A Study On Middle School Students’ English Perceptual Learning Style Preferences

In recent decades, modern education develops rapidly. Once the concept of “individualized instruction” has been put forward, it caught great concerns. Meanwhile, in the field of second/foreign language teaching, more and more researchers realized the significance of individual differences and shifted their research focus to the study of “learners”, because of the prevailing of “student-centered” teaching mode. As an important component of individual differences, the study of learning styles is the basement and prerequisite to realize the individualized instruction for teachers.Nowadays, though individualized instruction has drawn much attention of researchers, few teachers adopt their teaching strategies based on their students’ learning style preferences. Besides, the correlational researches mostly focus on college students. The researches about middle school students are insufficient.Therefore, 420 students and their English teachers from two different middle schools were chosen as the research subjects. And the research questions include:(1) What is the general situation of perceptual learning style preferences among senior school students?(2) What are the learning style differences between senior middle school students and junior middle school students, male and female students, and between students with different learning achievements?(3) How is the situation about teachers’ teaching strategy preference?(4) What is the matching degree between the teachers’ teaching strategies and the students’ learning styles and how to improve the improper teaching strategies?For answering these questions, the thesis adopted various methods, namely, questionnaire, classroom observation, as well as interview. Based on Reid’s theory of perceptual learning style, this thesis adopted “the perceptual learning style preference questionnaire” to survey 420 students from two different middle schools. Meanwhile, according to Tan Dingliang’s theory and the structure of “the perceptual learning style preference questionnaire”, this thesis developed the classroom observation table. And in order to make the teachers’ instructional strategy preferences more accurate, the author also interviewed the teachers after the classroom observation.This research has found that kinesthetic and tactile learning styles are the most welcomed learning styles of students. The visual style and auditory style are most students’ minor learning style preferences. And students’ preference to the group learning style is the lowest. Students with different ages, learning achievements have significant differences on learning style preferences. The learning style preferences of male and female students only have significant differences in visual and auditory dimensions. Students’ individual learning style is respectively negative correlate with students’ group and kinesthetic learning styles, but the correlation didn’t reach the significant level. At last, the teachers’ instructional strategies didn’t match students’ learning style preferences in most dimensions, because they prefer to use visual and auditory strategies mostly and hardly use tactile or kinesthetic teaching strategies. According to this, this thesis made a series of suggestions to the teachers about how to match their teaching strategies with their students’ learning style preferences.