A Study Of Correlation Between Senior High School Students' FD/FI And Their English Achievements

Since the 1970s,scholars have already realized that learners' individual factors have more effects on language learning.More and more researches on second language teaching have transferred from teaching methods to learners' individual differences,and there have increasingly been a multitude of variables used to account for individual differences.Among those,the most frequently used ones appear to be cognitive elements e.g.language aptitude and learning strategies,and affective elements,e.g.anxiety,motivation,and self-confidence.In the present study,150 Senior Grade Three students from No.3 Middle School of Lanhua are chosen as the subjects and they take the personal information questionnaire,the Test of Embedded Figures and the two standard simulated tests—the tests for Senior Three students preparing for College Entrance Examination.The two tests include multiple-choice,cloze, word-spelling,reading comprehension and writing achievements.The subjects' TEF score and their English learning achievements,reading comprehension and writing achievements are analyzed in a correlative study to find out the possible relationship between FD/FI and total score, reading comprehension and writing achievements of senior high school students.There are six parts in this thesis.Part one starts with a brief introduction to the background and significance of this investigation.In part two,the representative theories of FD/FI learning styles and a survey of researches at home and abroad are presented.The third part introduces the theories involved in this investigation.Definitions and classifications of learning styles are tackled,so are definitions of FD/FI.Part Four puts forward the research questions,subjects, instruments as well as data collection and data analysis of the research.Results are provided in part five.Namely,among 150 subjects,27 are FD,71ate FI and the rest 52 are field-mixed.There is no obvious correlation between TEF of FD students and their English learning achievements,while results show significant correlation between TEF of FI students and their English learning achievements.The possible reason is that traditional English tests in China are standardized simulated tests including multiple-choice,cloze,word-spelling, reading comprehension and writing.FD students are not good at multiple-choice,cloze,reading comprehension or writing,they enjoy learning through communicating with others,and therefore they are liable to the communicative aspect of language very wonderfully.However,the communicative competence can not be reflected by the standardized simulated test.In this case, it is no wonder that they appear to be the students with low achievements measured by this criterion.But FI students are at advantage in most of English test items,especially in reading and writing.The two parts take up the largest proportion in the standardized simulated test paper.So we can make a conclusion:the higher one's reading and writing achievements are,the higher his English achievement is.TEF of FD students are correlated to their reading achievements negatively while are correlated to their writing achievements positively.The results reported lend support to the conclusion that FD students are not good at reading.In reading,they often have difficulty in separating incoming information from its contextual surroundings and they are more likely to be influenced by external cues,and to be non-selective in their information uptake.The subjects are Senior GradeThree students,they are going to attend College Entrance Examination,they know clearly that writing takes up very large proportion in the exam,if they want a higher English achievement,they have to try their best to get a higher writing achievement,so they practise writing a lot,maybe it results in the present result.TEF of FI students are correlated both to their reading achievements and their writing achievements positively.This is because in traditional English tests in China,FI students are at advantage in most of English test items,especially in reading and writing.FI students have no difficulty in separating the most essential information from its context and are more likely to be influenced by internal than external cues and to be selective in their information uptake. Therefore,they tend to perceive things analytically and are better able to restructure their perceptions and cognitions and hence have greater flexibility in thinking and problem solving.So they are good at reading and writing,this leads to their higher reading and writing achievements.Part six contains the conclusions,implications and limitations.Conclusions are that FI students are good at reading and writing,accordingly,their English achievements are higher, they tend to be generally more independent,competitive and self-confident.FD students are not good at reading and writing,accordingly,their English achievements are lower,they tend to be more socialized to derive their self identify from persons around them and are usually more emphatic and perceptive of the feelings and thoughts of others.Implications include learners should make efforts to expand their style range and learn to apply right styles on right occasions,while the task of the teachers is how to understand the preferred styles of each learner and to adjust the flexibility in the learner,teachers should effectively match learning styles in EFL classroom.