Learning-Plan-Guided English Teaching:an Approach To Cultivating Senior Middle School Students’ Learning Autonomy

In the last few years, in the field of language teaching and learning,"advocating autonomy and cultivating students’autonomous learning ability" has become a hot topic. This indicates that nowadays students’learning gets more concern than teachers’ teaching, and that the purpose of school education is not only to instruct students to master knowledge but also to equip them with lifelong learning attitudes and abilities. According to New English National Course Standard set by the Education Ministry of China for Senior Middle School, the main goal of English teaching and learning is to develop students’English learning autonomy. Thus teaching approach should be well chosen for cultivating students’ autonomous learning ability. to help students to master effective learning strategies, to form appropriate learning habits, and to grasp adequate ability of self-assessment and self-regulation in their daily learning. Ideally, the teaching approach can foster students to lay a solid foundation for lifelong learning.The learning-plan-guided teaching approach dates back to the late1990s in China. It is called "Xue’an Dao Xue" in Chinese, which depends on the learning plan as a medium leading students to learn and teachers to teach. This teaching approach guided by learning tasks and advocates autonomy. cooperation and inquiry. As a combination of task-based approach, cooperative teaching approach and inquiry teaching approach together, this approach has absorbed the strengths of many teaching approaches, and the most prominent characteristic of this approach is its student-centeredness, which is beneficial to cultivating students’English learning autonomy, therefore, in the last few years, it has been put into practice in many schools and has made gratifying achievements.This thesis aims to make a detailed discussion on whether the learning-plan-guided teaching approach can be used to cultivate students’ learning autonomy. During her internship in Fuxian Senior Middle School, the author of this thesis was very lucky to have witnessed and been personally involved in the implementation of the learning-plan-guided teaching approach. In this thesis, first of all, the author will first review the definition of learning autonomy, its theoretical bases, characteristics of autonomous learner and techniques to cultivate learners’autonomy. Next, she will expound the definition of the learning-plan-guided teaching approach, its implementation and its characteristics. Then she will attempt to draw a conclusion that the learning-plan-guided teaching approach does cater to the prerequisites for cultivating students’learning autonomy in theory by analyzing the relationships between the learning-plan-guided teaching approach and autonomous learning theories. Finally, the author will verify the efficiency of the learning-plan-guided teaching approach through a teaching experiment. The teaching experiment involved lasted about four months from Feb.16to June20,2011. The participants consist of111students from two natural parallel classes in Fuxian Senior Middle School, who just began to experience the learning-plan-guided teaching approach at the beginning of the new semester. In order to get authentic data, the author of this author chose questionnaires and class observation as the research instruments. Based on the teaching experiment, the following conclusions are drawn.1. The leaning-plan-guided teaching plan is popular with Senior One students in Fuxian Senior Middle School.2. The learning-plan-guided teaching approach is effective in cultivating students’ autonomy in Senior Middle School.3. Some factors that influence the efficiency of the learning-plan-guided teaching approach include.(1) Teamwork(2) The assessment from teachers and peers(3) The ways to lead students to attribute failures(4) Immediate feedback...