A Study On The Correlation Between College Non-english Majors’ English Learning Styles And Sex Roles

Learning style refers to individual learner’s characteristics during the process of their learning. Studying on this topic can not only help learners realize their characteristics and conditions in English learning, but also guide teachers to adjust their teaching methods to suit students’needs and create a teaching-learning style matching learning environment. Unlike sex, dividing people into male or female biologically, sex role is a multidimensional construct, including a wide range of sex related personality traits, values, activity preferences, etc. It categorizes individual people into different types according to the social expectation towards males or females. Therefore, sex role divides people mainly from the psychological perspective.168non-English major sophomores from three universities in Urumqi Xinjiang took part in the research. In the present study, Reid’s Perceptual Learning Style Preference questionnaire (PLSPQ) is adopted to investigate students’preferred way of English learning. PLSPQ classifies people’s learning styles into six categories:visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, group and individual. Besides, Sex Role Inventory for Chinese College Students (CSRI), established by Qian Mingyi and her colleagues in2000, is employed to investigate students’sex role identities.100adjectives in CSRI chosen on the basis of sex stereotype and social desirability are used to categorize students into four types:masculine (having more male traits and less female traits), feminine (having more female traits and less male traits), androgynous (possessing both male and female traits), and undifferentiated (having less male and female traits). Apart from the quantitative study, the paper also adopts interview as the qualitative research method to investigate students’ learning style preferences. After the collection of data, SPSS18.0was implemented to analyze the collected data. Conclusions are drawn as follows:1.Among the four types of sex roles, namely, masculine, feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated, all the Chinese college non-English majors investigated are distributed rather evenly. Androgynous learners (31%) are ranked first and feminine ones (19%) last. Compared with the male college non-English majors, the distribution of the four types of sex role is relatively even among the female college non-English majors. Meanwhile, there is incongruity between college non-English majors’physical sex and sex role. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate Chinese college non-English majors’ sex from psychological perspective.2.Chinese college non-English majors prefer to learn in a variety of learning styles. Among the perceptual learning styles, students prefer kinesthetic and visual styles most while auditory style least. Of the six types of perceptual learning styles, masculine students prefer tactile and kinesthetic learning most, and disfavor auditory and individual learning most; compared with masculine students, feminine students like individual and visual learning styles most, and their least preferred learning styles are group and kinesthetic; students of androgynous type prefer kinesthetic and group learning styles most, and auditory and individual learning styles least; undifferentiated students like individual and kinesthetic learning styles most, and dislike tactile and group learning styles most.3.Students of different sex role types differ significantly in learning style preferences. On the whole, undifferentiated learners are more visual but less kinesthetic than androgynous learners, masculine learners are more group-oriented than undifferentiated learners, and feminine learners are more individual than undifferentiated learners. There is no other significant difference among the four types of students.4.Both masculinity and femininity are correlated with some kinds of learning styles, but masculinity’s correlation is more significant than femininity. Masculinity is closely correlated with kinesthetic, tactile, and group learning styles; and femininity is correlated with visual, group, and individual learning styles.Based on these findings, some suggestions are given:language teachers should eliminate their stereotyped perceptions about learners’ sex differences in English learning when designing learning tasks; teachers should raise their awareness of sex role types and learning style preferences and help their learners be aware of their types of sex role and their preferred ways of learning; teachers should also diversify their teaching styles to meet the needs of different characteristics. Thereby, a real learner-autonomic learning environment could be created.