A Study Of Autonomous Learning In English Listening Comprehension Of Vocational College Students

Since Henri Holec put forward the concept of learner autonomy in 1980s, it has beenwidely accepted in the field of language teaching. Under the influence of humanisticpsychology, cognitive learning theory and constructivism theory, autonomous learning hasgained momentum, and the cultivation of students’autonomous learning ability has becomethe consensus of many educators and researchers in the field of foreign language teaching.The shift of teaching mode from being teacher-centered to being learner-centered calls forlearners’responsibilities for their own learning.Listening ranks first among the four basic skills (listening, speaking, reading andwriting) of language learning. With the development of globalization, internationalcommunication becomes more and more frequent. As one of the most frequently used formsof language skills, listening plays a very important role in our daily communication as well asin the educational process. Nowadays, with the rapid development of higher education, thenumber of students greatly increased. And there generally exist the problems of large classesbut the less class hours in college English teaching of vocational colleges. The cultivation ofstudents’autonomous learning ability in listening has become the top priority. Audio, videoand the development of computer technology and the popularization of the Internet, togetherwith the research on learning strategies, all these make the implementation of autonomouslearning possible.This thesis first introduces the definition of autonomous learning and the relatedresearch at home and abroad as well as the relevant research on autonomous learning inlistening comprehension at home and abroad. Then some listening leaning strategies areintroduced. On this basis, we carried out the empirical studies on the cultivation ofautonomous listening learning ability of vocational college students.The teaching experiment in this thesis lasts one term and the subjects involved are thestudents of two classes who major in numerical control in grade 2009 of Rizhao Polytechnic.The author explored the effect of autonomous learning ability on English listeningcomprehension. The experiment combined the questionnaires, listening tests, interview as theinstruments. The author proceeds with training on metacognitive strategy to the experimental class while for the control class, the author does not have special training and supervision.Mixed methods of both quantitative and qualitative research were put into use. The software ofSPSS17.0.was also introduced for the data analysis obtained from the questionnaires andlistening tests.The results of the experiment show that under the guidance of the concept ofautonomous learning, the listening scores of experimental class students who were given aperiod of learning strategies training have raised significantly compared with that of the controlclass. Students’ autonomous learning ability strengthens. They can develop and implementlearning programs, monitor their own learning process, and evaluate their learning results.Teacher plays a better role than before who becomes the guider, the coordinator, the resourceprovider in students’learning process. Thus it can be seen that it’s necessary and effective tocultivate students’autonomous learning ability in English listening study in vocational colleges.Although the experiment has achieved the anticipated effect, there are still somelimitations. This experiment was conducted only in one vocational college, and there is aparticularly large gender gap in the major of NC, which consists of more boys and scarce girls,so the experiment failed to consider more girls. Only one learning strategy, metacognitivestrategy, was adopted in the strategy training and the time duration of the experiment was not sosatisfactory. The author hope above-mentioned problems should be solved in further studies. It’sthe best to adopt more samples from different vocational colleges to make the data morerepresentative. In addition, more learning strategies like cognitive strategies and social/affectivestrategies should be applied for training and the students may get greater progress if the trainingtime lasts longer. The author hopes this study can provide some help for students’Englishlistening learning in vocational colleges.