A Study Of Senior High School English Teachers’ Perception Of Autonomous Learning

The idea of autonomous learning has attracted much attention from language teachers and education at researchers since it was recommended to China. The New English Curriculum Standards(2011) highlights that the growth of students’ autonomous learning capacity should be viewed as an objective of English teaching, which means an important transformation for senior high school English teachers in terms of course materials, teaching method and theories of language learning and teaching. How teachers understand autonomous learning’s concept, to some extent, affects their classroom practice. But the study on teachers’ perception of autonomous learning is far from enough both at home and abroad. The present research intends to describe and examine the teachers’ perception of autonomous learning in response to the new situation.Quantitative and qualitative data are gained through questionnaire and interviews for the study. A total of 120 senior high school English teachers are involved in the study. The results of the study show that teachers were confused with what they should emphasize in their English teaching to cultivate students’ autonomous learning, although they have some knowledge about autonomous learning. The study adopts the factor analysis method to show that correlations were confirmed weak between these teachers’ perception and some factors. Three of the nine factors affecting teachers’ perception were figured as important predictive variables to affect their autonomous learning.The quantitative and qualitative analysis also reveals that the teachers have great preference to tradition and deficient trust in their students’ competence to autonomous learning. In general, it appears to be more awareness of responsibility and role confirmed in these teachers but little implementation and integration of their practice.It is hoped that this study may offer some new evidence concerning senior high school English teachers’ perception about English teaching and learning. Due to the findings of this research, the researcher insists that more attention should be paid to the teachers’ perception than ever when the reform is being conducted nationwide.