An Empirical Study On Improving Junior High School Students’ English Autonomous Learning Ability And Learning Results Via The Guided Learning Plan

One of the ultimate goals for education is the development of students’ autonomouslearning ability and the core pedagogical concept reflected in New National CurriculumStandard is human-orientedness. In order to achieve this goal, the author attempts to changethe traditional teaching approach and carry out the guided learning plan teaching approach inEnglish class of Junior High School. This attempt of human-oriented teaching approachguides students to learn autonomously. The guided learning plan is a new teaching approachwhich is completed by the cooperation between teachers and students. The guideline principleunderlined in this approach is to view “the learning plan” as “the carrier”of the approach,“theguidance” as “the teaching method”, which fully reflects teachers’ leading role and students’subjective role in the teaching process. This kind of teaching approach is student-centered,which will stimulate students’ interest, learners’ strong autonomy and initiative in learning.However, so far, the research on the guided learning plan teaching approach mainly focuseson the theoretical aspects including contents, design of the guided learning plan etc, andignores the aspects in its application, especially the application to English teaching in JuniorHigh School. The author starts the survey with the analysis of theoretical basis of the guidedlearning plan, such as the cognitive discovery learning theory, the zone of proximaldevelopment theory and the cone of learning theory, combines the guided learning plan andEnglish instruction in class, meanwhile puts emphasis on how to gradually cultivate JuniorHigh School students’ English autonomous learning ability by using the guided learning plan,making students’ subjectivity and autonomy develop gradually.The author selects, to be more accurate, two classes from Grade Three in a certain JuniorHigh School, Fengcheng, Liaoning Province as the research subjects. One is as ExperimentalClass (EC) and the other as Control Class (CC) and the author carries out the empiricalexperiment so as to testify whether student’s autonomous learning ability and learning resultscan be improved by using the guided learning plan in class. The key questions of this researchare listed as follows:(1) To what extent does the application of the guided learning plan affect Junior High Schoolstudents’ English autonomous learning ability?(2) To what extent does the application of the guided learning plan affect Junior High Schoolstudents’ English learning results?The experiment lasted for one semester. The author carried out the experiment by usingthe questionnaire about students’ autonomous learning ability, observation of learning behaviors, interview and tests as the instruments. The collected data was analyzed by both thequalitative and quantitative research methods. The result of the experiment shows that bothstudents’ autonomous learning ability has been improved by adopting the guided learning plan.It indicates, to some extent, the new approach is helpful for teachers to improve students’learning results, which proves that the guided learning plan is a feasible teaching approach inJunior High School.