A Study Of Co-operative Learning In Promoting English Learner Autonomy In Junior High Schools

For almost over 30 years, Learner Autonomy has been discussing dramatically in the field of applied linguistics,especially in middle schools’ English teaching. In current years, Chinese English teaching in junior and senior highs has changed a lot with the innovation of the systems of entrance exams. Educational departments and teachers are paying more and more attention to the students’ competence in pragmatics rather than semantics to meet the demands for the talented of the globalization. To realize this, getting rid of old practice and taking advantage of good methods are necessary. Besides, cultivating students’ learner autonomy is essential for the teachers in China.Learner Autonomy is a long-term dynamic process rather than a motionless product. Moreover, it is important to help middle students identify the strategies that they have been already using or could potentially apply so that it will help students to give greater control over their English learning.In this thesis, the author took the Junior Two students as subjects and conducted a study on the influence Learner Autonomy has on English teaching in middle schools by means of questionnaire and experiment. 83 students from Class 3 and Class 4 in No. 1 Junior High School in Heishan, Jinzhou are involved in the experiment. The author did a one-term-experiment both quantitatively and qualitatively. Then the result of the experiment is analyzed. The goal is to prove the two questions in the study:(1) Can Co-operative Learning boost and develop middle-school students’ Learning Autonomy effectively?(2) Can the students achieve higher score in the final exam when higher autonomy is achieved?Finally, the experiment shows that when higher autonomy is gained,higher score can’t be achieved probably. Meanwhile, because of time and experience limit, some deficiencies in the thesis, which are to be solved in the future English classes, are unavoidable. For example, the teaching method used in the experiment to foster Learner Autonomy is not systematic, and the system of evaluation is not perfect. As a result, the author cordially invites suggestions and help from experts and readers.