An Empirical Study On The Application Of The Length Approach To Foster College Students' English Writing Autonomy

With more and more frequent international communication and cooperation in politics,economy and culture in the modern time, our nation is in great need of more excellent youngpeople who have a good command of English with learner autonomy than ever before.Autonomous learning is a modern learning ideology mainly based on humanism and cognitivepsychology, and it has become one of the most important research subjects in appliedlinguistics, for it plays a potent role in fostering students' learning effect. Since Henri Holecintroduced learner autonomy in the foreign language teaching in1981, it has been consistentlyattached great importance in the foreign language world home and abroad. Although differentscholars defined it in different ways, they all emphasized that learner autonomy is theresponsibility of learners for their own learning."The College English CurriculumRequirements", issued in2007by the Department of Higher Education in the Ministry ofEducation of the People's Republic of China, clearly stressed the importance of cultivatingEnglish learner autonomy in the teaching practice to help students to know how to learn, andform life-long learning abilities, which urges every college English teacher to change theirtraditional teaching ideology, and try to explore new types of college English teaching modesrevolving around students. However, the general status quo of college English teaching is notso positive actually. Due to great amount of English teaching contents with relatively littleamount of time in large-class teaching situation, the teachers usually pay little attention toEnglish writing which usually takes great efforts, a lot of time but with little effect. Besides,some researches indicate that college students generally have poor level of writing autonomy,which is closely related to their writing performance. Evidently, all of these factors result in theweak writing abilities of most of the college students. Thus cultivating college students' writingautonomy to promote their English writing proficiency has become a top priority in the presentresearch with respect to an effective English writing pedagogy.The author assumes that the Length Approach (LA) proposed by Wang Chuming et al in2000is probably an effective mode in fostering English writing autonomy to help college students improve their writing proficiency. In the author's eyes, LA can meet the requirementsof the teaching ideology of the current time and stimulate students to play an active role in theirEnglish writing. Hence, the author introduced it to the English writing instruction ofnon-English major college students to test the hypothesis.To start with, the author made an analysis of the researching background and significanceof the study; then she reviewed the definitions, theoretic framework, and studies on learnerautonomy home and abroad, especially its application in English writing; next she illustratedthe basic notion, teaching ideology, theoretic bases of LA, together with its correlation towriting autonomy and relevant researches. After raising research questions, the authordescribed the design and methodology of the present research which is a quasi-experimentalresearch of non-equivalent control group design combining qualitative study and quantitativestudy with the application of LA as an independent variable and the learners' writing autonomyand writing proficiency as dependent variables. The subjects include92non-English majorsophomores from two natural classes of Shanxi Medical University. With one class as theexperimental group, the new method, LA, is being applied to the students' English writing,while the other class as the control group receives the traditional product approach to learnEnglish writing. And the English proficiency levels of the two groups were equal, which weremeasured by a t-test on their English proficiency test scores of the previous semester. Theresearch instruments included pre&post writing tests, questionnaire surveys and interviews,from which data were collected to find out students' changes in English writing autonomy andwriting proficiency. Then the data were analyzed by means of SPSS17.0.The research results indicate that the application of LA is effective in helping thenon-English major college students to improve their English writing proficiency and fostertheir English writing autonomy which plays a significant role in helping students achieveprogress in English writing. Through inspiring students' writing interests, enhancing theirself-esteems, strengthening their writing motivations, forming more positive attitudes towardsEnglish writing, and making full use of writing strategies, LA effectively facilitatesconsiderable improvement in the students' English writing autonomy.Finally, the author summarized the results, implications and limitations of the presentresearch and made some suggestions for further studies in this researching field.