학습 스타일, 외국어 학습 전략, 구동사 성취도간의 관계에 대한 연구

Abstract

Abstract

The major purposes of this study were (1) to examine Korean college students’ learning styles as a predictor of their achievement in learning English phrasal verbs, (2) to investigate Korean college students’ learning strategies as a predictor of their achievement in learning English phrasal verbs, and (3) to examine the relationships among learning styles, learning strategies and achievement in learning English phrasal verbs. To answer these questions, 89 students who studied English phrasal verbs during the fall semester of 2013 participated in the study. The participants took two achievement tests (a midterm and a final) during the course, and were asked to complete three sets of surveys just before the final. The first two sets of surveys were designed to measure the participants’ learning styles, utilizing instruments adapted from the Learning Style Survey (LSS) developed by Cohen, Oxford and Chi’ (2001) and Willing’s study on four learning styles (1989). The last set of surveys measured the participants’ learning strategies, utilizing the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) developed by Oxford (1990). SPSS 20 and Amos 20 were used for the statistical analysis of the data. The analyses included descriptive analyses, reliability analyses, and correlation analyses. A factor analysis was also conducted to investigate the construct validity of the LSS, Willing’s styles and the SILL. The results revealed two factors in the LSS: synthesizing style and auditory style, three factors in Willing’s learning styles: communicative style, concrete style and authority-oriented style, and four factors in the SILL: social strategy, metacognitive strategy, memory strategy, and cognitive strategy. Subsequently, the factors were put into multiple regression analysis and SEM(Structural Equation Model) analysis in order to analyzes the causal relations among the variables. Auditory learning style and communicative learning style, however, were excluded from the analyses because the values of Cronbach’s alpha for the two factors were lower than the threshold (.60) for a significant level of internal consistency. The results of the statistical analysis of this study indicated that 1) There was no significant relationship between learning style and achievement in learning English phrasal verbs; 2) There was no significant relationship between learning strategy and achievement in learning English phrasal verbs; 3) Synthesizing learning style affected both direct strategy (memory strategy and cognitive strategy) and indirect strategy (social strategy and metacognitive strategy), and that direct strategy affected achievement in learning English phrasal verbs, which implied that synthesizing learning style affected achievement in learning English phrasal verbs when mediated by direct strategy. In other words, the achievement in learning English phrasal verbs was high among the synthesizing learning style students when they adopted cognitive and memory learning strategy. The data collected by the survey questionnaire that asked the participants’ preferred learning style and learning strategy showed that the most preferred strategy was memorization and that the most preferred way of learning English phrasal verbs was studying based on linguistic principles. The open-ended survey data were consistent with the statistical analysis in that the memorization and cognitive (understanding the linguistic principles) strategy were related to a high level of achievement in learning English phrasal verbs. The participants’ answers about their effective learning strategy included “studying example sentences”, “memorizing after listening to an explanation”, “using phrasal verbs in the conversation”, and “using various types of media.” Some answered “I don't know.” The result of this study have some important pedagogical implications concerning effective ways of learning English phrasal verbs: 1) Learning style might not be a significant predictive variable for achievement in learning English phrasal verbs. 2) Synthesizing style, when mediated by the “direct” learning strategy, might have an indirect effect on achievement in learning English phrasal verbs. 3) There could be a significant relationship between learning style and learning strategy, which is consistent with the findings of previous studies. 4) Direct learning strategies such as memory and cognitive strategy seems to have a positive impact on learning achievement. The former is the most familiar learning strategy among the students while the latter is related to understanding the linguistic principles of English phrasal verbs.