A Study On Learning Styles Of High School Students And Possible Relationships Between Learning Styles And English Learning Achievements

Since the Second World War, under the influence of the humanistic psychology, individualized teaching has sprung up. In the West, the focus of the foreign language learning researches has gradually been shifted from the exploration of teaching to individual learner differences since 1960s and learning style is one of the most significant factors of individual learner differences.Abundant researches on learning styles have been conducted in the West. In China, however, most of the studies are restricted to the theoretical discussion and there are just relatively few empirical studies. Most of the empirical studies have chosen university students or adults as their subjects and few have chosen high school students as subjects. Hence, using a questionnaire based on Oxford (1993)'s instrument, the current study investigates the learning styles of 150 Senior One students who are from three different high schools (A, B, C) that represent the first class school, the second class school and the third class school respectively and seeks to provide answers to the following questions: 1) What kind of learning style preferences do high school students have? 2) Is there any significant difference in learning style preferences among different high schools? 3) Are there any possible links between gender and learning style preferences? 4) Is there any significant relationship between learning style preferences and English learning achievements?In search of answers to the four questions above, the current study has some major findings as follows: Firstly, the data from the current study indicate that students are more or less oriented to high tolerance of ambiguity and they prefer visual, extroverted, intuitive and global learning styles. Secondly, using the ANOVA . in SPSS, the data reveal that the students of School A are more visually oriented than those of School C, and the students of School C are lowest tolerant of ambiguity among students in three schools. Thirdly, there is no significant difference between gender and learning style preferences, except that more females prefer visual style than males. Finally, in the investigation on the correlation between variables of learning style construct and the English learning achievements, it is found that lowtolerance of ambiguity correlates negatively with English learning achievements, that is, a student with low tolerance of ambiguity is likely to get a low mark in the English Entrance Examination to Senior High School. Besides, visual style and concrete-sequential style have positive effect on English learning achievements.At the end of the study, the author puts forward some pedagogical suggestions, suggesting that teachers should adjust their teaching styles to students' learning styles, train students to stretch their learning-style repertoire so as to meet the demands of diverse learning situations, and thus create a lively, inclusive language learning environment to meet the needs of students with diverse learning styles.