A Study On Cultivating High School Students’English Autonomous Learning Ability

Learner autonomy has become a much-discussed topic and a new trend in language learning and teaching in China in recent years. National Curriculum for Senior High School English Language Teaching, issued by the Ministry of Education in2003, urges that all the students should change their ways of learning with the help of the teachers. English teachers must spare no efforts to improve their methodology of teaching and lay stress on the students’learning in order to promote them to learn English autonomously instead of learning passively. Students should be encouraged to take more responsibility for their own learning and change their beliefs and attitudes about language learning and their role as a learner so that they can undertake autonomous learning effectively. From the aspect of how to cultivate high school students’English autonomous learning ability, the author makes an investigation on factors affecting learner autonomy of high school students.This thesis introduces the definition, connotation, theoretical basis, characteristics and strategies of learner autonomy and summarizes the internal and external factors playing roles in cultivating students’autonomous learning ability. Through the means of questionnaire, English test paper and interview, this thesis analyzes the factors affecting learner autonomy, and the results from my tentative research have invariably come to conclude, though in a rather limited way, motivation, learning goals, learning methods and learning strategies are the key factors that have proved to affect learner autonomy to quite a considerable extent; psychological and affective factors are also very important factors; learning process control and learning outcome evaluation are also deemed the basic techniques in autonomous learning. Suggestions for cultivating high schools students’learner autonomy are provided according to those factors.