A Study Of English Learning Styles Of Non-English Majors In Higher Vocational-technical Colleges

For quite a long time in China, schools are heavily biased towards uniformity over diversity and all instructed in the same way in the classroom, yet the way they process and learn new information varies from person to person. In theological education, too much attention has been paid to the contents of the teaching and the teachers. As a result, the limited acknowledgement of individual learning differences encourages a continual search for the only"best"way for students to learn, teachers to teach, and the curriculum to be studied. The students who do not learn through whatever the"best"approach happens to be are too often labeled"disabled"because their best way of learning does not respond to the particular method. And there is ample proof to achieve a broad educational outcome, in large part because learners do not fit a single mold and the learners'preferences, especially learning styles, have been neglected.In the field of language teaching research in modern society, learning styles have received considerable attention from researchers as the focus on"how to teach"has shifted to"how to learn". Learning styles refer to the learner's special cognitive, emotional, and physical action which indicate the personal consistent and lasting acting styles formed in the interaction between the learner's conscious and learning environment. The research of learning styles is an important subject in studying learner's individual differences and sheds light on language teaching. Evidence shows that the use of learning styles is closely associated with foreign or second language learning, though different results concerning the concrete relationship between them occur. Therefore, the present study sought to investigate English learning styles used by non-English majors from a higher vocational-technical college and try to give a description of the distribution of learning styles by using a sample of 75 non-English majors from Liaoning Institute of Science and Technology. The instruments of Reid's Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire ( PLSPQ,1984) , classroom observation and interviews are used to reveal the usage condition of learning styles by college students and the conflicts between learning and teaching.The general results of the study indicate that students of a higher vocational-technical college employed a variety of learning styles to study English and there are style differences between high achievers and low achievers. From classroom observation and interviews, we find that the conflict between learning styles and teaching styles do exist in higher vocational-technical college EFL classroom. What's more, after five months'style training and altering of teaching styles, students'academic outcome is improved. This seems to suggest that different kinds of learning styles may contribute to different aspects of L2 learning and learners'English proficiency can be enhanced if English educators know more about students'learning styles and teachers'teaching styles.The results reveal the use condition of learning styles of non-English majors from a higher vocational-technical college and suggest that this phenomenon should be a real concern of English teachers and that the training in learning styles and teaching style should be incorporated into English teaching program and become a new task for English teachers. They should help students raise awareness of learning styles, recognize those styles used by them, and the most important, with the new roles of English teachers, they should learn to train their students to use diverse learning styles and they should change teaching styles to meet the students'need, which in turn let the students benefit a lot by becoming successful language learners.This paper starts with a general revision of study of EFL learning styles at home and abroad and an introduction to the definitions and classifications of learning styles and analyzed the status quo of language teaching and learning in higher vocational-technical colleges. To be more specific, this paper is composed of six chapters. Chapter one briefly introduces the necessity and significance of research on learning styles. It emphasizes the need to some further study. The layout of the whole paper is also introduced in this chapter. Chapter two introduces the study of learning styles at home and abroad. It describes the situation of the research and the feature of this thesis. Chapter three gives a survey of learning styles researches and relevant theory. It describes the definitions of different researchers on learning styles and different classification systems. Chapter four presents the investigation of language learning styles of non-English majors in a higher vocational-technical college. Chapter four shows the results of the study, analyses the results and then make some suggestions for students and teachers in English learning and teaching. And chapter five summarizes the paper and some conclusions are drawn in this chapter.