A Study On English Learning Ecological Environment For College Students

As the living environment affects people’s living condition, the education environment affects students’ foreign language learning too. In order to improve the quality of foreign language learning, we must study the ecological problems of the foreign language learning environment. Although national key universities of 985 and 211 projects are equipped with excellent teaching resources and learning environment, however, local colleges are very marginal to these advantages. The teacher and students’ demand of a rich learning environment is high, while their satisfaction of the current environment is relatively low. Given the contradiction between the demand and reality of the environment, this study suggests that it is necessary to study the English learning environment in local colleges.This study reviewed the research literature about learning environment at home and abroad, then put forward the necessity for Education Ecology to examine learning environment, and further described the theoretical system of Education Ecology to prove its applicability. This study selected one local college in Shanxi Province as the research objective, and utilized questionnaire method to investigate the college students’ perceptions and demands on current English learning physical environment, human environment and institutional environment. The specific research questions are: First, how does students percept the three dimensions of college English learning environment? Second, what are the college students’ demands on three dimensions of English learning environment? Third, according to college students’ perception differences between the current situation and demand, to what extent the current learning environment and the demand learning environment imbalanced? What are the reasons? Fourth, how to build an ecological English learning environment applying ecological theory, according to the survey results?At first, this study designed a questionnaire which was distributed to 200 students from 5 majors, and finally 180 valid questionnaires were recovered. Statistics was coordinated and analyzed by SPSS. Then, this study interviewed 4 student respondents as well as 2 teacher respondents and conducted a qualitative analysis. Results of statistics analysis and interviews show that, at this stage of time, the English learning environment for this college’s students is not optimistic as a whole, and student satisfaction is not high, meanwhile the demand degree is high. So it turns out that the gap between the demand and the reality is so large that the overall environment is in a state of ecological imbalance. The sequencing of students’ satisfaction of the 3D environment is as follows: the human environment, the physical environment, the institutional environment. In the physical environment dimension, the largest gap between the current environment and the ideal environment, namely the most imbalanced situation lies in "learning tools". In the human environment dimension, the largest imbalance lies in "external supports". In the institutional environmental dimension, the "evaluation system" maximizes the imbalance.Based on Educational Ecology, this study advocates that, in order to make optimizations for English learning environment for college students, "resistances law and moderate principle" should be applied to the physical environment, "niche principle" could be utilized to the human environment and "flowerpot effect" should be used in the institutional environment to improve teaching and learning efficiency, accelerating the modernization process of college English learning environment construction.