Developing Autonomous Learning Of English In Senior High Schools A Meta-cognitive Perspective

With the coming of the information age, the future of human beings is learner-centered society. Therefore, autonomous learning has become the ultimate objective of education and only in this way can we adapt ourselves to the future society. But as an English teacher for almost ten years, the author has discovered that most of the students are not efficient learners and they are very often forced to learn. It is urgent to seek a way to help such students out of trouble. The training process of autonomous learners is very complicated, and the author tries to explore learner autonomy from the perspective of meta-cognitive strategy.Meta-cognition has a very close relationship with autonomous learning. Meta-cognition contains three parts:meta-cognitive knowledge, meta-cognitive strategy and meta-cognitive monitoring. Autonomous learning refers to the process in which autonomous learners can plan, monitor and adapt their learning process. To some degree, meta-cognition is the base and an important part of autonomous learning and meta-cognitive monitoring is the core of autonomous learning. The author tries to improve students'meta-cognitive level through the training of meta-cognitive strategies so as to foster students' ability in autonomous learning.In this paper, the author adopts the five-phase training method based on CALLA to explore the relationship between students'meta-cognitive level and their level of autonomous learning based on a careful analysis of the statistics obtained from the pre-tests and post-tests. The result of the research indicates that meta-cognitive strategy can enhance the students'meta-cognition level and that students'higher meta-cognitive level can enhance their ability in autonomous learning and then promote their achievements in English.