A Study On The Correlation Between Perceptual Learning Styles And English Reading Strategies Of Vocational College Students

This study aims to investigate the characteristics of perceptual learning styles and English reading strategy use among vocational college students, and to explore the correlation between their perceptual learning styles and English reading strategies. Three research questions are presented in this study. They are:1. What are the characteristics of perceptual learning styles of vocational college students?2. What are the characteristics of English reading strategies of these students?3. What is the correlation between their perceptual learning styles and English reading strategies?The participants in this study are126students of different majors in three grades from Xianyang Vocational Technical College. The instruments employed in this study are two questionnaires:one is Joy Reid’s (1987) Perceptual Learning Style Preference Survey (PLSPS), consisting of30items of statements so as to measure learners’ preferred styles in six categories:visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, group and individual learning styles; the other one is Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), developed by William Baker and Kamonpan Boonkit (2004) on the basis of Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), comprising30items of statements in order to investigate learners’reading strategies among six categories: memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, affective and social strategies.The collected data from these two questionnaires are analyzed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version19.0. The results of the descriptive statistics analysis and the Pearson correlation analysis show that:1. The participants have multiple preferences for perceptual learning styles. The tactile style is the most popular style; the auditory style is the second popular style; the kinesthetic style is the third one; the group style is the fourth one; the individual style is the fifth one; the visual style is the least popular style.2. The participants make use of different reading strategies on a medium level. Among the six categories, the compensation strategy is most frequently used; the metacognitive strategy is second frequently used; the cognitive strategy is the third; the memory strategy is the fourth; the affective and the social strategies are the least frequently used ones.3. Some perceptual learning styles have significant correlation with several reading strategies. The visual style learners prefer to choose the cognitive and the affective reading strategies; the auditory style has negative correlation with the social reading strategy; the kinesthetic style learners favor the compensation reading strategy; the group style has significant correlation with the metacognitive reading strategy.The findings of this study can provide some implications to the teachers who try to create instructional designs that are student-centered in order to cultivate students’ self-directed learning. Teachers can adopt appropriate instructions based on their students’ different style preferences and train them to master different strategies to fulfill diverse tasks. Students should understand their style preferences and dominant reading strategies, develop alternative styles, and learn to flexibly adopt one or several strategies in various contexts.