Doing it with style(s)

All teachers are, or should be, aware that different people learn in different ways. Most language teachers over the age of 35 probably learned a language at school through mainly grammar and translation; that worked for us, but maybe not for most of the other kids in the class who were probably put off languages for life. The temptation is to conclude that successful learners had a different learning style from the unsuccessful ones, and therefore if we want our own students to do better than the generations that preceded them, we need to find out about our students learning styles and tailor our teaching accordingly. I worked in a Further Education College in England, and the first thing students would do with their tutor is take a questionnaire which, at the end, would tell them if thir style was “visual”, “audio” or “kinaesthetic”. This is common practice in England, and inspectors will want to see it happening.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Absolutely – until you take a closer look. Firstly, the conclusion from the grammar/translation class mentioned above isn’t the only one you can draw. Maybe the more successful learners were more hardworking, had better support at home, got on better with the teacher, had been promised a bike if they passed all their exams… There are all kinds of reasons why one learner will be more successful than another.

Secondly, and more importantly, the theory of learning styles is far more controversial than many of us realise. Professor Frank Coffield, then of Newcastle University, actually did some proper research into learning styles and identified 71 different theories. When he and his team studied 13 models in more detail, he found serious flaws in them (links below). He was also critical of the way they were being implemented. I recall a learning styles questionnaire that asked if students made audio recording of the lesson to play back later (Yes? You must be an auditory learner.). In all my time as a student and teacher, the only student I saw doing that was partially sighted. Just read this article in the Internet TESL Journal to see how many different models you can cram into just one article. Does anyone really take all these models into account when planning alesson?

For me, the question is this: Even if the model you happen to be using is the correct one (out of the 71 out there), what should you do with the information. Suppose you discover that you have 10 “visual” learners, 8 “auditory” and 2 “kinaesthetic”; do you dedicate 50% of your teaching to “visual” methods to fit the style of the majority? Do you try to add more “kinaesthetic” activities to encourage your ten “visuals” to adapt their learning and compensate for their “weakness”? Or do you just try to incorporate a wide variety of activities to stop the students getting bored, which is what you would have done anyway?

What’s more, by risking pigeon-holing your students, there’s the danger that some will go “This activity doesn’t fit my learning style” and switch off. If you create the expectation that everything you do will be tailored to them personally (which you can’t do unless it’s a one-to-one class), you risk encouraging the idea that the students don’t need to do anything like hard work because you’ll spoon feed them what they need. Whatever their learning style, successful students are the one who put the work in and take some responsibility.

So my advice is not to make your students waste time on questionnaires that look like a bad Facebook “What Frends character/superhero/nationality are you?” application. Just keep them busy and make your lessons as varied as possible. And remember that human beings are complicated.

Each to their own, The Guardian, 31 May 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/may/31/schools.uk3

Fashion victims: Could “learning styles” tests do more hard than good? , The Guardian, 4 May 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2004/may/04/furthereducation.uk1

Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning – A critical review https://crm.lsnlearning.org.uk/user/login.aspx?code=041543&P=041543PD&action=pdfdl&src=WEBGEN

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