An Exploration Of Junior Middle School Students' Learning Disabilities In English Learning Process

Learning disabilities(LD)mainly refers that students' intelligence is normal,but their academic performance is significantly inferior,which embodies that students may have some flaws in certain special abilities or learning skills(such as listening,speaking,reading,writing,spelling etc).Many scholars and experts have done a lot of researches in the area of LD,but they often only focus on the theoretical aspects,not from the actual situation of middle school students.So it is necessary to have an exploration of junior middle school students' learning disabilities in English learning process to provide some strategies to help students to overcome their English disabilities.Based on the former study,a questionnaire survey is carried out among 180 junior middle school students from Yongfeng Middle school to study their LD.The questionnaire is made based on Stephen B.McCarney(1988)Learning Disability Evaluation Scale-Student Version(LDES-SV).All of the outcomes were analyzed with the help of SPSS 16.0.(1)Descriptive statistics which consists of means and standard deviations was used to present the general features of junior middle school students' English LD.(2)An independent-sample T test was used to judge whether there were some differences in English LD between different genders.(3)In addition,the author also used correlation analysis to measure the correlation between LD and their English achievement.The findings of this research are listed as follows:Firstly,generally speaking,most of junior middle school students have relatively serious English LD.Speaking disability ranks first in the six sub-types LD,followed by listening disability,reading disability and logical thinking disability.Writing disability and spelling disability rank the last in the six sub-types LD.Secondly,female students show lower mean scores of all the six types of English LD than male students,and significant differences exist between female and male students in LD.In terms of six sub-types LD,there are significant differences between male and female students in listening disability,speaking disability and spelling disability.There are no significant differences between male and female students in logical thinking disability,reading disability and writing disability.Thirdly,the research shows that the students' English achievements have negative and significant correlation with LD.In addition,all of the six English LD have significant and negative correlation with students' English achievement,which means that the greater English LD the students have,the lower English final exam scores they may obtain.Some implications and suggestions for junior middle school students are presented based on the results of this research.