A Study On The Relationship Between Learning Styles And The Choice Of Listening Strategy In Senior High School

The research about learning styles, listening learning strategies and therelationship between them has great significance to facilitate the listening teaching in senior middle school. On the one hand, the teacher can train learners appropriate listening strategies according to their different learning styles, adopt proper teaching methods and teaching strategies to improve the results of listening teaching; on the other hand, having held the knowledge of learning style and listening learning strategy, learners can choose and use appropriate listening strategies according to their own learning styles in the process of listening learning, consciously, which can improve their listening comprehension achievements now and efficiency of learning in the future.The subjects in this thesis are 112 students from two intact grade-one classes in Xi'an NO.1 middle school. The instruments used in this research are two complicated questionnaires and four standard listening comprehension tests. One of the questionnaires is Perceptual Learning Style Preference Survey (PLSPS), which developed by Joy Reid (1984) consists of thirty items in random in order to allow ESL students to self-identify their preferred learning styles among six categories: visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, group and individual. The other questionnaire, Listening Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, was composed of O'Malley and Chamot's (1987:287-306) typology of learning strategies, Oxford's (1990:293-330) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), and author-designed questions on the basis of her own teaching experience. The questionnaire consists of three parts, metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies, and can be further divided into 18 sub-strategies altogether, which is used to investigate the state of the choice and use of listening strategies. Based on the theories of Richard (1983), Ur (1984), and the classification modes of western scholars, the carefully designed standard listening comprehension test, of which the listening materials were taken from Step by Step Bookâ…¡, aims to investigate the subjects' listening comprehension proficiency.As to the data analysis, there are three aspects correlations analyzed in this thesis. The first one is the correlation between learning styles and listening comprehension achievements in senior middle school learners. The second one is the correlation between listening learning strategies and listening comprehension achievements. The last one is to explore the relationship between different learning styles and the appropriate listening learning strategies. The first two researches belong to the foundational field; the third one is the highlight of the thesis which uses listening comprehension achievements as a variable. Although there are a lot of previous researches about the learning styles and listening learning strategies separately, yet the research about the relationship between them is still blank, especially the research about Chinese primary education is even less. After the data analysis, the finding of the relationship between learning styles and listening strategies in the thesis will be applied into the everyday classroom listening teaching to check and examine the validity of the relationship, the author has combined the theory with practice in the classroom teaching and trained the learners listening strategies according to their different learning styles for about six months. The comparison between the results of the pre-test and the post-test shows that listening strategy training is successful.After data-analysis, there are some important findings:1. Individually speaking, most of the subjects are multiple-style preferences, that is to say they use more than one sense to get necessary information. The highest frequencies are tactile, individual and auditory styles, while the lowest is group style. From the interacting angle, there is insignificant correlation between learning styles and listening achievement, learning styles haven't direct relationship with listening achievement.2. The majorities of learners sometimes use listening learning strategies or generally not use listening learning strategies, but only a small number of students usually use listening strategies and none always use listening learning strategies. The three categories of listening strategy are ranked from cognitive, metacognitive to social/affective strategies in descending order of frequency of use. Cognitive strategies are the senior students' most preferred listening learning strategies and metacognitive strategies ranked the second, social/affective strategy is the least one. Among the subcategories of each strategy, some of which are learners' preferred ones and others are the least used strategies.3. The correlation coefficients show that all the three kinds of listening strategies have significant relationship with listening comprehension. They interact with each other: the choice and use of learning strategies affects listening achievements. Among the eighteen listening strategies, eleven of which have positive relationships with listening achievements. In turn, the different levels of achievements can also influence their choice of listening learning strategies; high-achievement learners choose and use strategies more frequently than low-achievement learners. The learners who use listening learning strategies more frequently have higher achievements in listening learning accordingly, and those who adopt less gain lower achievements.4. There are correlations between learning styles and listening strategies, that is to say, the listening learning strategies the subjects choose are linked to their learning styles. Learning styles affect the choice and use of listening learning strategies; learners with different learning styles choose different strategies in their listening process. The six kinds of learning style learners each have their own preferred listening learning strategy.5. From the analysis about the results of the pre-test and the post-test, the author has found the listening strategy training according to different learning styles has different effects on different proficiency learners, the effect on the low-proficiency learners is the greatest of all, on the medium-proficiency learners is the second and on the high-proficiency learners is the lowest.In practice, this study has significances for senior middle school listening pedagogy. Teachers can make use of the findings about the relationships between learning styles and listening strategies to encourage and help students to choose appropriate listening strategies matching their own style preferences in the process of listening teaching and learning. Teachers can also help train students relevant strategies that are more important for listening achievement or that they use least frequently. Besides, the finding can not only encourage and help teachers adopt teaching methods suitable for learners' learning styles and strategies, but also make learners accord their choice and use of listening strategies with their learning styles, thus a good language learning environment come into being.