The Investigation Of Chinese College Students’ Learning Styles And The Relationship Between Their Learning Styles And English Speaking Outcome

As the research focus of second language acquisition turning gradually fromteachers and their teaching to students and their learning, the learners’ individualdifference research are becoming increasingly the irreversible research tendency.Learning style is one of the most important modules among students’ cognitivedifferences, whose research will help the researchers analyse the reasons for students’learning differences. Based on the learning style theory by Herbert Thelen (1954) andthe classification of learning style theory by Reid (1987), this study applies bothquantitative and qualitative research methods, questionnaires and class recordings totrack the activities of47sophomore students from a basic English class in one collegein Chongqing, who are from different majors and different districts. Then all therecordings were decoded into texts and the specific evaluation standard was applied toevaluate them. Finally, by using SPSS17.0and Excel the distribution of students’perceptional learning styles and the relationship was analysed between learners’ learningstyles and their spoken English performances.The research results show that,(1) there indeed exist learning style differencesbetween research subjects. The descriptive statistics shows that most (45.5%) subjectsbelong to the visual learning type, and following is the mixed audio-visual students(22.7%), while pure auditory (2.3%) and haptic (9.0%) learning style students only takea small share;(2) The correlation analysis finds that there is no obvious relationshipbetween students’ learning styles and their spoken English performances; and (3) sixindividual interview are taken among several specific students about the factorsaffecting their spoken English in their minds. Factors such as the teachers themselves,the learning atmosphere and the talking subjects etc are the core ones affecting theirspeaking. This study points out that the improvement of students’ speaking ability cannot be achieved overnight, which needs to be paid attention to from childhood, and onlythrough the cooperation between family and school can students’ learning interest bestimulated, and can students’ consciousness be improved. Finally, students can formgood learning habits.