A Study Of The Correlation Between Perceptual Learning Styles And English Reading Strategies Among Junior High School Students

The new National English Curriculum advocates quality-oriented education and promotes personality development of junior high school students today.As concern about individual differences of learners grows,more and more educators view perceptual learning styles as one of the critical factors which can be directly involved in learners' learning process and affects their learning performances.On the other hand,as an essential part of language teaching and learning,correct usage of reading strategies not only improves students' reading ability but also increases their reading interest and driving force.Thus,guiding students to choose suitable reading strategies in a way most compatible with their own perceptual learning styles has become the key to improve students' reading efficiency.Therefore,based on O'Brien's(1995)three dimensions of perceptual learning styles and the theory of Oxford's(1990)learning strategies,this study sets out to research on the relationship between perceptual learning styles and English reading strategies among junior high school students.This study is conducted among 140 students(75 girl students and 65 boy students)coming from the Jingdezhen NO.13 middle school in Jiangxi province with two different tests.The first one is the Learning Channel Preference Checklist designed by O'Brien(1995)and the other one is the Survey of Reading Strategies by William and Kamonpan(2004).Descriptive,Correlation and Multiple Regression Analysis were all used with SPSS17.0 statistical software.The research questions are:(1)What are the general situations of perceptual learning styles and English reading strategies of junior high school students?(2)Is there any correlation between perceptual learning styles and English reading strategies among junior high school students?(3)To what extent does the perceptual learning styles contribute to predicting the performance of junior high school students' English reading strategies?The results of this study can be demonstrated after the quantitative study.Firstly,junior high school students show multiple preferences in perceptual learning styles and the most preferred one is the visual style,followed by the auditorystyle.And the haptic style is the least preferred perceptual learning style.Meanwhile,junior high school students hold a moderate and slightly higher overall use frequency of English reading strategies.Among all the reading strategies,compensation strategy is viewed as the most frequently used strategy,followed by cognitive,meta-cognitive,memory and social strategy.And affective strategy is the least preferred reading strategy.Secondly,there are significant correlations between perceptual learning styles and English reading strategies among junior high school students.The visual style has significantly positive correlations with all the English reading strategies and the highest coefficient is cognitive strategy(.476**).The auditory style is also positively correlated with nearly all the English reading strategies except for affective strategy and the highest coefficient is also cognitive strategy(.462**).However,the haptic style only has some negative correlations with memory and meta-cognitive strategy and has no significant correlation with any other reading strategies.Thirdly,junior high school students' perceptual learning styles have a predictive power on English reading strategies.The visual style possesses the strongest power to predict junior high school students' overall usage of English reading strategies while auditory style also has some certain predictive impacts on cognitive,memory,compensation and meta-cognitive strategy.On the basis of the findings in this research,some pedagogical implications have been proposed which can help teachers to adjust instructional strategies or teaching methods in reading to meet students' different perceptual learning styles and also help students to adapt their reading strategies based on their own perceptual learning styles.