The Relationship between Learning Styles and Foreign Language Learning

Nowadays, more and more people think education should focus on how students learn rather than how teachers teach. This kind of “student-oriented” education brings about some studies about students’ learning styles. Learning styles play an important role in language learning. This paper reviews some different definitions of learning styles, some factors that are related to learning styles, and several studies about some learning outcomes and academic performances resulting from different learning styles. By analyzing the results from different learning styles, the researcher tries to find out the relationship between learning styles and language learning, which is aimed at helping students learn a foreign language easier and better as well as giving teachers some implications about how to teach students with different learning styles. In this research, the researcher focuses on perceptual learning styles which contain visual, auditory, and tactile learning styles, finding that they all have some effects on language proficiency and influence language learners’ academic performances in different ways. This paper contributes to present some earlier research on learning styles and the acquisition of foreign languages and examine how the two relate.