A Study On Reflective Learning Of English By Senior High School Students

Reflective learning can not only promote learners’ self-monitoring and self-constructive ability and help learners learn from their experience and self-knowledge,but also facilitate learners’ autonomy.Nevertheless,little attention has been paid to learners’ reflective learning as the research focus has been centered on teachers’ reflective teaching.Therefore,reflective learning remains a new research topic.Additionally,there is a scarcity of studies focusing on senior high school students whose reflective learning ability should be highly valued,particularly those senior high school students in the Southeast of China.Furthermore,no relevant studies have been found to compare reflective learning of students with different English proficiency.This study aims to investigate the overall situation of reflective learning of English by senior high school students,to find out whether there are any differences in reflective learning of English between high-proficiency and low-proficiency learners,and to probe into possible contributing factors.Research participants involved in the present study were from a senior high school in S city,Jiangsu province.Both quantitative data and qualitative data were collected,namely,182 questionnaires were administrated and 16 students were interviewed for analysis.The major findings were briefly summarized below.Firstly,the overall situation of reflective learning of English by senior high school students was satisfactory.Overall,the students’ reflective learning of English was above the medium level.To be specific,students were better at self-knowledge and self-reflection on the learning process.In contrast,their relating experience to knowledge and self-reflection of English learning remained to be improved.Secondly,there were indeed significant differences in overall reflective learning between high-proficiency and low-proficiency learners.The level of reflective learning of high-proficiency learners was significantly higher than those low-proficiency learners.Regarding four dimensions,namely,knowledge of oneself,relating experience to knowledge,self-reflection on the learning process and self-regulation of learning all demonstrated significant differences between two groups of students.The most significant difference lay in the knowledge of oneself and the least significant difference was observed in the self-reflection on the learning process.Thirdly,it was found that there were a series of contributing factors to reflective learning of English by senior high school students.Factors concerning both teachers and students were concluded from the interviews.Factors with regard to students mainly involved their cognition about reflective learning,reflective perseverance and learning initiative,while factors related to teachers could be summarized as teachers’ requirements,supervision and their reflective activities.