Relationship Between Learning Styles And English Achievements: A Study Of Chinese College Students' English Learning

With the focus of teaching shifted to the individual differences of the learners, learning style has attracted more and more researchers' attention in the last thirty years. In the Western countries, a number of studies have been carried out on the relations of learning styles to the process of foreign language learning. In China researchers have used the relevant theories and findings in west for their studies, which were of great help for promoting English learning and teaching in China. However, they were mainly theoretical illustrations of the important role learning styles play in English learning and few empirical studies have been conducted in Chinese setting. Therefore, the present author studied English learning styles of Chinese college students and the focus was placed on the learning style preferences of non-English majors in China, seeking the possible relationships between English learning styles and English achievements.The study included quantitative study and qualitative study. The author combined the methods of questionnaire and oral interview to investigate English learning styles. The instruments used in the quantitative study were a questionnaire and an English test. A learning styles questionnaire was administered to 224 second-year non-English majors from Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an Jiantong University and Xi'an Shiyou University. The final English examination scores of the students were used to indicate their English achievements. The relationships between learning styles and English achievements were examined through the Service Pack of Social Statistics software (SPSS 11.0). Date analysis fell into four steps: first, in order to understand the general distributive tendency of the data involved, descriptive analyses were made of the data concerning learning styles and English achievements; then an independent-sample T-test was made to find out the gender variation in learning styles; thirdly, correlation analysis was conducted to understand the relationships between the learning styles and English achievements; finally, multiple-regression was made to find out how learning styles contribute to English achievements. A student interview guide was used as the instrument in the qualitative study. The participants in the oral interview were four students from the 224 who participated in the quantitative study. They were interviewed in small group of two and the talks were recorded in the tape for analysis.Based on the analyzed results of questionnaire and oral interview, the main findings were as follows:1. It has been found that Chinese college students preferred individual and analytic learning most and auditory learning least.2. Male students preferred individual and hand-on learning than their female counterparts. Compared with male students, female students preferred auditory and sequential learning.3. The following results came from the correlation analysis and multiple regression: (1) Analytic style was significantly and positively correlated with scores in listening, structure, cloze, reading, and writing respectively as well as with total score, and it could be used to predict significantly the variance of those scores. (2) Group-oriented style was significantly and negatively correlated with scores in cloze and writing respectively as well as with total score, and it could be used to predict the variance of those scores. (3) Global style was significantly and positively correlated with score in reading and it was a positive predictor of the score. (4) Sequential and closure-oriented styles were significantly and positively correlated with total score, but they failed to enter the multiple regression.On the basis of the findings, recommendations for teachers of English are given: teachers should up-grade their knowledge about learning styles; teachers should help students to identify their learning styles and arouse students' awareness of learning styles; teachers should adjust to the students' learning style preferences and foster more flexibility of students' learning sty...