An Experimental Study Of Incorporating The Newspaper Reading To Cultivate The Elementary Upper Graders’ Autonomous Learning Ability

Nowadays, primary school students’ English learning is in a passive state. Students’ interest in English study is not strong and they lack of learning confidence. With the increase of grade, the polarization phenomenon of English learning is more and more obvious. English autonomous learning can help students to build confidence and improve the students’ interest in learning, leading to the improvement of students’ language ability and learning ability. Therefore, to develop the students’ ability of English autonomous learning has become an urgent task of the current primary school’s English teaching. Many high school and university teachers has studied using newspaper to cultivate the students’ English autonomous learning ability, but the similar study in the primary school is rare.This thesis tries to research on the relationship between newspaper reading and improving the students’ English autonomous learning ability from the perspective of empirical. Research questions include:1.Can students’awareness and motivation of autonomous learning be enhanced through English newspapers reading strategy? 2.Does applying newspapers have good effects on students’ autonomous learning ability? 3.Will the improvement in autonomous learning enhance the students’ whole English level?This research adopts the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, including questionnaires, student interviews and result analysis and other research methods. This paper first discusses the basic theory of autonomous learning and the research results of applying newspapers in English teaching. In order to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of applying newspapers to develop students’ autonomous learning ability, the author applied the textbook "21st Century Teens Kids" in the teaching of English for the 12 weeks’empirical study.The study results are as follows:1. By independently reading "21st Century Teens .Kids" in a planned way and having reading activities and the independent evaluation, the students’ interest in learning English has become much stronger, establishing the learning confidence and forming a certain sense of autonomous learning.2. Through English newspapers reading strategy and using certain autonomous learning strategies, students improved the ability of autonomous learning English and mastered some reading strategies.3. The pupil’s average scores in the post-test are significantly higher than the pre-test, shows that the English newspapers reading strategy does improve the students’ English level.Finally, the author summarizes the main findings of this study, the limitations and some suggestions for future research.