An Investigation Into Senior High School Students’ Reflective English Learning

In China, our ancient educationalist Confucius had pointed out the importance of learner autonomy two thousand years ago. At abroad, Henri Holec(1981) firstly put forward Learner Autonomy(LA) in the field of applied linguistics. Since then, many researchers study learner autonomy from different angles and prove its great importance in the field of education, including language teaching and learning. However, investigation shows that students? autonomous learning level is relatively low. So how to promote learner autonomy becomes a hot research focus. Reflection, as one important kind of meta-cognitive learning strategy, is proved to be an effective means to help students to learn autonomously. However, research shows that learners know reflective learning little, let alone use reflection in language learning process. What?s more, most of the research on reflective learning comes from abroad and domestic reflective learning research is rare. So it is necessary to investigate Chinese learner?s reflective English learning.The present study will focus on an investigation into senior high school students? reflective English learning through reflective questionnaire and interview. There are three research questions in this study: what is the general situation of students? reflective learning? what is the difference between arts and science students? reflective English learning? what is the correlation between reflective English learning and learning performance? The subjects in this study are 227 second-year senior high school students in a county of Gan Zhou, with 112 arts students and 115 science students. Questionnaire of Reflective Thinking is used to measure students? reflective English learning level and mid-term English examination score is used to represent participants? English learning performance. Besides, an interview is used to get related subjective information.Results from the research show that: first, senior high school students in this study employ all four scales of reflective learning actions, including habitual action, understanding action, reflection and critical reflection. However, they employ non-reflective action more than reflective action. In the scale of non-reflective action, they tend to employ understanding action more than habitual action; in the scale of reflective action, critical reflection is employed more than reflection. Second, there is no significant difference between science students and arts students? reflective English learning on the whole and in the four scales of habitual action, understanding action, reflection and critical reflection. Third, there is significant positive correlation between students? reflective learning on the whole and their learning performance. A significant positive correlation also exists between students? reflection and their learning performance. Students? habitual action as well as their understanding action and critical reflection have no significant correlation with their learning performance.The findings are expected to help senior high school English teachers to adopt proper teaching methods to improve students? reflective English learning basing on the research result and arouse senior high school students? awareness and attention on reflective English learning.