IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ LEARNING STYLE PREFERENCES AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR CRITICAL THINKING ABILITY

Pasher, McDaniel, Roher and Bjork (2009) believe that most people prefer an identifiable method of interacting with, taking in, and processing stimuli or information. Based on this concept, the idea of individualized learning styles originated in the 1970s, and acquired enormous popularity . Oxford (2003) believed that learning styles are the general approaches that learners utilize in acquiring a new language or in learning any other subjects. The four types of learners identified by Willing (1988) are concrete learners, analytical learners, communicative learners and authority-oriented learners. Willing (1988) emphasizes that understanding the students’ learning style preferences is helpful for teachers and educators because it enables them to match their teaching styles, methodologies, and course organization with learners’ learning styles to help learners improve their learning. Many studies have been done on learning style preferences. Shirani Bidabadi (2012) investigated Iranian EFL Freshman university students’ learning style and its relationship with English listening proficiency levels. The results of her study revealed that the communicative learning style is the most preferred learning style; besides, she found there was a significant positive correlation between the learners’ learning style preferences and their English listening proficiency levels. Torres and Cano (1995) found a moderately positive relationship between a student’s ability to think critically and the student’s learning style. Myers and Dyer (2006) studied the influence of learners’ learning style on critical thinking skill. The participants of their study were the students who enrolled in an agricultural leadership development course. The results showed that students with deeply embedded Abstract Sequential learning style preferences exhibited significantly higher critical thinking skill scores. As different studies indicate learning style and critcal thinking are among many important factors influencing learning and in particular language learning. A few studies have been done on the learning styles and its relationship with other factors in Iranian context. Therefore, the present study aims at exploring Iranian EFL learners’ learning style preferences and investigating the significant relationship (if any) between their learning style preferences and critical thinking ability. To this end ninety Iranian EFL students were selected. They were from University of Sistan and Baluchestan and Islamic Azad University of Zahedan. The data was collected through two questionnaires. The first was Willing’s learning style questionnaire which is a four-point Likert scale consisting of four categories (Communicative, Concrete, Authority- Oriented, and Analytical learners) with 24 items modified based on the Iranian EFL university students' learning. Its reliability using Cronbach Alpha was proved to be 0.844. The other instrument used for this study was the Persian version of a Critical Thinking Questionnaire including 30 multiple choice items. The critical thinking questionnaire was adopted from the thesis of Naeini (2005), which in turn was adapted from Honey (2004). The reliability of the questionnaire was found to be 0.86. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences, version 19, was applied for data analysis. Descriptive statistics of the data revealed that the most preferred learning style used by Iranian EFL learners was proved to be communicative learning style with the highest mean value of M= 18.84. Concrete learning style and analytical learning style were in the second and third ranks respectively, while authority oriented type of learning style had the lowest mean (16.51). This is consistent with the results of Ho’s (2009) and Shirini Bidabadi’s (2010) study which indicated that most Iranian students were communicative learners; and contradictory to the results of Liu’s (2008) study on students in Taipei which reported that authority-oriented type of learning styles was the highest with the mean score of 11.52 and communicative type of learning styles had the lowest mean score (M=8.87). For the second objective of this study the Pearson Correlation analysis showed that there was a statistically significant association between Iranian EFL learners’ communicative learning style and their critical thinking ability at p<0.01 significant level. Besides, analytical learning style was in statistically significant relationship with critical thinking (p<0.05). Studies done by Cano (1995) and Mayer and Dyer (2006) also confirmed the relationship between the learners’ learning styles and critical thinking ability. The study has some pedagogical implications for teachers, syllabus designers and learners which will be discussed in the paper.

کلیدواژه ها:

Learning style preferences ، Critical thinking skil ، EFL learners ،