An Empirical Study Of English Autonomous Learning Training For Independent Institute Students Through Duty Report

Learner autonomy plays an important role in English learning. But many researchers find that lots of college students don't know how to study, especially the students from the independent institute. They enter the college with a comparatively weak basis and they are deeply affected by the traditional education system. Thus, the students' autonomy ability is not so satisfactory.In order to arouse the students' enthusiasm and enhance teaching interaction, many teachers have used "duty report " in their English classes. The author tries to instruct the students to do duty report in a cooperative way so as to change the teacher-centered mode into the student-centered mode and improve the students'autonomy ability and academic record.The experiment lasts for eighteen weeks with 84 subjects from two non-English major classes of an independent institute in Hunan, who are taught by the same teacher. In English classes, duty reports are added to experimental class while the comparative class only uses the usual teaching steps. The research uses varies methods including questionnaire, interview and test. The questionnaire covers the following five aspects to measure the changes of students' autonomy:understanding of the purpose and requirements of college English teaching, goal-setting & planning, strategy employment, monitoring the learning process and reflecting learning outcome, making use of learning resources. The questionnaire is given to the subjects twice:before the experiment and after the experiment. The returned valid data were processed by the SPSS 17.0. Interview is utilized as supplementary instrument to get information of the current learner autonomy situation and the development of their autonomy. Tests are held both before and after the experiment to analyze whether the experiment is helpful to the improvement of score. Test papers come from item pool of CET-4.Data analysis indicates that on the whole, duty report is beneficial to learner autonomy. But as to the five aspects affecting learner autonomy, the effects are not the same. It affects more in strategy employment, goal-setting & planning and making use of learning resources than in monitoring the learning process and reflecting learning outcome. The experimental class makes notable gains in score, and the internal differences are narrowing, while the comparative class makes little progress in the second test and the internal differences are still large.The whole thesis is divided into six parts. The first part is introduction which sets forth the background and the significance of the research. The second part:literature review. In this part, the author describes the definition, character and connotation of autonomy; discusses the influence factors of autonomy; reviews the research on learner autonomy both home and abroad; analyses duty report and its present research condition. The third part:theory basis of the research. The research is built on some theories such as humanistic theory, constructivism learning theory and cooperative learning theory. The fourth part is about the experiment, including research objectives, research objects, research tools and an example of experimental teaching. The fifth part is the analysis and discussion about the data. The author analyses the data collected, summarizes the enlightenment for college English teaching in independent institutes, and reflects the effect and deficiency of the experiment. The sixth part is conclusion which sums up the whole thesis.