Promoting Learner Autonomy In EFL Teaching In High Schools

The rapid development of science and technology has turned the 21st century into an epoch of knowledge-based economy, which is characterized by the explosion of information, thus urging for human beings' life-long learning capacity. Meanwhile the acceleration of globalization has been attaching more and more importance to English since English is the most important international language in cross-cultural communication. It is under such global social contexts that learner autonomy has become a buzzword in the field of English language teaching and learning all over the world.This paper aims to examine the readiness of the high school students to be autonomous learners in this setting. It also attempts to explore the students' actual performance in autonomous learning and reveal the problems the students encounter in becoming successful autonomous learners.Data of the study was collected from interviews and a questionnaire sent to the students in Jiangxi Nanchang No.2 Middle School. All of the subjects in the study were students in the three grades in this High School. In order to investigate the subjects' beliefs and strategies in learning autonomy, the interview was done before the questionnaire to get the initial information. Then the questionnaires were sent to the subjects to complete in the classroom. And the data was collected from the questionnaire and was analyzed by SPSS. The analysis of the data indicates that the students in high schools are not ready enough for the autonomy and they also encounter many some problems as listed below:1. The learners' attitudes towards English learning are changing. They think that the success in language learning mainly depend on themselves, not on teachers. And their major problems in language learning are vocabulary and grammar. They also have willingness to communicate with native speakers.2. The learners know their weakness and strong points in language...