Promoting Learner Autonomy In English Reading By The Meta-cognitive Strategy Training In Secondary Vocational School

Learning autonomy has been a buzzword in foreign Language teaching in the recent twenty years. Especially in western context, the concern with teaching and learning has shifted from the teachers' teaching to the students' learning. By 1981 Holec (1981:3) had defined autonomy as "the ability to take charge of one's own learning". Dickinson, (1987:11) accepts the definition of autonomy as a "situation in which the learner is totally responsible for all of decisions concerned with his learning and the implementation of those decisions". Learner autonomy includes a wide range of content. For the benefit of research, the author develops learner autonomy through meta-cognitive strategy training as their own research purpose in reading class. A model of meta-cognitive strategy training is proposed with the purpose of cultivating learner autonomy in English reading class.In this study, the author chose two natural classes ( an experimental class, a control class) of the second graders in Baotou Secondary Vocational School. The study was designed a questionnaire and three tests. All the students were given a questionnaire in order to investigate their performance in learner autonomy; the pre-test,mid-test,post-test were conducted at the beginning and the end of the experiment respectively in order to observe if there were any significant differences between the experimental group and the control group. All the data collected from the experiment are analyzed by SPSS V130.0 to find out the effectiveness of the training program. We find in this study that the training with the framework of meta-cognitive strategies to foster learner autonomy in reading classroom in China is helpful to foster and enhance learners' reading proficiency, meta-cognitive awareness and learner autonomy in the perspective of second language (L2) reading. Furthermore, we find that the pre-training for the teachers influence the effectiveness of training of learner autonomy to some extentThis dissertation consists of six chapters.Chapter One offers a brief introduction to the significance of this study, basic concept and structure of this essay.Chapter Two is the literature review: literature review of the theoretical background and relative empirical studies. It consists of the concepts of meta-cognitive strategies, English reading and learner autonomy, and the theoretical relationship among them. Then, it is the literature review of relative empirical studies on meta-cognition and readers, training of meta-cognitive strategies and readers and trainings for fostering learner autonomy.Chapter three is about the methodology, which is the heart of the whole research. It includes the hypothesis, the subjects, the instruments, the procedures and data collection.Chapter four goes to the discussion and analysis of the results.Chapter five provides pedagogical implications of learner autonomy training in classroom in the Chinese context in perspective of reading.Chapter six consists of the conclusion and limitation of this study.