An Investigation Of The Relationships Among Senior High School Students' Perception Of English Classroom Environment,Learner Autonomy,and Academic Achievement

Classroom environment usually refers to the students' or sometimes the teachers' shared perception of the environment(Fraser,1986).It is considered to be one of the most important factors influencing students' cognitive and affective outcomes.The past decades have witnessed much research on classroom environment both at home and abroad,most of which focused on the correlation between students' perception of classroom environment and their academic achievement.Recently,a small number of scholars have noticed the relationship between students' classroom environment perception and their autonomous learning ability.However,at present,little empirical research has been conducted to analyze the relationships among the three of them.To fill this gap,this study tries to investigate the senior high school students' perception of their English classroom environment,aiming to explore the relationships among senior high school students' perception of English classroom environment,learner autonomy,and academic achievement.This study adopts quantitative research method to investigate 235 Senior Two students' perception of English classroom environment and their English autonomous learning ability with the two inventories,Middle School English Classroom Environment Inventory(Liu Liyan & Liu Yongbing,2010)and Middle School Students' English Autonomous Learning Ability Questionnaire(Cheng Yaxing,2016),focusing on the following research questions: 1)What is the senior high school students' perception of their English classroom environment? 2)What is the relationship between senior high school students' perception of English classroom environment and their academic achievement? 3)What is the relationship between senior high school students' perception of English classroom environment and learner autonomy? 4)Could learner autonomy mediate the correlation between students' classroom environment perception and academic achievement?According to the results of quantitative data analysis,the major findings could be summarized as follows: 1)Senior high school students are generally satisfied with their English classroom environment;2)Students' perception of English classroom environment is positively related with their academic achievement,and theirperception on “Task Orientation” and “Cooperation” can predict their academic achievement;3)Students' perception of English classroom environment is also positively correlated with learner autonomy,and their perception on “Task Orientation” and “Teacher Support” can predict learner autonomy;4)The correlation between students' classroom environment perception and academic achievement could be significantly mediated by learner autonomy,and the effect value is 0.4877.Based on the above findings,some suggestions are proposed for senior English teaching: Firstly,English teachers should focus on task-based teaching and improve students' awareness of “task”.Secondly,teachers should provide more support and help for students.For example,teachers need to love and respect students and attach importance to their questions.Thirdly,teachers should make great efforts to create a cooperative classroom environment for students and guide them to cooperate with each other.