On The Integration Of Multiple Intelligences With Learning Styles To Improve English Teaching In Junior High Schools

Being essential to theories of modern English teaching, the theory of Multiple Intelligences stresses on students' individual differences and advocates developing students' multiple intelligences. This corresponds to the notion of Quality Education which is vigorously practiced nowadays. Therefore, this theory is not only favored in the field of world teaching studies, but also be gradually used in the field of language teaching.In 1983, Dr. Howard Gardner, who is professor of education at Harvard University, proposed the famous theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner holds that, every person has at least eight different intelligences that account for a broader range of human potential.Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences focuses on respecting students' differences and advocates adopting more flexible and individualized teaching methods in the process of teaching and learning, so that more and more students can become more confident and be developed to the largest extent, and then better learning results can be achieved.Among the factors that can affect the learners' learning a foreign language, the individual's learning style differences are one of the key issues. Understanding individual differences can be helpful for teachers to know students better and choose proper teaching methods to provide what they need.Learning styles focus on how to learn, and it not only pays attention to the process of the individuals' information processing, but considers the effect caused by individual's emotion, phychological behavior, learning environment and so on; while multiple intelligences pay more attention to the learning contents and relations between different subjects. As for the relationship between multiple intelligences and learning styles, Harvey Silver and his partners once descibed in this way, even someone did have one stronger intelligence, he must find the way to use it. When these two theories are used in the field of education, they can be much helpful to educators. With the help of learning styles, teachers can be guided on how to teach; with the aid of multiple intelligences, they can know better what should be taught.Therefore, it is possible and necessary to integrate these two concepts and do research on how to form a new classroom teaching method on the integration of Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles, hopefully it can improve the efficiency of junior school English teaching. As for junior school English teachers, they can apply the integrated teaching method into the real classroom teaching as many as possible, and this can also be helpful to verify whether the integrated method can improve the junior school English teaching.In order to verify the method of integrating multiple intelligences with learning styles can improve junior school students'academic achievement, the author of this paper did a teachig experiment in a junior school for a term. The author selected 113 junior school students as the subjects, and they are students in Luoyang No.2 Foreign Language School. In the course of research, the author empolyed two questionnaires, namely, the Multiple Intelligences Inventory and Reid's Perceptual Learning Style Preference Survey. In addition, the author interviewed some experienced teachers and designed some teaching plans. This paper aims to:explore the way to integrate multiple intelligences and learning styles into English teaching in China; to find the relationship between English academic achievement and the teaching method based on the integration of learning styles and multiple intelligences.Through doing the teaching experiment and analyzing the questionnaires, this paper comes to the following conclusions:1. The main procedures of integrating multiple intelligences and learning styles into the English teaching contains six aspects and they will be explained in Chapter Three.2. The teaching method on the integration of multiple intelligences and learning styles can improve students'English language learning to some degree. And it can also raise teachers' awareness of sensing students'differences in learning styles and multiple intelligences.In a word, this paper aims to do research on how to improve junior school English teaching by integrating Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles into the classroom teaching. And the author hopes this paper may provide some enlightenment about modern junior school English teaching.