A Factorial Study On Senior High School Students' Competence Of Autonomous Learning Of English

Autonomous learning has become a hot issue in educational field over the past twenty years. It has been advocated from pedagogical point of view that autonomous learning is a means of effective learning and a desirable goal of teaching as well. There have already existed various studies concerning autonomous learning; however, these studies lack conformity. Theories are not systematic and confirmable because all the researches come from the researchers' standpoints. This study is a research to investigate autonomous learning of English according to students' own perspective.Based on implicit theory, this thesis sets out to explore the factors on senior high school students'competence of autonomous learning of English, just in hope that the results will lead teachers to have a better understanding of students'beliefs.This investigation was partitioned into 2 stages. First of all, an open questionnaire was adopted to identify the variables, which brought out 43 items mentioned most frequently by 73 students. Then a formal questionnaire was designed and distributed to another group of 66 students from Fuzhou Senior High School. All the elicited data were processed with the major technique of Factor Analysis. The results indicated that 8 main factors were considered to have positive effects on English autonomous learning by general students, including learning attitudes, the expectation towards the teachers, learning strategies, learning motivation, learning style, self-confidence, self-monitoring, and learning interest. Among them, learning attitude was reported to be the best predictor of English autonomous learning. These findings will be of significance in designing effective instructional programs for the teachers.