An Investigation Into The Learning Styles Of The Middle School Students With Different Mother Tongue Backgrounds In English Learning

With the increasing concerns on the individual differences of learners in second language acquisition, scholars both home and abroad carried out numerous studies on the learning styles of language learners. However, not many of them focused on the learning styles of ethnic minority middle school students. This study intends to investigate the learning styles of Yi and Han students in terms of their different mother tongue background and in terms of gender to reveal whether there is any difference among the learning styles of them. At the same time, it attempts to explore whether there is any correlation between the subjects’ leaning styles and their English proficiency.With the questionnaire originally developed by Liu Runqing and Dai Manchun(2003), this study combined quantitative and qualitative research approaches to investigate 240 middle school students from grade 3 of a local middle school in Chuxiong Yi autonomous prefecture in Yunnan province. Among the 240 students, 100 are Han students; 76 are Yi students who can speak both Yi language and Chinese; 64 are Yi students who can only speak Chinese but not Yi language. The subjects’ English scores in 2015 Senior School Entrance Examination in Yunnan province were drawn as their learning proficiency. In addition, interviews with one Yi students who can speak both Yi language and Chinese, one Yi student who can only speak Chinese but not Yi language, two Han students and one English teacher were conducted as a complementary survey.The data were analyzed by the use of SPSS 11.5. Descriptive, Independent-Samples t-test, Pearson correlations were adopted to analyze the data of the questionnaire.Data analysis indicated that each group of students preferred some learning styles to other learning styles.Significant difference was found between the learning styles of Han students and the Yi students who can only speak Chinese but not Yi language.Significant difference was observed between the learning styles of male and female students too.In addition, it was found that there was significant correlation between the learning styles of students and their English proficiency.Finally, in this thesis, the possible reasons contribute to the results are explored and based on the results of the study, some implications are proposed.