The Effect Of Matching Classroom Instruction With Learning Styles On Middle School English Learning In China

This thesis was devoted to survey whether matching students' learning styles with English classroom instructions would have positive impact on students' achievement. People worked very hard to adopt learning style theories for the purpose of improving the education quality. However, confusion and doubts existed on whether it was valid to base those education reforms on those theories since no agreement had been reached on the effect of matching students' learning styles. Besides, most focuses on this topic were put on the five perceptual styles. Little research had been done to investigate the matching effect from the perspective of social learning styles. This was why I chose to study this topic.A questionnaire and 3 tests were adopted in the study. Subjects involved in the research were 40 first-year high school students from Tongnan Middle School, Chongqing. They were chosen out of 99 students to make sure that the Experimental Groups and the Control Groups had no difference except their learning styles.After the experiment the researcher found that (1) in the class matched with collaborative learning style the Experimental Group performed better in the posttest and the postponed test, and gave higher marks to the instruction; (2) in the class matched with independent learning style the Experimental Group did do better than the Control Group, even though the difference was not big enough to have statistical significance. The matched group also showed their higher satisfaction level by giving higher marks to the instruction. Therefore, this study should be regarded as positive evidence for the effect of matching students' learning styles.The pedagogical implications put forward by the paper are: diagnosing learning styles and developing self-awareness; diversifying the instructional styles; developing computer-assisted instruction...