Integration Of EFL Learners' Learning Styles Into The Classroom Interaction

This paper proposes an innovative EFL teaching model - integrating EFL learners' learning styles into the classroom interaction, and reports the pedagogical experiment based on it.There has been plenty of literature about the influence of learners' learning styles upon the learning processes and results, including the way learners approach the learning contexts and materials. Discussion about this influence, however, has been largely theoretical, especially in Chinese EFL classroom settings. Practical concern over and real implementation of the learning style factor in classroom interaction, as well as syllabus development and materials design, are both still being conceived and negotiated. This paper will introduce the two studies that have been completed in China, each of which, respectively, dedicates to the building of the theory of the Style Model, and the experimental implementation of it in an authentic classroom setting.Study 1 was aimed at the construction of the Style Model theory in terms of principle, method, and design. A large amount of related literature has been studied and reviewed, and a principle was hypothesized that the better EFL classroom interaction is designed to match the learner's learning style, the more likely the learner is to respond positively and achieve. As to method and design, typical activity forms from different existing second/foreign language teaching methods were listed and then descriptively transformed into a five-point scale to measure learner's classroom activity preference. A total number of 1109 participants, who are 10th- and11th-grade students from 16 senior high schools in the urban areas of Beijing, took part in a questionnaire survey consisting of a learning style scale and the classroom activity preference scale mentioned above. Factor analysis was afterwards generated upon the data of the activity preference scale to sort out four major factors contributing to the variation. Among them, two were positively correlated with the "global vs. analytic" distinction of learning styles, and the other two were negatively correlated with it. Activities encompassed in these four factors were consequently determined as matching their corresponding learning styles. This framework out of the statistical findings of the survey was built up as guidance for choosing pedagogical methods and designs.Study 2, a pedagogical experiment based on the framework by Study 1, was carried out in two 7th-grade EFL classes for 10 weeks. The teacher of one class consistently and exclusively applied activities belonging to the global style, while the teacher of the other class did the same but with activities of the analytic style. The pre-test the participants from the two classes took consisted of SAS and a motivation scale (measuring "achievement goal orientation", "attribution", and "self-efficacy") with the items of both of them randomly mixed, and a proficiency test with listening, speaking, reading, and writing sections. The post-test was another version of the pre-test, which had been tested as statistically identical to the latter. The results showed: in general, when activities matched his/her style, the learner would achieve more, and his/her motivation would probably be enhanced.