The Application Of Learner Autonomy To English Listening Teaching In Senior Middle School

The concept of “learner autonomy” has long been a hot issue in the field of foreignlanguage teaching ever since its birth in the1980s.“Learner autonomy” has differentdefinitions, but almost all the studies have emphasized on the transference of learningresponsibility from the teachers to the students, the learner-centered study and thedevelopment of the students’ ability of leaning autonomy.The researchers both at home and abroad have made a lot of experiments, showing that inthe whole training process, it is feasible to promote the ability of learner autonomy bymonitoring the students’ learning activities with the help of a series of measures, applyingstrategy training instruction, multi-media assistant teaching and increasing the students’cooperation. The language skills are made of listening, speaking, reading and writing, andlistening is the most important in these four skills. However, the present situation of Chinesestudents’ listening ability is far from satisfactory, especially in Senior Middle School. Manystudents have studied English listening passively just for passing college entrance exam.Moreover, others have even given up learning English listening. There exists autonomy crisisrather than intellectual crisis among the English learners; therefore there is a pressing need forfostering learner autonomy among the senior middle students in English listening teaching.This research discusses on an application of the related theories of learner autonomy inEnglish listening teaching in Senior Middle School. By studying the definitions, types andcharacteristics of learner autonomy, the author has established the teaching model ofautonomous listening in this study based on “the self-regulated learning model of “PangWeiguo’’（2003）. Humanism, Cognitivism and Constructivism have provided plenty oftheoretical foundations for learner autonomy. The teaching model of autonomous listening isemployed mainly to improve the level of the students’ English listening with the aim atdeveloping the students’ autonomous learning ability by applying a series of measures andstrategy training instruction. Therefore, this model has been proved to be effective by thetheory and the characteristics of listening process.It took the author one semester to perform the experiment on Sep.2011. The experimentwas carried out in two classes which were taught by the author at No6middle school inYuanJiang city, Hunan province. One class was an experimental class and the other was thecontrol class. The experimental class adopted the teaching model of autonomous listening andthe traditional method was used in the controlled class. Questionnaires and tests were madeboth at the beginning of the experiment and in the end, adding the interviews after theexperiment. Compared with the controlled class, the results show that it has significantly effect on promoting students’ listening ability and developing the students’ ability of learnerautonomy by applying the teaching model. Moreover, the students have the positive attitudetoward it. Such findings provide practical implications for English listening teaching in China.That is, in order to help learners to be more autonomous and more proficient in their learning,teachers should take the responsibility of designing a new teaching model to satisfy students’needs.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to this thesis.Chapter Two reviews the related research literature on learner autonomy home and abroad anddescribes the related content of listening. Chapter Three is the most important part in this paper,analyzing the necessity and possibility of application of leaner autonomy in Senior MiddleSchool. Then, it provides the detailed teaching model about experiment design. Chapter Fouroutlines teaching experiment, which has proved the effective of the teaching model. ChapterFive is the analysis on the results of data collection. The last chapter deals with the majorfindings, conclusion, the limitation of the study and recommendations for further research.