| The investigation of learning styles, listening comprehension strategies and the correlation between them is of great importance to facilitate the teaching of listening for junior college students. On one hand, with the knowledge of learning styles and listening comprehension strategies acquired, learners are able to select and apply proper listening comprehension strategies according to their own learning styles when they listen to the listening materials, which can facilitate their listening comprehension and they will be more proficient in English learning in the future. On the other hand, teachers can adopt different teaching methods according to learners'various learning styles in listening comprehension. In addition, they can use different teaching strategies to help learners in listening.There are one hundred subjects coming from three intact grade-one English major classes in Shuozhou Normal School. Two questionnaires and a piece of text were used in the present study. One of the questionnaires is Perceptual Learning Style Preference Survey (PLSPS), and it includes thirty items to let students identify their own preferred learning styles including visual and auditory, tactile and kinesthetic, group and individual styles. The other questionnaire is Listening Strategy Inventory, and it was based on O'Malley and Chamot's theory, Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning and the author's own teaching experience. The questionnaire consists of forty items to investigate the state of the application of listening comprehension strategies. The listening material was taken from the subject's textbooks. With respect to the data analysis, the first part is the frequency of learning styles to describe the subjects'preferred learning styles. The second part is the frequency of listening comprehension strategies to find out the learners'frequently used listening strategies. The last part is the correlation between listening comprehension strategies and learning styles. The important findings are as follows:1. Based on the analysis of the data, we know that most of the subjects use more than one leaning style to finish their listening tasks, which means that most of them have multiple-style preferences. Besides, we can find that the most preferred learning styles are auditory and tactile learning styles, the least preferred learning style is group style.2. Most of the subjects use listening comprehension strategies sometimes, and none always or almost always uses listening strategies. However, a few students usually use listening comprehension strategies and few never use listening strategies. Of the three categories of listening strategies, cognitive strategy is the most preferred listening comprehension strategies, metacognitive strategy and social/affective strategy are the second and the least.3. From the analysis, we find that planning and evaluation are frequently used strategies among the four categories of metacognitive strategies. They have little language awareness and can not monitor their listening activities consciously. Among the cognitive strategies, note-taking, transfer, translation, elaboration, gist-listening, inferencing and predicting strategies are frequently used.4. The data shows that the subjects'learning styles have relationship with some of the listening comprehension strategies, which means that the use of listening strategies is linked to their learning styles. On the other hand, learning styles influence the choice of the subjects'listening comprehension strategies. Students who have different learning styles prefer different listening strategies. Visual learners usually prefer to adopt planning and resource strategies; they usually set the goals and use available resources to improve their listening comprehension. Auditory learners prefer predicting by means of the pictures or titles. Kinesthetic style learners like using note-taking, such as writing down key words to improve their memory. In addition, they would try to develop interest in English learning. Tactile learners prefer to monitor the comprehension in their listening activities and they would like to render ideas from one language to their mother tongue. Besides, they also like note-taking and developing interest. Group learners also have language awareness and want to monitor their comprehension, and they usually repeat a chunk of language (a word or a phrase) orally or mentally. |
