A Study Of Senior High School Students' Language Learning Styles

For quite a long time in China, schools are heavily biased towards uniformity over diversity and students are 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 content 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 way of learning does not respond to the particular method. And there is ample proof over the years to show it is futile to search for the single "best" way to achieve a broad educational outcome, in large part because learners do not fit a single mold and the learners' preferences, especially the learning styles, have been neglected.With the shift of focus in EFL from teaching methodology to learners and learning process, the learning style has become one of the personality-related variables that draw more and more attention. It is high time that due attention were paid to the learners' individual differences. As one of the most noticeable aspects of individual differences, learning style differences have won more and more academic concerns. Some keen teachers begin to realize that students have different learning preferences. Learners bring their own individual approach, talents, interests, etc to the learning situation. Individual students and whole classes respond to tasks in very different ways, so that the same teaching strategy has a different appeal to different students and therefore meets with various degrees of acceptance or rejection in the class. And now it is widely accepted that the research on learning style, one of the most important factorsinfluencing the learner's success or failure in foreign language learning, play a vital part in the EFL/ESL classroom.The present study is mainly concerned with: inventories of learning styles, the related factors in the forming of learning styles, the language learning & teaching styles and learning & teaching strategies, learning styles and language acquisition and an empirical investigation on the distribution of the learning styles of the senior high school students and some classroom implications.Based on social constructivism and multiple intelligence theory, this study intends to investigate the learning styles of Chinese English learners in senior high school, with respect to their sensory (i.e. visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic modes) and sociological(i.e. group and individual modes) preferences, and the gender differences in their learning styles.Thus, the paper attempts to answer the following questions:1) What are major, minor and negligible learning style preferences of the senior high school students?2) What is the relationship between their learning styles and academic achievement?3)Do these learning styles vary by gender? i.e. is there any difference between female and male senior high school students' learning styles?The sample of the study consists of 68 senior high school students (males:32;female:36). from Grade 2 of No.l Senior High School of Baicheng, Jilin.Reid's (1987) self-reporting questionnaire of perceptual learning styles is used, which is concerned with four basic perceptual learning styles and preferences for group and individual learning. The study is also based on the Final-Term English Examination scores to see whether or not there is any significant correlation between the learning styles and the academic achievement.The study reveals the characteristics of the learning styles of the senior high school students:1) The students chose individual, visual and auditory learning as their major learning styles and showed minor preferences for tactile learning and kinesthetic learning, and considered group learning as their least preferred learni...