| For decades, the concept of learner autonomy in language teaching and learning has gained tremendous attention from educators and researchers both at home and abroad. In China, the New English Curriculum Standard integrates this concept into the education policy and postulates the main goal as "cultivate the students' ability of autonomous learning". Vocabulary learning is the basis of language learning which also poses most of difficulties for senior high students to achieve desirable language proficiency, so to foster students' autonomous vocabulary learning will be significant to help students develop comprehensive English abilities.This thesis attempts to develop students' autonomous vocabulary learning and improve their lexical competence by cultivating autonomous vocabulary learning. Firstly, based on the understanding of learner autonomy and vocabulary learning, aspects including the attitude, autonomous learning abilities and strategies use are investigated by means of questionnaire to explore the status quo of autonomous vocabulary learning among senior high students. The results show that students in senior high school have certain degree of learner autonomy on vocabulary learning, but this is not satisfied.According to the findings from questionnaire, a 15-week experiment is carried out by means of learner training for autonomous vocabulary learning with the aim to improve students' lexical competence measured in terms of vocabulary knowledge including aspects of productive knowledge, receptive knowledge and depth knowledge. From the results, it can be inferred that learner training for autonomous vocabulary has a positive effect on students' vocabulary proficiency, especially on gains of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.Although the study has some limitations such as the time span and research design, some suggestions are provided for vocabulary teaching and learning. |
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