Correlation Between Students' Learning Style Awareness And Their Language Achievement

Great interest has been aroused in individual differences among researches of Second Language Acquisition in recent years because of the development of applied linguistics, cognitive psychology and the actualization of humanistic rationale in education. As one of the hot issues among individual differences, learning style is taken as individuals' habitual and preferred ways of absorbing, processing and retaining new information and skills. The present study is to find the correlations between the students' self-awareness of their diversified learning styles and their language achievements.The participants in this study were 101 sophomore students from North University of China. Five instruments were chosen to obtain data related to learning styles and language learning achievements: questionnaire, self-report, class observation, English achievement test and interview. The statistical analysis was processed with SPSS and descriptive analysis, independent sample t-test, paired samples analysis and Pearson correlation analysis were employed.Based on the statistical analysis and exploration, this study got the following findings:1. The major learning styles of the participants are tactile and kinesthetic. Their minor styles are auditory and group. This result is consistent with other Chinese researchers' findings (Wang, 1992; Yu, 1997; Dang & Liu, 2001).2. With teacher's illustration of learning styles knowledge, individuals may be better aware of their learning styles and can consciously diversify their learning styles and choose the learning style which is the most appropriate one to the nature of a particular learning task.3. Pearson Correlation analysis shows that both the awareness of learning styles and the diversity of learning styles are significantly correlated with students' language achievement.Evidently, there is limitation in this research. But the results of this research can be considered reliable and meaningful. The findings testified the fact that most college students are not aware of their learning styles, and there is a correlation between the awareness of learning styles and language achievements. The instructional implications mainly concern raising awareness of learning styles on both part of teachers and students: diagnosing students' learning styles, making instructions on learning styles, diversifying teaching methods, and stretching students learning styles by applying various learning strategies in different learning tasks.