A Study On Perceptual Learning Styles Of Chinese Senior Middle School Students

Everyone learns and processes information in different ways, which may be ignored by most teachers when they deliver instructions. Sometimes, we may find that, in spite of teachers'effort, there are always some students who show a tendency to be bored and inattentive in class, do poorly on tests, get discourage about the English learning, and may conclude that they are no good at English learning and even give up. In considering how to improve students'learning effectively, teachers need to understand students'learning styles. It is generally agreed that matching between teaching styles and learning styles can lead to students'academic achievements as well as their active participations in the classroom.The earliest research of learning styles could be traced back to 1950s when Herbert Thelen advanced the concept of learning style for the first time (谭顶良,1995). Learning style emerged as a common concept in the early 1970s and has become a focus of education research and general education interest gradually. The pioneering researchers, Dunn & Dunn, Price, Gregorc and Reid and so on, defined learning styles systematically and started the research of the learning styles models. The study of learning styles mainly concerns about the difference of the individuals. In the initial stage of learning style research, researchers and instructors were in the habit of labeling a particular style as"right"or"wrong", or"good"or"bad". However,the successive researches reveal that learning style was not a matter of"true or false", but of"more or less"。Everyone has his or her own learning styles, and every learning style has not only its advantages but also its limits.Many scholars at home have devoted themselves to the study of learning strategies, while there are a few of studies on learning styles. Additionally, most studies on learning styles at home took university students as their subjects; few of them took high school students as their subjects. In this case, the present study aims at investigating the distributions of the perceptual learning styles in Senior English class. By comparing and analyzing the results, the conclusions are set out, which highlight some implications for educational guidance of English teachers.