Understanding The Effect Of English Majors' Language Learning Styles On Their Performance In Lexical Inference

Lexical inference means that learners of foreign languages infer the meaning of the new words based on such factors as available clues in the texts, learners' own world knowledge and their familiarity to the text and related linguistic knowledge.Lexical inference is shown as an effective method to help tackle new words, and plays an important role for learners to increase their vocabulary and comprehend reading materials. As such, studies of lexical inference earn a lot of attention of researchers in China and beyond. These studies suggest that in the course of learners' lexical inference, many factors affect their appropriate or correct inference. Among these factors, textual and learner factors have been widely researched in recent years,however, there are few researchers studying learners' learning styles. Therefore, the author, in this thesis, conducted an empirical research to explore the effect of English majors' language learning styles on their performance in lexical inference.This thesis intends to answer three research questions: 1) What kind of general learning style do English majors prefer? 2) Is there any correlation between English majors' learning styles and their performance in lexical inference? 3) Is there any difference between English majors' learning styles and their scores in lexical inference? In order to address these three questions, the author adopted a quantitative research by using a questionnaire survey and a lexical inference test. The participants were 160 English majors from Tianjin University of Science and Technology (TUST).A total number of 130 questionnaires and tests were checked to be valid. All quantitative data were dealt with under the help of software SPSS 19.0.The results revealed that English majors preferred visual, extrovert,intuitive-random, closure-oriented and analytic learning style. As for the correlation between learning styles and inference scores, there was a positive correlation between auditory learning style and inference scores, but the negative correlation between visual learning style and inference scores, so does hands-on learning style. In addition,open learning style was negatively correlated to inference scores as well. There was no significant correlation between other learning styles and inference scores. In the aspect of difference, it was found that the lexical inference performance of visual and auditory learners was higher than that of hands-on learners; closure-oriented and analytic learners respectively scored higher than open and global learners, and the difference was significant. Although English majors preferred intuitive-random learning style, inference scores of intuitive-random learners were significantly lower than that of concrete-sequential learners.The results of the study are beneficial for learners to comprehensively understand their learning styles,and students with different learning styles should communicate with each other in terms of lexical inference strategies,so that they could make a great progress. In addition, it provides the empirical data for teachers to adjust their teaching methods to learners' learning styles so as to improve students'learning.