An Empirical Study Of Anchored Instruction For The Development Of Nonenglish Majors’ Autonomous Learning Ability

According to Constructivism, learning is not a simple process of knowledge transmission from teachers to students, but the process of self-knowledge construction of individual learners. The purpose of teaching in the framework of Constructivism is to create a cognitive context for students to construct knowledge, and to promote students’ self-construction of knowledge. As one of the three types of constructivist teaching models, anchored instruction enables learner to acquire knowledge by problem-solving in an authentic context.Based on the theory of Constructivism, this paper employed the empirical research method to explore the influence of anchored instruction mode on non-English majors’ autonomous learning abilities. And it tried to answer the following questions:1.What effect does anchored instruction have on the development of non-Englishmajors’ autonomous learning?2. In which aspects does anchored instruction affect the students’ autonomouslearning?3. What are students’ attitudes towards anchored classroom teaching?Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, two classes of information technology majors in an independent college of Jiangsu Province received anchored instruction and traditional English teaching methods respectively. One class was the experimental group(hereinafter shortened as EG) including 27 students and the other was the control group(hereinafter shortened as CG) including 28 students. The experimental teaching period was 18 weeks. Before the experiment, the English proficiency levels of the two classes were tested to prove that there was no significant difference between them. The autonomous learning abilities and English proficiency of the two classes were also respectively measured by the Autonomous English Learning Scale based on a three-dimensional conceptual model of learner autonomy and the CET Band 4 before and after the empirical teaching. After the experimental teaching, six students were chosen randomly from the experimental class to take semi-structured interviews so that the interviewer could gain a clear idea of students’ attitudes towards the anchored teaching. Additionally, the test data were processed by SPSS19.0 and the research results showed that:Firstly, the anchored instruction could promote the development of non-English majors’ autonomous learning abilities.Secondly, the anchored instruction could effectively improve students’ autonomous learning abilities from three aspects: autonomous learning psychology, autonomous learning behavior and self-managing learning ability. With regard to the autonomous learning psychology, both the EG and the CG made progress after one-semester’s college English learning; however, as the subjects of learning, the EG students achieved a more obvious improvement in identifying the their responsibility for English learning, in initiatively taking English learning responsibility, enhancing English learning consciousness and decreasing the learning dependence. What’s more, the progress in identifying learning subjects and shouldering English learning responsibility was relatively greater than that in the other two aspects. With regard to the self-managing learning ability, through the ―anchor‖ problem-solving, autonomous learning and collaborative learning, the EG students achieved a greater improvement in plan-making ability, the ability of implementing and monitoring learning plan and the ability of evaluating and reflecting than that of the CG. And the most obvious progress was in plan-making, which facilitated the improvement in the self-managing learning ability. With regard to the autonomous learning behavior, students’ autonomous learning behavior was more likely to be excited after being equipped with psychology of autonomous learning and self-managing learning ability. The EG students’ English learning autonomy(hereinafter shortened as LA) and independency are embodied in the learning behavior before, in and after class. The explicit autonomous learning behavior shifting from autonomous tendency tended to be more obvious with the proceeding of experimental teaching.Lastly, students had positive attitudes towards anchored instruction. The EG students gained a high acceptance of anchored instruction model. First of all, the EG students held that more opportunities were provided for them to explore and conduct cooperative learning and their English proficiency was improved accordingly. Then, in anchored instruction, students deemed that their classroom participation, learning concentration and English learning attitudes were all improved obviouly. Finally, in terms of learning motivation, the subjects’ English learning philosophy gradually shifted from test-driven to will-driven.In this study, we find that anchored instruction can promote students’ autonomous English learning abilities, which enriches the current studies on the exploration of effective ways of cultivating autonomous learning ability and provide references for the reform of College English teaching.