A Study Of Cultivating Junior Students’ Cultural Awareness Through Autonomous Learning

This paper reports on a study of cultural awareness infiltration and how to improve the students’cultural abilities in junior English teaching through autonomous learning.The subjects involved in the study were junior students from Class9and Class10in the Second NanKai Middle School in Tianjin. The two classes were taught by the same teacher. The total number of the students is94. One is the experimental class (Class10, N=46) in which the teacher guided students to use some autonomous learning strategies to improve the students’ cultural knowledge. The other is the control class (Class9, N=48) in which the students acquired cultural knowledge mainly through the teacher’s lecturing. The experiment lasted from September2010to September2011.Students from Class9and Class10were asked to have a questionnaire about cultural knowledge individually and the scores were recorded. Two teachers were invited to score the tests independently. Data-analysis was done both quantitatively and qualitatively.The results showed the reliability and effectiveness of the experiment. Firstly, the questionnaire showed that students in the experimental class had a stronger sense of autonomous learning than the control class, and they formed a habit of learning English and grasping cultural knowledge after class. Secondly, students in the experimental class got higher scores than the control class in the test of cultural knowledge. The differences between the experimental class and the control class were significant. The new methods were efficient in improving the students’ autonomous learning abilities. After adopting the strategies teaching, the students’ cultural knowledge and abilities were improved.Due to the short time, the results yielded from this study will serve as hypotheses to be tested in the future.