A Comparative Study Of English Autonomy In Senior High Schools

In recent20years, learner autonomy has become a hot issue in foreign languageteaching. The term “learner autonomy”, was first advanced in the book Autonomy andForeign Language Learning by Henri Holec in1981, which refers to “the ability to takecharge of one’s own learning”.There have been numerous studies on learning to learn, on developing independentlearning and on autonomy abroad since the1960s. While in China, study on learnerautonomy only started in the mid-1980s, which mainly introduces the related researchesabroad, or puts an emphasis on the importance of learner autonomy in colleges as wellas training the learner in terms of strategies development and learning skills. Littleimportance has been attached to the practical study on learner autonomy in Englishteaching and learning in senior high schools and most of the finished researches just puttheir emphasis on only one area. But researches on the whole situation of learnerautonomy in China are being neglected to some extent. Our country has set the maingoal of English teaching and learning as “developing the students’ autonomous Englishlearning” in the New English Course Standard for the basic education stage. Thisurgently demands that teachers and the education authorities create the prerequisites forautonomous learning. In this regard, the study aims to examine students’ autonomousEnglish learning situations in two different areas, try to find the similarities anddifferences and find out some practical ways to help them improve their autonomouslearning abilities.According to the research, the paper tries to explore the following questions: l)what are the current situations of English learner autonomy in two key high schools inBeing and Chongqing?2) What are the suggestions to improve high school students’English learner autonomy so as to improve their school results?163students from Beijing Pingguoyuan middle school and178students from No.8middle school of Chongqing participated in the study. They were required to completethe questionnaire revised from Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning(SILL) version7.o, Pang Weiguo’s questionnaire on learner autonomy and WenQiufang’s questionnaire on the English Learning Situation of Chinese Learners (WenQiufang&Wang Lifei). The questionnaire consists of34items on a five-point Likertscale, investigating students’ autonomy from six aspects: students’ motivation towards learner autonomy, learning strategies, students’ monitoring on learning process,students’ monitoring on learning results, students’ understanding on teachers’ teachingobjectives and requirements, and students’ learning environment. The choices weretransformed into Means，and Standard deviations by SPSS. In order to get more detailedinformation about students’ autonomy，an interview was conducted among20studentsafter they finished the questionnaire.The findings show that the students in the two key high schools have autonomouslearning abilities to some extent but the whole level of learner autonomy is not too high.The students have English learning motivation. Most of them consider English as a veryimportant course. They will connect their English study with their future. Althoughsome of them are not interested in English learning, they still insist on hard learning forgood learning results. They know some of the learning strategies but are not capable ofmaking use of them. They take notes in the class but sometimes they can not grasp themain points. The learning is lack of planning and managing. When they come acrossdifficulties, they turn to teachers and classmates for help. Useful environments are notbeing fully used. Some differences exist in the situations of the two areas, but thedifferences are small and not obvious.Accordingly, the author offers some suggestions on promoting learner autonomy inEnglish learning of senior high schools. These suggestions include: inspiring anddeveloping students’ English learning motivation, cultivating and training students’learning strategies, encouraging and improving self-evaluation, peer-evaluation andcooperative learning, guiding students to fully use of multimedia and internet andchanging teachers’ traditional role.