A Study Of Learner Autonomy In Chinese Vocational College English Learning

Autonomous learning has been a topic of widespread concern since the 1880's of the 20th century, and the basic concept of autonomy as well as the theory and methodology is changing a lot in the recent three decades especially in the area of foreign language teaching. Teaching model has being changed from the "teacher-centered" into the "student-centered", requiring the learners to learn on their own to assume responsibility. Recent years, more and more domestic and foreign researchers and teachers are trying to cultivate self-learning ability of learners as a language teaching objectives in the field of language teaching. As a new type of teaching philosophy, many schools take the lead in the pilot self-study, which also appeared in a growing number of related research.As a result of years of expansion, the number of the college students in China is increased lot, and the quality of teachers as well as the teaching facilities can not match at such surge, many colleges and universities can not be optimistic about the situation of English teaching, coupled with the spoon-feeding teaching style and the low learning initiative, result in the bad effect of English learning. Recent years, a great deal of relevant researches existed in our country, calling for the applications of autonomous learning in universities and colleges. The author used to be a substitute college English teacher in a vocational college and that provided the author the good opportunity to communicate with the students there, through this experience the author realised the urgency to guide them to self-study is imperative.Based on the previous studies, referring to the actual situation of Chinese Vocational colleges, with the guide of the Humanistic Theory, the Constructivism Theory, the Metacognitive Theory, the Cognitive Theory, the Social Interaction Theory, the Social Information Processing Theory and so on, this paper aims to explore the English autonomous learning in Chinese Vocational Colleges through an experiment . In this paper, 84 students from two classes of Department for Financial Accounting, Jinan Vocational College in Jinan, Shandong Province took part in the experiment .The author took one class as the experimental class, the other as the control class, collected the data through the comparision of the testing results before and after the experiment in the two classes, and all the data was analyzed by SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) and all the results were presented in tables.According to the analysis of the experiment, the author put forward the pedagogical suggestions as follows: to raise students'awareness of Learner Autonomy; to improve teachers'teaching style and class model; to develop Learner Autonomy through Learner strategy training and finally the author suggest that we should create a favorable environment for both English autonomous learning and teaching in Chinese Vocational Colleges.