An Empirical Study On Promoting Learner Autonomy Of Senior High School Students By Reflective Teaching Approach

Reflective teaching is an approach which arose in the western countries in the1980s. It is an important trend for teaching reform and teachers’ professional development. Meanwhile, it can foster learner autonomy and improve student’s studying efficiency. Reflective teaching can be realized in many ways, such as interview, questionnaire, teaching journal, class observation and video recording.In recent years, learner autonomy has attracted great attention in the educational field of China. It also has been considered an important goal in the second language teaching. Learner autonomy aims at learning how to learn from student’s perspective and making efforts enhance the rationality of learning practice as well as making students become autonomous learners.This thesis aims at applying reflective teaching to cultivate learner autonomy and improve student’s English competence as well as knowledge in senior English class. Meanwhile, this thesis seeks to equip students with English learning strategies and make them become reflective students and autonomous learners. Reflection is also a crucial part to teachers’ development. During this process, the teachers can also benefit a lot. Thus it can help the teachers to enhance research capacity and stimulate teachers’professional development.This study employs one of approaches of reflective teaching--action research. In this kind of new approach, the teachers can take part in the research and implement the experiment. Through analyzing and reflecting of teaching practice, action research makes teacher easily attain feedbacks of teaching and learning, then the teachers can adjust approaches to achieve the teaching purpose and improve teaching quality as well as cultivate learner autonomy. Action research provides an opportunity for teachers and students to investigate their practice in class and it brings big changes to learning. It always involves a cycle of question-hypothesis-solution.This research is attempted to explore the following questions:(1) Can reflective teaching promote learner autonomy? (2) How to cultivate learner autonomy by means of reflective teaching in senior high school English class?The subjects are selected as the first step of research procedure. They are two classes of Senior Grade one, which are taught by the author. One class is regarded as experimental class, the other is chosen as control class. The research lasts one semester (almost five months). The author designs the research methods, such as test achievement, questionnaires, students’ interview and teaching journal. Then the author implements following stages:finding the questions, identifying problems in teaching practice, developing plan, carrying out action, collecting and analyzing the data, reflecting the results of actions to find solutions to the problems. They form a cycle of reflective teaching:initial reflection-planning-action-data collection and analysis-solution-reflection.Through the study, the author finds out that reflective teaching can cultivate learner autonomy in the senior school English class. The outcome of research is significant, and the study shows that the approach of reflective teaching is also effective.This thesis consists of seven chapters. The first chapter is an introduction; it presents background and purpose as well as significance of the study. The second chapter states literature review, which includes learner autonomy and action research. The third chapter introduces the theoretical framework of the study; it elaborates the principals and foundation of reflective teaching in details. The fourth chapter is the methodology with research questions, subjects, instruments, procedure, data collection and analysis. Chapter five contains the reflective teaching process by action research approach, it can be realized the research procedure. The sixth chapter is an important part of the research, which provides the results and discussion of the study to testify if reflective teaching can promote learner autonomy as well as the reflection of whole action. The seventh chapter addresses the findings and implications of the research; it also clarifies the limitation and unsolved problems for further study.