Building Student-Centered English Class At Senior School

In recent years, student-centered teaching (hereafter “SCT”) principle hasbeen attached great importance and continuously carried out in the area of Englishteaching. Different from traditional teacher-centered teaching mode, in SCT,students are the center of the whole teaching process, students’ learning autonomy,collaborative learning and their independent sense are emphasized.Correspondingly, teachers’role also turns into students’facilitator.Therefore, to build a “SCT” English class means to transmit the students’role from “passive receiver” to “active explorer” through the cultivation of theirlearning strategies and development of learning autonomy.This paper mainly explores how to unify the relationship among “SCT”,meta-cognitive strategies’ training and autonomy improving in Chinese highschool English class at the premise of respecting the students’ individualdifferences. At the same time, the teachers’ role, class environment, and thestudents’ themselves will be treated as important factors in this research. Thetheoretical bases are constructivism, the theory of good language learners, studieson language learners’affective factors and Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis.A study is carried out among two third year classes in Zhengzhou foreignlanguage senior school. With the data collected from questionnaire, classobservation, interviewing with teachers and the three months’ meta-cognitivestrategy training, the relationship among “SCT”, meta-cognitive strategies’training and autonomy improving in Chinese high school English class wasconfirmed, i.e. training the students’ meta-cognitive strategies is an importantprerequisite for building a “SCT” English class and an important approach todevelop the students’learning autonomy。 This research possesses both practical and theoretical significance. Inaddition to supplying instructions for second language learners in China esp. theEnglish learners, it also serves reference for the seeking of a successful Englishteaching innovation method. At the last part of the thesis, limitations areconsidered and recommendations are also made for future related research.