The Relationship Between Thinking Styles And Listening Strategies Among Senior High School Students

With the rising of researches on individual differences and the releasing of national English curriculum standards for senior high school students(2017 version),both thinking ability and learning ability are attracting more and more attention.Considering that thinking styles are closely related to thinking ability and listening strategies are closely related to learning ability,both thinking styles and listening strategies are worthy of further research.Though researches about learning strategies of senior high school students are in large amount and researches about thinking styles are gradually emerging,researches about the relationship between thinking styles and listening strategies of senior high school students are still very limited.Based on Sternberg's theory of mental self-government and O'Malley and Chamot's theory of learning strategies,this study investigate four research questions:(1)What is the current situation of thinking styles among senior high school students?(2)What is the current situation of listening strategies among senior high school students?(3)Is there any correlation between thinking styles and listening strategies among senior high school students?(4)how do individual factors such as gender and language proficiency influence thinking styles as well as listening strategies of senior high school students?Research methods combined both quantitative and qualitative methods.The subjects were 203 senior high school students from Sichuan province.Questionnaires that included thinking style inventory and listening strategy scale as well as 2018 English listening test for college entrance examination were used to collect quantitative data.All quantitative data were typed into Microsoft Excel 2010.Then descriptive analysis,correlation analysis and independent t-test were conducted through SPSS 22.0 soft.Besides,8 participants were chosen to do a semi-structured interview and qualitative data of listening strategies was collected in this way.Major findings are:(1)Senior high school students in the study tend to have various thinking styles and the intensities of 13 thinking styles are in a medium level in general,though the level of each style is quite different.(2)Senior high schoolstudents in the study tend to be in a medium level of using listening strategies and they tend to use cognitive strategies more often,especially inference and predicting.Meta-cognitive strategies come next and they do not use social/affective strategies very often.(3)There is a strong correlation between thinking styles and listening strategies of senior high school students in the study in general,though several thinking styles do not have obvious correlation with three listening strategies.(4)Gender difference exist in both thinking styles and listening strategies while the difference between high language proficiency and low language proficiency only exist in listening strategies.The study confirms the correlation between thinking styles and listening strategies.It is meaningful in improving students' efficiency of listening learning,integrating thinking styles in teacher's teaching and promoting creativity in teaching.