A Study On English Learning Style Differences Between Urban And Rural Junior School Students

In recent decades, as the focus of the research of foreign language acquisition has gradually been shifted from the teaching methodology to individual differences of learners, the issue of how to carry "students-centered" teaching and how to teach according to personality-related variables draw more and more attention of many researchers. Learning style as one factor of the individual differences also took many researchers’ attention.Thus, Western and Chinese scholars carried out a large number of empirical studies on learning style. But both at home or abroad, almost these researches mainly took college students, adults as their subjects. And few researches took the middle school students, especially the urban and rural junior students as their subjects, let alone the study on their learning style difference. In order to know about the English learning style difference between the junior students in urban and rural areas, and find out whether the urban and rural junior school students’different English achievements could be significantly influenced by their learning style preferences, the author carries out a research on the urban and rural junior school students, who are from four different locations in Panyu District in Guangzhou city. In this research, Reid’s2002self-reporting questionnaire of learning styles is mainly used to get the information about the subjects’ learning style differences. The subjects of this research consist of951junior-school students, including Junior One, Junior Two and Junior Three.481of them are from Urban Junior Schools including Qiaocheng Middle School(a key school) and Panyu Experimental Middle School(a non-key school), and470are from Rural Junior Schools, including Dagang Middle School(a key school) and Tanshan Middle School(a non-key school). The reason for choosing these four kinds of junior schools as samples is that:two schools lying in the city center represent the urban schools, and the other two lying in the rural area represent the rural schools. Besides, each kind of school includes a key school and a non-key school. So they have a certain representative and can reflect the difference between urban and rural areas in Panyu District to some extent. To reduce the experimental error,40random samples of cases of each grade in each school are selected by means of Select Cases in SPSS from the911valid questionnaires. So the total questionnaires for analysis are480in this study. The study is also based on the English final examination, which was given to the students from all around Panyu District at the end of the first semester in2010, to analyze the different correlations between English achievements and English learning styles in urban and rural junior schools. In this research, the findings are as follows:Firstly, according to the subscale standard score of English learning style, overall English learning styles of junior school students in urban and rural areas are in a reasonable level. The students with middle level of learning style constitute the most part, only a few students with strong or weak level of English learning style. From the distribution point, overall English learning styles in the urban and rural areas show normal distribution approximately.Secondly, there exist extremely significant differences of the students’English learning style between the urban area and rural area. The students’English learning style in the rural junior schools is more obvious than that in the urban junior schools. Generally speaking, in the sensory learning style, there are significant differences in the preferences for auditory style and hands-on style between the two areas. The students in rural area tend to like auditory style and hands-on style. Besides, it is not great different between urban and rural areas in the preference for personality style, but comparing the means of these styles, the students in urban area prefer individual style, while the students in rural area tend to like cooperative style. As for the cognitive learning style, there exist significant differences between urban area and rural area. The students in urban area prefer reflective style, while the students in rural area favor impulsive learning style.Thirdly, as to the different correlations between English achievements and English learning styles in urban and rural junior schools, reflective learning style has positive correlation with English achievements both in urban and rural areas. But impulsive learning style has negative correlation with English achievements in rural area.Based on the results of the research, some suggestions for Junior Middle school English teaching and learning are proposed at the end of the thesis. It is hoped that the study may benefit the students’ English learning, teachers’teaching and enrich the research in the field of individual differences as well.