A Study On English Learning Style Of Senior Students In Rural Area

For more than two thousand years, the theory"Teaching students in accordance of their aptitude"has been put forward by Confucius, the great ideologist and educationist in China. However, the due attention hasn't paid to the learners'individual differences for quite a long time. Schools are heavily based towards uniformity over diversity and students are all instructed in the same way, especially in the most rural area of China. Fortunately, with quality-oriented education and the learner-centered approach implemented, more and more focus has been on the learners rather than on the instructors. With the shift of focus in EFL from teaching methodology to learners and process, both learners and teachers begin to aware how students learn and consider learning styles as one of the personality-related variables influencing success in learning a foreign language. Individual students bring their own individual approaches, talents, interests, etc. to the learning situation. So they have different learning styles.Plentiful researches on learning styles have been conducted in the West. In China, however, most of the empirical studies have chosen university students or adults as their subjects and few have chosen high school students, especially rural students as subjects. And in order to make up this as well as the limitation of the small range investigation of the previous studies, using a questionnaire based on Oxford (1993)'s instrument, the current study,based on humanism and multiple intelligence theory, investigates the learning styles of 2182 rural students from two schools. This study intends to investigate the overall learning styles of rural English learners in senior high school, influences upon their academic achievement in EFL learning, academic streams vary in their learning style preference and the gender differences in their learning styles.According to the research, some key findings emerge from the result. First of all, most of rural high school students prefer hands-on, extroverted, intuitive, and global learning styles and that they are oriented to low tolerance of ambiguity, and they consider auditory learning as their least preferred learning style. Good learners seem to exhibit stronger preference for visual, analytic and high tolerance of ambiguity learning styles. The study also indicates that highly successful English learners often have multiple-style preferences, that is, the students with greater learning style flexibility are often greater achievers. Global learning style is more preferred by arts students whereas analytic learning style is more liked by science students. There is no any other significant difference between gender and other learning styles.After the main results are presented,some implications for teaching and learning are discussed and certain suggestions are given to the language instructors and learners.