The Effect Of Task-based Learning Strategies Training On Learning Style Expansion

Many students spend much time learning English, but their English isn’t good yet. Thereason is the use of the improper learning methods and their own learning styles. Each studenthas their own learning styles, which have their strengths and weaknesses. This makes thestudents have difficulties in some aspects of language learning. It is a problem for the teachersto help the students make up for their deficiency. A number of scholars have mentioned thatstudents’ learning styles could be stretched through the learning strategy training, but there isno experiment to prove this in our classroom.The purpose of this study is to verify (1) whether the learning styles can be expandedthrough learning strategy training; (2) whether the students work more easily and activelyafter their learning styles expansion.In this experiment, the author adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitativemethods. The main experimental steps are as follows: The author chose two full-time teachingclasses of Grade One in Yuncheng Xiangyang Senior High School. Before the experiment theresearcher handed out the questionnaire to 180 students to investigate their general learningstyles. During the experiment, the researcher trains Class One students to use the strategies inlistening, speaking, reading and writing properly, while the Class Two is taught in thetraditional way. After a semester, the author investigates the learning styles of all the studentsin Class One again via questionnaire.After a seventeen-week experiment through strategies training, the data were collectedand analyzed by the statistical software SPSS19.0. It shows that: (1) In the pre-test, there was no significant difference between Class One and Class Two in the preferences of learningstyles. However, the post-test showed that Class One students’ learning styles were expandedwhen the experiment finished, but Class Two made no significant difference between thepre-test and post-test. That is to say, this strategy training could expand the learners’ learningstyle. (2) According to the data, 68.1% students felt the strategy training were useful andhelped them learn easily, that is to say, after applying the learning strategies, the studentslearnt the language more easily and actively.The author hopes that the findings of this study will be helpful to the senior high teachersin English learning and teaching.