Helping Students Cultivate and Develop Autonomous Learning

Helping Students Cultivate and Develop Autonomous Learning

Shanghai No.4 Middle School  Zhang Zhimei

   Everyone knows school education is very important and useful. Yet no one can learn everything from school. A teacher, no matter how much he knows, cannot teach his students everything they want to know. The teacher’s job is to show his students how to learn and how to think. So much more is to be learned outside by students themselves.

    English is the most widely used language in the world. Nowadays, a large number of people learn English in China. English has become one of the most important subjects that the students must take at school. I’m now teaching in a junior middle school. My junior 3 students take six English lessons each week. I observed my students seldom spoke English out of class. They had their lessons passively, not actively. When they were asked questions, they seldom raised hands and just kept silent even if they knew the answers. Though my students have learned English since they were Grade 3 students in the primary school, they cannot speak English very fluently. When they were asked to write a short passage of at least 70 words, they made a lot of mistakes in grammar or on spelling. Sometimes they made the same mistakes again and again. So it’s quite difficult for students to learn English well and it’s also quite difficult for us teachers to teach English. Confucius believed that it was important for students to learn of their own initiatives as learning should be a process of independent exploring and understanding but in reality greater importance has been attached to the teacher’s role as the only source of knowledge, the instructor, the authority and the judge. Students in China are generally very teacher-dependent and lack the initiative to implement learning on their own. To many of them the classroom is the only place where they learn English.

    Autonomy in language learning has been a heated topic of research within the field of applied linguistics in Great Britain and America for the last two decades. It’s quite necessarily feasible and also challenging to promote autonomous learning in school. Autonomous learning is relatively new concept to EFL teachers and learning in China. But how can it be developed in an input-poor environment? What should we English teachers do to help our students to cultivate autonomous learning both in and after school? How can we teachers help students to make full use of the information from the Internet? I think it’s a serious and important problem for us English teachers.

One of the definitions of autonomy in Collins Cobuild English Dictionary reads “ The ability to make your own decisions about what to do rather than being influenced by someone else or told what to do.”

Similarly, Holec (1981), one of the earliest advocates of autonomy in language teaching has defined it as the “ability to take care of one’s own learning”.

Young (1986) suggestions, “The fundamental idea in autonomy is that of authoring one’s own world without being subject to the will of others.”

  Dickinson (1995) considers autonomy as “both an attitude towards learning and a capacity for independent learning”. He elaborates the attitude as responsibility the learner is prepared to take for decision-making in the learning process. That is, “they can identify, formulate and change goals to suit their own learning needs and interests and are able to use learning strategies and monitor their own learning”.

[1] [2] [3] [4]  下一页