A Preliminary Study Of Chinese Students' Learning Style Preferences

Learning styles are the ways people learn and understand the world. Everyone has their own preferred natural intellectual strengths, but different people have very different strengths, which can best help them to learn; in addition, individual intellectual types function equally well in terms of learning styles.For quite a long time in China, schools have focused uniformity over diversity and students have all instructed in the same way in EFL classroom, yet the way they perceive and process new information varies from person to person. One of the most important features of learning styles is that it relates to learners'learning preferences. The significance of students'different learning style is relevant to FL study. Different learning style preferences form a student's unique learning style and aid teachers in planning instruction. An awareness of learners'learning styles can improve behavior by building levels of motivation and self-confidence within the class. This research a focus on style approach can result in the learner feeling more involved in the process of FL learning. Teachers can, therefore, use their knowledge of learning styles to structure lesson activities with the aim of raising students'motivation, interest and on-task behavior.The hypothesis of the paper is that certain learning style preferences, with respect to cultures, have their roots in their respective cultures and have influences on the ways in which learners with different cultural and culturally influenced educational backgrounds learn and think. The purpose of this study is first to carry out a comparative survey, then through the comparison as a mirror to explore Chinese college students'learning style preferences while learning English. Then I draw the following conclusion. Students from different cultural and educational backgrounds differ significantly from each other in their learning style preferences. Analysis of the data demonstrates that students chose their learning preferences significantly differently in relation to various learning style preferences. In the study, Chinese students showed their preferred styles as the major and minor on each dimension, with one exception, the tactile/kinesthetic, where there was only a minor difference between preferences for either. There are no significant differences between tactile and kinesthetic styles. Students who chose tactile and kinesthetic are almost equally spread. Thus, it seems that Chinese students both like tactile and kinesthetic learning styles. A very high percentage of Chinese students chose visual learning and individual learning as their major preferences. For the other five dimensions of cognitive learning styles, Chinese students showed their preferences for analytic, field independent, introverted, concrete-sequential and closure-oriented styles. In the data gathering, some Chinese students within the same class and with the same educational and cultural backgrounds selected other styles as their learning preferences. This demonstrates that culture and educational practice are not the only two factors that play a role in style forming and style development, and people are indeed individuals with their own traits. However, some valid generalizations about learning style can be made concerning students from one culture and one ethnic group, and the styles identified above illustrate some of these principles.Furthermore, this study can provide Chinese English teachers with new insights of the learning process and develop their awareness of valuing students'learning style preferences while designing and adopting more effective methods of teaching English.