performance between the two classes before the experiment. In order to understand the present situations of students'autonomous learning, the author designs a questionnaire on autonomous learning of vocational college students, and hands out the copies to the two classes. From analysis of the collected data with SPSS software, it's shown that vocational college students don't have good abilities in autonomous English learning. In the one semester of oral English teaching, the teachers combine cultivation of learning motivation and practices of meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social-affective strategies together in the teaching of the experimental class, while the comparative class is only taught in traditional teaching method and with teaching materials required by the syllabus. The experiment uses questionnaires, interviews, oral tests, students'logs as research tools, and analyzes the questionnaire data and oral test scores with SPSS software. The result shows that guiding students to establish and strengthen their learning motivations and creating appropriate environments to practice and cultivate students'meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social-affective strategies are helpful to improve vocational college students'abilities in autonomous oral English learning and their oral English. This study obtains some achievements; however, it still has its own limitations. The author hopes the results of the study can be helpful to oral English teaching of vocational college students and to the cultivation of their autonomous learning abilities.