Effects Of Gender, Culture, Personality And Belief About Language Learning On Learning Styles

With the focus of teaching shifted to the individual differences of learners, learning style has attracted more and more researchers'attention in the last thirty years. Learning styles research field could be divided into as follows: inventories of learning styles, the related factors in the forming of learning styles, the link between language learning styles and strategies, learning styles and classroom teaching, and learning styles and language acquisition.The previous studies put their emphasis on the awareness of identifying students'learning styles, and gave some suggestions on matching teachers'styles with students'styles. The author put her eyes on the factors forming learning styles, that is, how students'learning styles would be formed. It is beneficial for teachers to foster students'learning styles.The study was a quantitative study. The author made use of the questionnaire method to investigate English learning styles. The instruments used in the quantitative study were made up of several questionnaires about learning styles, culture, personality, and beliefs about language learning. Questionnaires were administered to 221 second-year non-English majors from Xidian University, of which 216 are valid. The relationships between learning styles and four factors were examined through the Service Pack of Social Statistics software (SPSS 11.0). Data analysis fell into three 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 factors; then, correlation analysis was conducted to understand the relationships between the learning styles and factors; finally, multiple-regression was made to find out how factors influence learning styles.Based on the analyzed results of questionnaires and oral interviews, the main findings are as follows:1) Chinese students have a variety of learning styles. They like reflective and sequential learning most and group and impulsive learning least.2) The paired test implies that visual style is preferred in information gathering, that global style and sequential style are preferred in information organizing, that reflective style is preferred in information applying, that closure-oriented style is preferred in tasks approaching, and that individual style and teacher-dependent style are preferred in social learning styles.