A Case Study on the Effectiveness of Learner Autonomy in British and American Literature Study

Gang XU

Abstract


It is generally acknowledged that learners should play an active role for themselves and take more responsibilities in studying a foreign language in order to improve learning efficiency. However, learner autonomy has not been paid much attention to in the present British and American literature teaching in Chinese universities. This situation has prevented British and American Literature teaching from playing its important role of cultivating students’ independent and creative thinking ability. Therefore, the author conducted an experiment in the classes of British and American literature in Foreign Language School of Inner Mongolian university for Nationalities, aiming at exploring the feasibility and effectiveness of cultivating learner autonomy in this course. In the research, a pretest (test before the experiment) and a post test (test after the experiment) were used as a comparision to collect data, and SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) were used to analyze the results after the experiment. The analysis of the results and data shows that cultivating learner autonomy in British and American literature teaching can stimulate the students’ interest in this course and accordingly improve their strategies of learning this course. Besides, it can also improve their comprehensive ability of English study.


Keywords


British and American literature teaching; Cultivating learner autonomy; Strategy of learning; comprehensive ability

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/n

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