A Correlation Study On College EFL Students’ Thinking Style, Listening Strategy And Listening Achievement

With the implementation of quality education, educational experts and scholars areseeking the way to improve students’ listening achievements from different angles. We notonly must respect the students’ personality, but also concern about the students’ developmentin an all-around way, making students learn how to study, explore and solve learningproblems independently. Generally speaking, it ascribes the interpretation of students’academic success or failure to the differences of student’s abilities. However, the academicachievement between two students who have the same abilities may be very different. One ofpossible reasons is that their abilities are applied to different ways, in other words, theirlearning styles are different. At the same time, learning style is thinking style which reflectedin the study area. Cognitive style has huge significance in educational theory and practice.Yale University, R.J. Sternberg proposed the latest theories on the development of cognitivestyle--the concepts and theories of thinking style.The survey was conducted mainly through tests and questionnaires to find out therelationship of thinking style, listening strategy and listening achievement. The subjects in thesurvey were190medical major sophomores in Hebei Medical University. The thinking styleQuestionnaire was designed based on Sternberg’s thinking style questionnaire. In the currentstudy, some revisions were also made to the questionnaire. The listening strategyquestionnaire was designed on the basis of Andrew D. Cohen, Rebecca L. Oxford and JulieC. Chi’s Questionnaire. The listening comprehension test in CET-4in June,2008wasemployed. With the help of the statistical software SPSS13.0，the descriptive analysis andcorrelation were used to analyze the responses of the tests and the questionnaire. The researchhas integrated psychological study, teaching methodology and testing method.This study draws the conclusion: some items of thinking styles had significant correlationwith listening achievements; the listening strategies had definite correlation with listeningachievements; some items of thinking styles had significant correlation with some items oflistening strategies. In this research not only the Pearson’s correlation be used to analyze thecorrelation between each two variables, but also the independent sample test was applied tothis analysis from the gender and the difference of scores of the students. College students should be good at exploring and being familiar with theirown thinking styles. Take good use of these styles to choose suitable listeningstrategies. Finally, they will step to successful future. At the same time, notonly teachers instill the knowledge, but also fully recognize the matchingbetween their teaching styles and students’ thinking styles. It is a good wayto improve teaching effects of English listening. The result of the present study willmake contributions to the development and improvement of classroom teaching and testing.Pay more attention to the matching of learner’s thinking style, learning style and instructor’steaching style. The research also sheds light on the cultivating students’ creative abilities.