A Comparative Study Of College English Autonomous Learning Situation Of Arts Majors And Science Majors

Ever since Henri Holec formally put forward the concept "learner autonomy" in the early 1980s, autonomous learning has taken on a growing importance in the field of foreign language education. But most of the researches have focused on the employment of learning strategies, teachers’ roles and network-aided autonomous learning. Comparative researches on the autonomous learning situation of Arts Majors and Science Majors were limited.This study, with questionnaire and interview as the research instruments and 195 non-English sophomores from Guangxi Normal University as the subjects, attempts to answer the following three questions:1. What is the overall situation of autonomous English learning of Arts students and Science students in Guangxi Normal University? 2. What are the differences between the high-score group and the low-score group in autonomous learning? 3. What are the difficulties and expectations of Arts students and Sciences students in terms of autonomous learning? Findings of the research indicate:1. The autonomous learning ability of Art majors and Science majors is at a medium level, but there are some differences. Art majors show higher proficiency in selecting suitable strategies, and they prefer to cooperate with each other in the process of English learning. They do better in speaking and communication skills. Science majors did worse in cooperative learning and the ability of autonomous learning is lower than that of Arts majors due to the fact that they have possibly devoted more time to their experiment. But they have over-done the Arts students in overcoming unfavorable emotions in English studying.2. There exists significant difference in autonomous learning between the high-score and low-score group, and the high-score has performed better than the low-score group concerning all the research subjects as well as individual groups of Arts majors and Science majors. To be more specific, High-score majors paid more attention to skills for listening, speaking, reading, writing and hoped to obtain guidance for improving their English language skills and guidance for learning strategies from teachers. Students in the low-score group focused on learning strategies and methods who needed teachers’ help, guidance, monitoring and communications more.3. Arts majors showed lower proficiency in operating on website-assisted teaching models. They hoped for the teacher to teach them some basic knowledge of operating computers as well as to guide them to choose learning resources for themselves. Science majors are weak in cooperative learning and self-monitoring.Based on all the investigation and analyses, some suggestions and some implications for college English teachers are offered: They should implement teaching models according to the characteristics of different majors so as to give more guidance and supports to non-English majors for their greater achievements.