A Study On The Relationship Between Perceived Learning Style And Vocabulary Learning Strategies In Senior High School Students

Student-centered teaching makes people pay more attention to the individual differences of students. Researchers’ attention has been focused on learning styles and learning strategies. In addition, according to High School English Curriculum Standards, senior high school students are required to master 2400-2500 words and 300-400 idioms or collocation. Although vocabulary is the most important part of English learning, it is difficult for most students to grasp it. Some studies have shown that it is the vocabulary learning strategies which fit for your learning that determine the success of vocabulary learning, rather than the number or frequency of vocabulary learning strategies. Therefore, it is important to help students choose vocabulary learning strategies which fit for their learning styles. However, most of researches on the correlations between learning styles and learning strategies focus on university students and few studies focus on senior high school students. So, the purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of perceptual learning styles and vocabulary learning strategies of senior high school students and explore the correlations between the two factors to improve their vocabulary learning efficiency.There were 200 high school students of Grade 1 from a school in Jining, Shandong Province participating in the investigation. Two questionnaires were involved here, vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire and Reid’s(1984) perceptual learning style questionnaire. The vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire was added resource strategy based on O’Malley &Chamot’s learning strategy classification and was adapted according to Gu & Johnson’s(1996)and Li Songhao’s(2003) vocabulary learning strategies questionnaires. The statistics of two questionnaires were conducted and analyzed by SPSS software. The results indicate that,(1) Senior high school students are multi-style learners. They have a strong preference for tactile learning style, followed by visual, individual, auditory and kinesthetic learning style and they do not favor group learning style.(2) The frequency of overall vocabulary learning strategies use is low. Cognitive strategy is used most frequently, meta-cognitive strategy the second and social/affective, resource strategy the least frequently.(3) There are correlations between perceptual learning styles and vocabulary learning strategies. Visual learning style has significant positive correlation with cognitive strategies. Auditory learning style has significant positive correlations with cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies. Tactile learning style positively correlates with cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. Group and kinesthetic learning style have significant positive correlations with social/affective strategies.The findings of this study have important implications for vocabulary teaching and learning.Teachers should adjust their teaching styles according to students’ learning styles and adopt various teaching methods to meet the demand of different students. What’s more, teachers should help students to know their own learning styles and guide students to use suitable vocabulary learning strategies accordingly so as to improve their vocabulary learning efficiency.