| In order to make students adapt to the development of society better,we should not only pay attention to students' academic performance,but also cultivate flexible thinking styles,promoting innovation.In traditional views,people who get great achievements have high ability.But in recent years,some scholars have found that thinking styles can influence students' academic performance significantly except for some traditional factors.American psychologist Sternberg(1997)considers thinking style as a way with which students use ability in learning.Besides,self-monitoring ability has attracted much attention in the second language learning.Those students who choose effective learning methods,finish tasks according to their plans,summarize and find their own shortcomings and remedy timely often can get better grades.Self-monitoring in learning mainly refers to a self-regulation and control for students' knowledge,emphasizing on the autonomous learning.Environment at college is free,students must enhance self-monitoring capability in order to get better development.This study mainly discusses the correlation among thinking styles,self-monitoring and English achievements of non-English major students with the research instruments,including the revised thinking style questionnaire designed by Sternberg and self-monitoring questionnaire designed by Dong Qi and Zhou Yong.In order to make students understand and answer questions better,both questionnaires are designed in Chinese.In order to keep the reliability and validity of English test,the author adopts CET-4to test students' English level.The subjects are 68 non-English major students at North University of China.The study aims to solve the following research questions:(1)What are the general characteristics of thinking styles among non-English majors and are there any correlations between thinking styles and English achievements?(2)What are the general characteristics of self-monitoring among non-English majors and are there any correlations between self-monitoring and English achievements?(3)Are there any correlations between thinking styles and self-monitoring?After collecting data,this study adopts social statistical software SPSS 17.0 to process the prepared data,mainly carrying on the descriptive statistics,Pearson correlation analysis and independent sample t-test.In the end,the conclusions are presented:(1)College students tend to use legislative,executive,hierarchical,external and liberal thinking styles.In specific,female students have higher scores mainly in executive,hierarchic,monarchic,local,internal and conservative styles while male students have higher scores mainly in legislative,judicial,anarchic,global,external and liberal styles.Thinking styles associate with English achievements partially.(2)College students' self-monitoring ability is in a medium level.Female students have higher scores in executing,feedback and compensation strategies while male students have higher scores in method and planning strategies.English achievements correlate with self-monitoring significantly and positively.(3)Thinking styles correlate with self-monitoring ability partially.Students with with executive,judicial,monarchic,hierarchic and internal styles have stronger self-monitoring while students with legislative,anarchic style,external style and liberal styles have lower self-monitoring level.The study provides a beneficial reference for our country's English teaching.Teachers should know their own thinking styles and help students choose suitable learning methods according to their own characteristics.And teachers should match their teaching methods to students' thinking styles.Students must adopt different thinking styles according to different situations and monitor their own English learning actively.Besides,teachers also should guide students to know how to conduct self-monitoring effectively in order to improve English grades. |
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