The Influence Of Junior High School Students’ Learning Style On Their Perception Of English Consonants

Based on PAM-L2 and ELT and adopting empirical research,the study takes junior high school students of the 8^thgrade in Xiamen,Fujian as subjects and uses questionnaire for learning styles and perception tests to know about students’preferences for learning style,perceptual assimilation models and perceptual identification of English consonants,and investigate the relation between learning style and English consonant perception,to provide suggestions for teaching English consonant for junior high school students.It’s hypothesized that students with different learning styles differ in their perceptual assimilation models and perceptual identification of English consonants.Through descriptive analysis,one-way ANOVA,Pearson correlation coefficient and simple linear regression in SPSS13.0,the study finds that firstly,students favor assimilating and accommodating styles.Among them,boys prefer assimilating style and girls prefer accommodating style.Secondly,students tend to assimilate some English consonants that have good relations with Mandarin consonants into more concentrated categories of native language,and give higher goodness-ratings.For those English consonants that have less similarities to Mandarin consonants,the assimilation is more dispersed.Thirdly,assimilators and divergers perform better in English consonant perception.Their perceptual assimilation models are more concentrated,and they give more objective goodness-ratings.Fourthly,learning style has no relation with perceptual identification of English consonants.But further study shows that the more students prefer RO,the better they do in consonant identification.By analyzing the relationship between learning style and English consonant perception,the study suggests that in English listening teaching,teachers need to emphasize the learning of consonant perception,and focus on teaching differences between English consonants,and between English and Mandarin consonants.In the teaching process,teachers should be able to integrate the teaching of English consonants into different types of lessons,and help students perceive and analyze consonants in the phonetic and phonological level.At the same time,teachers need to illustrate consonants according to students’perceptual assimilation patterns,and pay more attention to English consonants that students assimilate into the same category of Mandarin consonant with the same degree of similarity.Teachers should lead students to distinguish them and help them build new phonemic categories.In addition,teachers are supposed to teach according to students’learning styles and design various activities,to promote students’abilities of consonant perception efficiently.Furthermore,teachers should emphasize on fostering students’abilities of reflection and observation,and lead them to perceive consonants comprehensively.