A Correlational Study Of College Students' English Learning Styles, Learning Strategies And Reading Proficiency

Reading is one of the four essential language skills ----- listening, speaking, reading and writing. For college students, reading is a key to success in their higher education. Reading can build one's vocabulary and make a person write better. Reading provides the opportunity to learn new knowledge and to acquire new skills.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. Learning styles are the habitual ways which individuals prefer in learning. In addition, with the rapid development of cognitive psychology, the research on learner strategy has been a good harvest. Domestic and foreign scholars have introduced in detail the research on a variety of learning strategies.The present study aims at investigating in Chinese cultural contexts what is the relationship between learning styles and learning strategies and how they influence the English achievement, specially the reading proficiency among the college non-English major students. Meanwhile, the differences of learning styles and strategies used by the high-score and low-score group are analyzed.Firstly, the relevant theories about English learning styles, learning strategies, and reading achievement are outlined and findings of the previous and relevant researches are summarized. Based on all these, a tentative theoretical framework and hypotheses are proposed. Secondly, the author uses the method of questionnaire to investigate English learning styles. A learning styles questionnaire is administered to 185 third-year undergraduates from Northwest Normal University. The CET-4 scores of the students are used to indicate their L2 reading achievements. The relationships between learning styles and reading proficiency are examined through the Service Pack of Social Statistics software (SPSS 11.5). Also, the author uses Think-aloud Protocol to further investigate the reading preferences used by Chinese ESL undergraduates while reading articles in English. This study aims to find out whether its results confirm or contradict that of the previous study in connection with the similarities and differences of style and strategy preferences of high-score and low-score ESL readers. Thirdly, data is collected and analyzed statistically. Then the results are discussed and several conclusions are set out, which highlight some implications for educational guidance of EFL teachers. Finally, suggestions for future work in this field are portrayed.