AN EXPLORATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ LEARNING STYLE PREFERENCES AND THEIR READING COMPREHENSION ABILITY

سال انتشار: 1392
نوع سند: مقاله کنفرانسی
زبان: انگلیسی
مشاهده: 1,374

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شناسه ملی سند علمی:

TELT01_387

تاریخ نمایه سازی: 28 آذر 1392

چکیده مقاله:

Learning styles are various approaches or ways of learning. They involve educating methods, particular to an individual, that are presumed to allow the individual to learn best. The idea of individualized learning styles originated in the 1970s . Stewart and Felicetti (1992) define learning styles as those educational conditions under which a student is most likely to learn . Perice (2000) with a little different perspective clarifies learning style as the way a student prefers in learning materials. Thus, learning styles are not really concerned with what learners learn, but rather how they prefer to learn. Oxford (2003) believes that learning styles are the general approaches that learners utilize in acquiring a new language or in learning any other subjects. Different scholars identify different categoties for learning styles. Willing (1988) identifies the four types of learners as concrete learners, analytical learners, communicative learners and authority-oriented learners. 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 no significant difference between male and female learners’ learning style prefernces; and there was a significant positive correlation between the learners’ learning style preferences and their English listening proficiency levels. However, a few studies have been done on the learning styles and its relationship with linguistic skills in Iranian context. Therefore, the present study aims at investigating the significant relationship (if any) between Iranian EFL learners’ learning style preferences and their reading comprehension ability. It furthermore tries to investigate if there is any significant difference between male and female learners’ learning style preferences. 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 a learning style questionnaire and a reading comprehension test. Willing’s learning style questionnaire 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 a TOEFL reading comprehension test including six passages with 30 multiple-choice questions. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences, version 19, was applied for data analysis. The Pearson Product-moment Correlation analysis showed that there were statistically significant association between Iranian EFL learners’ learning styles and their reading comprehension ability at p<0.01 significant level. The Pearson correlations for communicative, concerete, athority-oriented, and analytical learning style were 0.592, 0.519, 0.402, 0.394 respectively. Besides, the independent samples t-Tests for gender differences in learning style preferences showed that there is no significant difference between male and female EFL learners’ learning style preferences. This is consistent with the results of Ho’s (2009) and Shirini Bidabadi’s (2010) study which indicated that there is no significant difference between male and female learners’ learning style preferences. The results of the present study have many pedagogical implications which can be beneficial for teachers, syllabus designers and learners

نویسندگان

Giti Mousapour Negari

Assistant Professor in TEFL, Faculty of Humanities, University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Zahedan, Iran

Ezzat Barghi

MA. Student, Faculty of Humanities, University of Sistan & Balouchestan, Zahedan