| Autonomy has been a widely concerned topic since Henri Holec put forward this concept in the 1980s in the light of cognitive theory, constructivism theory and humanistic psychology. Teachers have devoted themselves to cultivating students’ autonomous learning ability in the field of foreign language teaching. There is a tendency that teaching mode is inclined to transform from teacher-centered into learner-centered, enhancing students autonomous learning awareness and ability. However, the previous researches are generally focused on English autonomous learning as a whole and the research subjects are mainly undergraduates, studying on English autonomous learning of high middle school students are relatively inadequate, and researching about autonomous listening learning is rare. As English listening proficiency is more and more essential to Chinese middle school students, so it is of necessity and significance for us to study how to improve high middle school students’ autonomous listening learning.In view of the current situation of middle school English teaching and the requirements of the new English curriculum reform, this thesis intends to do a teaching experiment aiming to integrate classroom English teaching and extracurricular autonomous listening learning to explore more effective ways to enhance students’ autonomous listening learning ability.The teaching experiment is conducted in Yantai Foreign Language Pilot School, which lasted for one term in 2014. The 100 research subjects are from two classes of Grade Eight. There are 50 students in each class and they are randomly designated as experimental class and control class. In the experimental class, the extracurricular autonomous listening learning is emphasized and complemented apart from the regular classroom teaching, while in the control class the traditional listening teaching mode is still used. Both pre-test and post-test on listening comprehension are carried out in these two classes. The result of pre-test shows that the English listening proficiency level of both classes is close and similar. The instruments listening test, questionnaire and interview are adopted in the experiment to collect related data and analyze the data. This study is designed to answer three questions:1) How does extracurricular autonomous listening learning help improve middle school students’ English listening comprehension proficiency? 2) What is the relationship between autonomous English listening learning and students’listening scores? 3) What teaching strategies should be offered in English listening teaching in the future?The major findings of the study are as follows:1) although students know they should be responsible for their listening learning, and most of the middle school students don’t have autonomous learning habits, they spend a little time on listening practice in their spare time.2) the relationship between autonomous listening ability and listening proficiency were significantly positively correlated.3) learners’fail to effectively use some listening strategies, therefore, teachers should strengthen to teach meta-cognition strategies and other strategies.Based on the above results, a few suggestions for promoting learners’ autonomous listening learning are put forward:1) to stimulate both teachers’ and students’autonomous learning awareness; 2) to enhance listening strategy training; 3) to provide diversity of listening practice after class. |
