autonomy in learning english as a foreign language: a case study of chinese college students

This study is an endeavour to investigate how chinese students learn a foreign language out-of-class. a secondary aim is to learn about the different approaches that students use when they study by themselves. to meet the research objective, five participants were chosen to take part in a semi-structured interview. to study the participants’ attitudes toward autonomy in learning, the research was conducted using a list of ten questions which the participants were asked to answer. since learning autonomy depends upon the interrelation of the teacher and the learner, this study explored the subject from the learners’ perspective and examined the different strategies that students use out-of-class. despite recent research on learning autonomy, there is a lack of research addressing the field of adult chinese students learning foreign languages out-of-class. in order to fill in this gap in the relevant literature on language learning, this research examined various dimensions of the problem: how chinese learners start autonomous learning by learning self-management and cognitive processes. this study further discussed language learning strategies which had been proven useful in autonomous learning and what made these strategies essential tools for autonomous language learning.