A Study On Rural Senior High School Students' Autonomous English Learning Beliefs And Behaviors

Since 1980 s,autonomous learning has become the focus of foreign language teaching.It was well accepted that cultivating learners' autonomy should be considered as the final educational goal to promote education progress.Although many relevant researches have been conducted on autonomous learning from different perspectives,there are not many studies that have shed light on rural high school students from their perspectives.Besides,the implement of autonomous learning in rural high schools is far from expectation.It is believed that students' beliefs about autonomous learning greatly affect the fostering of their ability of autonomy.Consequently,it is necessary to gauge the readiness of rural high school students for the changes in the beliefs and behaviors that autonomous learning implies.The subjects of the study were 276 senior high school students in Grade One from Wuan No.1 Middle School.A questionnaire adapted from the version of Chan et al.(2002)and a semi-structured interview based on the questionnaire were conducted to explore the three following dimensions: 1)students' perceptions of their own and their English teachers' responsibilities in autonomous English learning;2)students' views of their abilities to act autonomously in learning English;3)their actual engagement in autonomous English learning inside and outside classroom.In detail,for each dimension,the study explored the overall situation of students' autonomous learning beliefs and behaviors,the difference of their autonomous learning beliefs and behaviors between high achievers and low achievers and between male students and female students.The statistical analysis of quantitative data was carried out by using SPSS 13.0,including descriptive analysis,independent samples t-test analysis.The major findings were as follows: 1)the students in this study generally had positive perceptions of the responsibilities concerning autonomous English learning and perceived most aspects of learning as their own or shard responsibilities with their teachers.However,they still expected their teachers to play an authority role in their learning to some degree;2)the students perceived themselves able to learn autonomously if given chance to do so.But the results demonstrated that they felt uncertain about their decisions,indicating a certain lack of confidence and readiness for autonomous learning.The results of independent samplest-test reflect that statistically significant differences existed between high and low achievers but there was no statistically significant difference between males and females in terms of their perceptions of abilities;3)with respect to the actual practices of autonomous English activities,students were often engaged in autonomous activities for examination and entertainment but seldom for practical language use.In addition,according to the results of independent samples t-test,there existed statistically significant differences between high achievers and low achievers and between males and females in their autonomous practices.Based on the above findings,some implications to promote rural senior high school student's autonomous English learning have been offered.First,stimulate students' learning motivation,especially intrinsic motivation.Second,improve students' confidence in autonomous English learning.Third,emphasize the importance of language communicative competence to cultivate the overall development of autonomous English learning.Last but not least,cultivate students' metacognitive strategies,especially the planning strategies.