An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of MI-based Teaching On English Performance Of Senior Two Students

According to the theory of multiple intelligences (MI) proposed by HowardGardner, everyone has relatively independent intelligences with their uniquecognitive development. In every teaching process, teachers can stimulate students’certain intelligence through the diversification of teaching methods by providingstudents with different MI-based activities. At the same time, instructors need totimely offer appropriate evaluation on students’ performance in order to promotetheir development of intelligences. Therefore, this study aims to know students’ MIprofiles and help them improve their English performance by giving availableinstruction in accordance with their aptitudes.The study selected40Senior Two students respectively from two art classes inLongchuan No.1Middle School of Guangdong Province as the participants to testifywhether MI-based instruction improves their English performance and MI profileswithin a year. During the experiment, MI-based instruction was given to participantsin the experimental group (N=40) while the control group was taught in a normalizedteaching. The results of pre-and post-MI questionnaires and two examinations werecollected. The statistical analyses adopted are Descriptive Statistics, PearsonCorrelation Analysis, Analysis of Covariance and Paired Samples T-test with the helpof IBM SPSS Statistics20and Microsoft Office Excel2007to analyze students’ MIprofiles, their performance in pre-and post-English tests and the relationshipbetween students’ MI and their English performance.This study produces the following findings:First, participants in the experimental group five of the seven intelligences havestrengthened while bodily/kinesthetic intelligence and musical intelligence decrease.There is a higher increase in linguistic, intrapersonal, logical/mathematical intelligences compared to other intelligences. The rate was improvedgreatly respectively in linguistic, intrapersonal, and logical/mathematicalintelligences, while the spatial and interpersonal intelligences were improvedslightly.Second, after a one-year MI-based instruction, students’ English performancehas significantly improved.Third, the correlation analysis shows that students’ performance in theexperimental class has low correlation with intrapersonal, spatial andbodily/kinesthetic intelligences. While linguistic, logical/mathematical, musical andinterpersonal intelligences have a negative correlation with students’ Englishperformance.