A Study On Matching English Teachers' Teaching Styles To Learners' Learning Styles Of English Majors

With the focus of teaching shifted to the individual differences of language learners, learning style as one of the factors which affect second or foreign language learning, has aroused more and more attention in the field of SLA research in the past decades. Meanwhile, the matches between teachers'teaching styles and students'learning styles is one of the most important factors that affecting teaching effects. In the art of education, there are two important factors: educators (teachers) and educatees (students). The teaching process is the process of bilateral activity. Only teachers'teaching and students'learning mutually adapted, can the expected teaching effects reached. However, the literature review about teaching styles and learning styles shows that they just did related research respectively, there is few empirical research on their relationships (matches). Therefore, this study, from the learner's view, conducts a survey on the matching teachers'teaching styles and learners'learning styles in the Northwest A&F University in the west region. The study aims to find the overall tendency of the learners'learning style preferences in the Foreign Language Department, the overall tendency of English teachers'teaching style preferences, the matches between them, etc, aiming to coordinate teacher-student styles, to create a learner-centered teaching mode, and to finally realize the individualized teaching. The main research contents include: 1) The overall tendency of learners'learning style preferences; 2) The overall tendency of English teachers'teaching style preferences; 3) Matches between English teachers'teaching styles and learners'learning styles.Research methods: The study mainly adopts the quantitative and qualitative methods, which the quantitative materials are mainly teachers'and students'questionnaire, qualitative research materials basically are the author's observation notes, semi-open interviews, etc. The author of this study invited all English teachers in the Foreign Language Department in Northwest A&F University to fill the questionnaire form. Besides, 125 English majors participated in this survey. All the data collected were done with factor analyses to examine the items related to learning styles as well as teaching styles by using the Statistical Packages for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for window version 17.0. Then, each category of both teaching styles and learning styles is processed by a descriptive analysis including mean and standard deviation and mean differences to get an overview of the differences of the two groups'styles.The findings from this empirical study are as follows:1. The overall tendencies of students'learning style preferences were kinesthetic learning, auditory learning, tactile learning, individual learning, visual learning and group study in declining order. Personal interview showed that students don't like group study, in which they may feel uncomfortable or have the feeling of being marginalized.2. The general features of teachers'teaching styles were tactile teaching, group teaching, visual teaching, individual teaching, kinesthetic teaching and auditory teaching.3. By contrasting, a mismatch between teachers'teaching styles and students'learning styles was found. The English teachers most like tactile and group teaching, and don't like kinesthetic and auditory teaching.In a word, this study presented that these students showed a variety of learning styles. Both students and teachers should enhance the knowledge of styles.Based on the Learning Style Theory, Gardner'Multiple Intelligence theory and Social Education Mode, as well as Rogers's Humanistic Education Theory, the cause analysis and inferred analysis were done with the above results obtained in the study. At the same time, some relative feasible suggestions to both English teachers and learners are put forward. These suggestions are both instructive and meaningful to English teaching, in terms of easing the teaching-learning style conflict, developing and diversifying teaching style and learning style and finally promoting both teachers'teaching and students'learning.Finally, the last part sums up the research findings of the present study, discusses the pedagogical implications, demonstrates some limitations of the study and comes up with some proposals for further studies into learning style and teaching style.