A Three-dimensional Study On Learning Styles Of English Majors In Vocational Schools

Chasing after new English teaching approaches has almost been a fashion in thelast decade in China. However, each "panacea" that was expected to solve allproblems for English teaching finally proved to be disappointing because of theignorance of the individual need. As a matter of fact, the consistent principle and alsothe final goal for education is individualization. Otherwise, even the 'Eclectic'approach is also a vague term and cannot bring about good teaching effect. Whilelearning style, as the basic element of individual difference is considered the startingpoint of individualization and provides prescriptive treatments by diagnosing students'individual needs.English majors in vocational schools are supposed to demonstrate the uniquenessin regard to their learning styles. Few researches of learning styles have beenconducted on this diversified body of students. Therefore, it is believed that the studyand application of learning styles will exert deep influence on teaching and learning invocational schools.The present research aims to explore the learning styles of English majors invocational schools by making an investigation into the learning styles of 112third-year English majors of Yantai Vocational School. Different from the previousresearches, most of which merely examine learning styles from only one dimension,this thesis approaches the subject matter from three dimensions based on Curry's"Onion Model"—the perceptual preference, Kolb's information processing preferenceand field dependence/field independence, in order to have a more profound andcomprehensive knowledge of the subjects' learning styles.Three learning style instruments, selected from each layer of Curry's "Onion"model, were administered to the subject. Then theNational Matriculation Entrance Test was also applied to test the subject's Englishlevel. Finally with data collected in various ways and processed by SPSS (12.0), thefollowing analysis and discussion were made concerning the five research questionsput forward by the author: the three-dimensional statistical description of learningstyle preferences;the Independent sample T-test of the gender difference;thethree-dimensional correlation between different learning styles and the correlationbetween learning styles and English achievements;the multiple regression of thepredicting power of the significantly related style on language achievements;One-way ANOVA for style difference between different classes.Based on the statistical analysis and exploration, this study draws the followingconclusions concerning the five research questions:1. The English majors in vocational schools show a variety of learning stylepreferences. Among them,kinesthetic, diverging and field-independent styles are themost preferred ones while group, converging and field dependent styles are leastpreferred.2. Male learners prefer field-independent style more than their femalecounterparts.3. Group style is found negatively correlated with reading scores(r= -.204*) andthe total English achievement (r= -.197*) and both the correlations are significant.4. Individual style is found significantly related with the subjects' languageachievement. Individual style is shown to be the best predictor of English learning.Further multiple regression shows individual style, as a variable, accounts for 9.1%variance in achievement. This indicates that individual style has the positive predictingpower on the subject's English attainment.5. As for the relationship between the three dimensional learning styles, thecorrelation analysis shows that there is really some correlation in between, whichsupports the research question only to some extent by several pairs. Those pairs ofstyles negatively correlated to each other are accommodator with assimilator (r =-.965**), converger with diverger(r = -.955**), individual with group (r = -.429**);and those significantly correlated to each other are kinesthetic with tactile ( r = .373**),group with tactile (r = .304**), group with kinesthetic (r = .236*), visual with diverger(r = .191*), kinesthetic with FI ( r =.188*).6. The One-way ANOVA shows that there is a difference between one group ofthe subjects and the others in terms of auditory style. This result gives the hint thatthere might exist learning style differences between different groups because ofdifferent social and instructional environment which might stretch or repress thelearners' learning style.Although this study also has its share of limitations, due to its multi-faceted datacollection and scientific research method, the findings of this study could beconsidered reliable and meaningful. It is sincerely hoped that this study will not onlyreflect the complete picture of learning style preferences in vocational schools, it canalso raise the learning style awareness, bridge the gap between the instructors and thestudents and explore individualized instructions that are compatible with the vocationalstudents so that individualization will be achieved in a real sense. In addition, the newresearch questions deriving from this research will provide insights into vocationalschool language teaching as well as further researches in the field.