On Learning Styles, English Reading Strategies And Achievements For Rural Students

In recent years, researchers and teachers have realized that it is learners instead of teachers that play a dominant role in language learning and they have now studied the effects of individual learner differences. Learner differences consist of many variables. According to Ehrman and Oxford(1990), the most effective language learning is inseparable from mutual coordination of the learning styles and learning strategies, so two of these variables will be explored in the present study, namely, learning styles and reading strategies. Productive researches have been done in the two variables. However, a majority of these researches are carried out among college students or senior middle school students. No researches among rural students from junior middle school have been done so far on the relationships between learning styles and the reading strategies together with English reading achievements. Reading is an essential way for junior high school students to learn English. Therefore, it is valuable and meaningful to investigate the issue for rural English teaching in China.The instruments used in quantitative approach are Oxford’s Style Analysis Survey(SAS), Reading Strategy Questionnaire(RSQ) and Reading Achievement Test(RAT). The qualitative data was collected by interview. It aims to supplement the quantitative statistics. Theparticipants involved are 249 rural students from four classes of a junior middle school in Guangdong Province. The following are the research questions that will be answered in this study.(1) What are learning style preferences of the rural students?(2) What are the frequencies of the rural students’ English reading strategies?(3) What is the relationship between the rural students’ learning styles, reading strategies and their reading achievements?Through data analysis, the following five conclusions were drawn in the study.(1) For the participants’ sensory learning styles, 26.9% of the students are visual while 20.8% auditory and 15.5% hands-on styles. It indicates that rural students prefer visual styles, followed by auditory, and hands-on style is the least preferred.For the students’ personality learning styles, there are 110(44.9%) extroverted students, 113(46.1%) introverted students and 22(9.0%) mixed styles students.In terms of cognitive learning styles, intuitive style(Percent=58.0), open style(Percent=53.1) and global style(Percent=54.3) are preferred among rural students in junior school.(2) The frequency of the participants’ overall English reading strategies is 2.8112; the frequency of metacognitive strategy use is 2.6276;cognitive strategy use 2.9970; affective/social strategy use 2.6604. This indicates that rural students’ reading strategy use is at a medium-to-low level. Of the 35 items in the reading strategy questionnaire, 6 items are most highly used while 13 items are the least preferred. Cognitive strategies are the most preferred by the participants comparing with metacognitive and affective/social strategies.(3) Three of the eleven types of learning styles, namely, closure-oriented, visual and auditory styles have significant correlation(p<0.01) with overall reading strategy use. However, four types of learning style, which are hands-on, extroverted, intuitive and analytic styles, show no correlation with any reading strategies. Introverted, sequential, open and global types are negatively though insignificantly correlated with the three groups of reading strategies, which means the four types may hinder strategy use to some extent. By analyzing the overall reading strategy use frequency among different levels of learning styles, we found that the more obvious the rural students’ learning styles are, the more frequently they use reading strategies.Of the eleven types of learning styles, only visual style(r=0.167**) significantly correlates with English reading achievements. Between high- and low-proficiency students, visual style in the eleven types of styles again shows significant difference at.028 level. Visual learningdoes play a significant role in language learning for rural middle school students. Compared with low-proficiency students, high-proficiency students are stronger visual learners.Reading achievements have significantly positive correlations with overall reading strategy use(r=0.420**, p<0.01), metacognitive strategy use(r=0.383**, p<0.01), cognitive strategy use(r=0.414**, p<0.01) and affective/social strategy use(r=0.230**, p<0.01). The difference in strategy use frequencies between high- and low-proficiency students is significant(p<0.01). The higher achievements the rural students achieve, the more frequently they use reading strategies. Students with high proficiency do better in applying metacognitive strategies to reading tasks than low-proficiency students.The present study gives a detailed discussion about the findings of the study. Based on the findings, it attempts to introduce reading strategy instruction into English reading classroom according to rural students’ different learning styles. It is wished to be of some help in English teaching and learning though the study has its limitations.