On Application Of Teaching Mode Of Learning Plan Guiding In Rural Junior Middle School For Promoting Students’ Autonomous Learning Ability

One of the basic goals of middle school English education in our country is to cultivatethe students’ autonomous learning ability and comprehensive ability of using the language,and the formation of the students’ individualized learning methods and the improvement intheir autonomous learning ability is an important symbol of success in teaching modereformation. Researches in our country on autonomous English learning began in the1990sand in recent years the researches enter into an unprecedented prosperous phase. But the focusof the study on English autonomous learning is mainly concentrated on the objects fromcollege students and the urban middle school students, relatively less on the ones from ruraljunior middle school students. Most of the rural junior middle school English teachers still usethe traditional mode of teaching, giving priority to imparting knowledge, which no doubt goesagainst cultivating the junior middle school students’ ability in English autonomous learning.“Learning plan guiding”, coming into being since1990s, is a new type of teaching mode, andthe teaching mode effects good result through taking “guided learning plan” as the carrier,guided learning as the means, teachers’ guidance as the leading factor, the studentsautonomous learning as the main body and the teachers and students working together tocomplete the teaching task. This teaching mode of learning plan guiding has played a positiverole in the promotion of students’ ability of autonomous learning and innovation and in thepromotion of their comprehensive development. Nevertheless, the teaching mode is appliedmore either in main disciplines for admission test or at senior middle school teaching stage,less in the rural junior middle school teaching stage.This study summarized the previous achievements in researches on teaching theory andpractice of autonomous learning and learning plan guiding, and through theoretical analysisand experimental investigation, the author made a survey on second-year students’ Englishautonomous learning in a rural junior middle school in Chaling County, Hunan Province. Thequestionnaire survey results show that the rural junior middle school students’ Englishautonomous learning ability is rather weak. Based on the questionnaire survey and theinterview results, the author chose two parallel classes of Grade Two in the junior middleschool for the study of autonomous learning ability cultivation chiefly through teaching modeof “learning plan guiding”. At the end of the semester of teaching experiment of the research,the author made the follow-up questionnaire survey about the autonomous learning ability ofthe experimental class and control class and compared the scores of post English achievementtest for the students from both classes. The experimental results show that teaching mode of“learning plan guiding” can succeed in bringing about positive changes in the aspects of rural junior middle school students’ interest in learning English, ways of learning English,monitoring of learning process and evaluation of learning results. The conclusion of this studyis that to improve the students’English autonomous learning ability and their English learningachievement it is necessary to change the traditional “force-feeding” teaching mode, takestudent-centered teaching mode (such as “learning plan guiding”), attach importance toguiding students’ learning method, stimulate their learning initiative and eventually cultivatetheir interest in learning English and their spirit of independence.