College Students' English Autonomous Learning And Meta-cognitive Strategies

With the focus of second language acquisition research changing from teachers' teaching to students' learning,students play an increasingly important role in autonomous learning and the research focus has also changed from teachers to students.Thus students'autonomous learning ability is particularly important.Besides,autonomous learning ability is also considered as one of the aims in the College English Curriculum Requirements.Thus,in order to improve autonomous learning ability of college students,we should choose the learning strategies that can instruct students to learn independently.Some experts point out that successful second language learners have excellent macro-control capabilities,can effectively manage their entire language learning process.They are proactive in learning,will reflect on the learning process,and can evaluate and adjust the use of learning strategies.They can find problems and make up for them in time.Meta-cognitive strategies control all the cognitive processes involved in our learning process.The use of meta-cognitive strategies plays an important role in improving the ability of independent learning.Therefore this thesis intends to study the status of meta-cognitive strategies using and autonomous learning ability of non-English majors in one university in Beijing so as to get the correlation between them as well as their language competence.The research findings will provide reference for students to improve their autonomous learning ability and language competence.This thesis will take 150 non-English undergraduates from one university in Beijing as the participants.It will use the quantitative method of questionnaire and qualitative method of interview to research the following points.First of all,it will research the extent of their autonomous learning ability and the use of meta-cognitive strategies.Next,it will explore the differences between CET-4 high-achieving and low-achieving students in the use of meta-cognitive strategies and their autonomous learning ability.Finally,it will research the correlations of autonomous learning ability,meta-cognitive strategies as well as language competence.All the data collected will be analyzed with SPSS 17.0.The findings of the research show that students' use of meta-cognitive strategies and the autonomous learning ability were both in a middle level in general.Independent sample T test indicates that there is a significant difference between CET-4 high-achieving and low-achieving students in the use of meta-cognitive strategies and their autonomous learning ability.Correlation analysis indicates that meta-cognitive strategies are positively correlated with autonomous learning ability and their language competence.According to these findings,we can conclude that meta-cognitive strategies can improve students' autonomous learning ability as well as their language competence.It also gives some implications for college English teaching models.This thesis is divided into five parts.The first part mainly introduce the research background,research questions,research objectives,research significance and thesis organization.The second part is the literature review in which the author elaborates the previous research of autonomous learning and meta-cognitive strategies.The third part is the methodology which introduces the research participants,instruments,data collection and data analysis.The fourth part is the results and discussion.The fifth part is the conclusion which concludes the major findings,points out the limitations and implications of the thesis and also the suggestions for the future research.