The Study On The Perceptual Learning Styles Of Junior High Students And Its Possible Relationship With English Learning Achievements

In traditional English teaching,the differences of students are always overlooked by the English educators,which contradicts the principles of language acquisition.Different students have different learning achievement owing to the individual differences.Among all the factors that lead to individual differences in language learning,learning styles have received much more attention from researchers at home and abroad.So far,many researchers choose the college students as the subjects from the perspective of the cognitive learning style.This thesis mainly regarded the Chinese Junior high school students as subjects and describe and analyze their perceptual learning style tendency.The author uses the Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire designed by Reid in 1984 and semi-structured interview to collect the data of the perceptual learning style preference of 98 junior high school students in Chengdu Tianjiabing Middle school.Meanwhile,with the data of final examination scores,the Independent Sample T-test and Pearson correlation coefficient are employed to find out the relationship between students' perceptual learning style preference and English learning achievements.On the basis of research results,the author points out that the teachers' and students' awareness of perceptual learning styles should be raised and some suggestions are put forward as to how to apply the perceptual learning style in junior high school.In this study,all the data are described and analyzed by SPSS21.0 and Microsoft Office Excel.SPSS21.0 descriptive statistics reveals that:(1)the participants show a variety of learning style preferences,but they show different degrees to each perceptual learning style.All participants prefer group and auditory learning styles most and the visual learning styles is the least preferred.(2)As for gender,there is no significant difference between male and female students.The female students like group learning style best.However,the male students prefer auditory styles the most among all the learning styles.In terms of English learning achievements differences,the participants,whether they are high achievers,middle achievers or low achievers,all show strongest preference for group and auditory learning styles and show weakest preference for visual learning style.The Independent Sample T-test and Pearson correlation coefficient display the relationship between perceptual learning styles and English learning achievements.That is,tactile,kinesthetic and individual learning styles are positively correlated to English learning achievements while visual,auditory and group learning styles are negatively correlated to English learning achievements.Comparatively speaking,visual and group style are the most contributable style variables affecting English learning achievements.They are negatively correlated to English achievements with a significance of-0.072 and-0.070.The absolute values of Pearson Correlation Coefficient between each style variable and English learning achievement are all lower than 0.1,which indicates that the learning style variables are weakly related to English learning achievements.According to the results of the research,the thesis provides suggestions as to the English learning and teaching in Junior high school.On one hand,teachers should raise the awareness of the individual differences and respect the students' learning styles.They should adopt more flexible teaching strategies to match the students' learning styles.On the other hand,teachers should consciously help students know more about their own learning styles and encourage students to choose proper learning strategies according to their learning styles.Studentsshould enrich the learning styles to meet the various learning demands by adjusting learning strategies,and finally realize the autonomous learning.