A Study Of Fostering The Senior High School Students’ English Autonomous Learning Ability

In the past twenty years, the research on learner autonomy has become a hot topic in foreign language teaching field. At present, the main theoretical basis of autonomous learning includes Cognitive Theory, Operational Theory, Constructivism and Humanism. The overall goal of the new curriculum standard is people-oriented, and comprehensively improves the students’ability to use the language; however, the traditional English teaching model is teacher-centered one, which obviously cannot meet the needs of the students. New curriculum standard emphasizes autonomy, cooperation and inquiry, thus it is particularly important and necessary to develop senior high school students’English autonomous learning ability. Research on autonomous learning in foreign countries began at the beginning of the 1960s, while the domestic research is late for more than twenty years. The domestic research on autonomous learning mostly introduce the research achievements of foreign countries, or focuses on the research of theories and methods, while the combination of theory and practice is not much. In this paper, the author applied the autonomous learning strategy into practice of senior high school English teaching, which has a certain guiding significance for senior high school English teaching in the aspect of practice.The purpose of this research is to use the methods and strategies to cultivate the students’autonomous learning ability in English, thus to improve their English learning interest and achievement. Then the author adopted two methods to carry out the research:questionnaire and test. The questionnaire survey before the test shows that the students in both classes share generally low level of autonomous learning ability; and in the questionnaire survey after the test indicates that the autonomous learning ability in the experimental class is higher than the one in the controlled class. In order to improve the students’autonomous learning ability, the author chose two classes to do the experiment. One is chosen to be the experimental class, and the other is chosen to be the controlled class. By using the pre-test and post-test methods, the experiment revealed that autonomous learning could improve students’English learning interest and English language achievement. Through the analysis of the experimental results, we can come to the conclusion that autonomous learning cannot just ensure the class success but also lay the foundation for the development of students. And besides, it can also do some good to the teachers for they have learned much from their students. However, in the whole process of the experiment, what the teacher feels most satisfied is that the students’sincere participation. The obtained results of this experiment need to be tested and verified in the further researches in the future.