Methodology in Language Learning: WHAT ARE LEARNING STYLES?

As is the case with a number of ID variables that turn out to be problematic under close scrutiny, learning styles can initially be defined in a seemingly straightforward and intuitively convincing manner. According to the standard definition, they refer to “an individual’s natural, habitual, and preferred way(s) of absorbing, processing, and retaining new information and skills”. The concept represents a profile of the individual’s approach to learning, a blueprint of the habitual or preferred way the individual perceives, interacts with, and responds to the learning environment.

 

Learning styles are an appealing concept for educationalists because—unlike abilities and aptitudes—they do not reflect innate endowment that automatically leads to success. That is, styles are not yet another metaphor for distinguishing the gifted from the untalented but rather they refer to personal preferences. These preferences are typically bipolar, representing a continuum from one extreme to another (e.g., being more global vs. being more particular) and no value judgment is made about where a learner falls on the continuum: One can be successful in every style position—only in a different way. Thus, ideally, the concept of learning styles offers a “value neutral approach for understanding individual differences among linguistically and culturally diverse students”.

 

In reality, however, this neutral status does not always apply to all the style dimensions because certain learning styles correlate more highly than others with desired aspects of language performance in specific settings.

 

First, what is the relationship between learning styles and learning strategies? The two concepts are thematically related since they both denote specific ways learners go about carrying out learning tasks. The main difference between the two concepts lies in their breadth and stability, with a style being a “strategy used consistently across a class of tasks”.

 

Styles operate without individual awareness, whereas strategies involve a conscious choice of alternatives. Although the two terms are often mixed up, “strategy is used for task- or context, dependent situations, whereas style implies a higher degree of stability falling midway between ability and strategy.” The styles are stable and have a cross-situational impact sounds convincing but if we take a closer look we find that there is a definite interaction between styles and situations.

 

Furthermore, the stability aspect of styles has also been questioned when researchers found that early educational experiences do shape one’s individual learning styles by instilling positive attitudes toward certain sets of learning skills and, more generally, by teaching students how to learn. The minority learning styles are more firmly set and are therefore more than mere preferences. They do not have the flexibility to change or shift their employed style according to the demands of the situation, and this may land them in trouble.

 

How do learning styles relate to personality? This, again, is a source of controversy, because some well-known psychological constructs are sometimes referred to as learning styles and sometimes as personality dimensions. The dimension of extraversion–introversion is a good example, as this popular dichotomy.  Indeed, learning styles appear to have very soft boundaries, making the category rather open-ended, regardless of which perspective we approach it from.

 

The natural question to ask, then, is this: Do learning styles really exist? Are they independent individual difference factors or is the term merely a convenient way of referring to certain patterns of information-processing and learning behaviors whose antecedents lie in a wide range of diverse factors, such as varying degrees of acquired abilities and skills, idiosyncratic. Frankly, We still do not know enough about the exact psychological mechanisms that make up the process that we usually conveniently refer to as ‘learning’ to be able to say that learning styles have definite neuropsychological validity and relevance to this process. The problem is that learning—and consequently the related concept of learning styles—is associated at the same time with perception, cognition, affect, and behavior, and a term that cuts across these psychologically distinct categories does not lend itself to rigorous definition.

 

If learning style is represented as aprofile of the individual’s approach to learning, this profile can be seen to comprise two fundamental levels of functioning: The first is cognitive, referring to a stable and internalized dimension related to the way a person thinks or processes information; the second is the level of the learning activity, which is more external and embraces less stable functions that relate to the learner’s continuing adaptation to the environment. It follows from this distinction that the core of a learning style is the ‘cognitive style,’ which can be seen as a partially biologically determined and pervasive way of responding to information and situations; and when such cognitive styles are specifically related to an educational context and are intermingled with a number of affective, physiological, and behavioral factors, they are usually more generally referred to as learning styles.

 

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University of Oxford - post gradual studies 2009 'English Language Teaching'

 

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