Fostering The Ability Of Autonomous Vocabulary Learning Of Senior High Students

In the recent twenty years, learner autonomy has been hotly discussed within the field of foreign language teaching, and the concern with English learning has shifted from the teachers' teaching to the students' learning. The New English Curriculum Standards the main goal as "develop students' learning strategies and cultivate then-ability of autonomous learning". With the teaching need and the penetration of theoretical study, vocabulary learning which is of vital importance to language learners has been drawn great attention by many domestic researchers. Although many new vocabulary teaching methods emerged one after another, vocabulary learning efficiency of EFL learners was not improved greatly and most senior high students still considered vocabulary learning to be one of the most difficult problems for them to deal with. Based on the constructivism, Humanistic psychology and self-regulated theory the experiment is carried out to foster senior high students' AVL, which is expected to help them solve the problem. The thesis first introduce the background of learner autonomy and previous researches on autonomous learning and then definitions of LA (learner autonomy) and AVL (autonomous vocabulary learning) are introduced with the necessity of fostering AVL among senior high students followed. During the experiment, three steps were carried out to foster senior high students' AVL: 1) raising students' awareness of AVL as well as vocabulary strategies use; 2) CALLA (Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach) was employed to explicitly teach vocabulary learning strategies; 3) fostering students' ability of AVL. Explicit instruction is given to the second step, which involves five phases of instruction: preparation, presentation, practice, evaluation and expansion. Quantitative and qualitative researches were conducted in the study. The result of the experiment indicates that 1) vocabulary strategies training can enhance students' AVL; 2) AVL can effectively improve students' vocabulary achievement.Apart from the findings and discussions of the study, implications for vocabulary learning and teaching are provided. Suggestions for further research are recommended at the end.