An Action Research On Fostering Senior High School Students' English Autonomous Learning Ability Through Teachers' Mediation

With the deepening of English education reform in China's Senior High School,autonomous learning mode has been continually promoted,and the requirement for improving the ability of students' autonomous learning has become increasingly prominent.To improve the learning methods and develop the ability of autonomous learning are the most important goals of education in New Curriculum Standards for Senior High School.Being a guide for students to learn,the teachers play an important role in the process of constructing students' independent knowledge system.According to the mediation theory,teachers function as mediators in teaching activities by intervening students' learning behavior.In recent years,some scholars have focused on the relationship between teachers' mediation and the development of students' autonomous learning ability.However,the research subjects mainly focus on college students and very little teacher action research on senior high school students.Therefore,whether or not teachers' mediation can improve students' autonomous learning ability by action research has become an urgent problem to be solved in senior English teaching.In the present study,the above problem has been investigated by action research.The action research is that teachers find problems in their own teaching and employ behavior intervention to solve the problems,which is different from quantitative or qualitative study and suitable for small scale research.The conclusion of action research can be directly applied to the improvement of teaching practice.Thus,the study conducts twelve-week action research in forty-two high first-grade students from a certain high school,Yancheng city,Jiangsu Province.Before and after action research,students' English autonomous learning ability and the implementation of teachers' mediation have been investigated by questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS19.0 software.Some qualitative data are collected by interview or from students' learning log.By comparing practice evaluation of students for teachers' mediation,dimensions of students' learning psychology,ability and behavior before and after action research,the following conclusions have been arrived:1.Senior high school students currently have low levels of English autonomous learning ability,especially of learning awareness,schedule settings,implementation and monitoring,evaluation and reflection and learning behavior.2.The effect of teachers' mediation has not lived up to students' expectation although the students currently have high expectations on it.3.In the present action research based on teachers' mediation,researchers find that students' autonomous learning psychology hasn't significantly changed,but autonomous learning ability and behavior are dramatically enhanced.As expected,teachers' mediation can improve students' English autonomous learning ability effectively.Although the present research has achieved the expected results,there are still some deficiencies,including small sample size and short study period.Further study not only needs to make up for the previous deficiencies,but also consider the effects of gender,age,parental education level.The present action research finds that the students' English autonomous learning ability can be improved by teachers' mediation,which provides multi-level data source for development and enrichment of mediation theory and autonomous learning theory.In the meanwhile,research results afford an effective approach to develop students' autonomous learning ability,and some references for senior high school English education reform.