Psychology II
Learning Styles and Strategies
Who was your favorite teacher?
Did s/he influence your decision of becoming a
teacher?
What did he do that made him a good teacher?
What were you like as a language learner?
How do you react when you face a problem? When there is an unexpected
change of plans? When other people don’t do what you expect them to
do? When you get angry? When there is something that causes a lot of joy
in you?
What do you need to do in order to learn something?
What “strategies” do you use to learn new information? Do you always
use the same “strategies”?
What were you like as a foreign language student? What difficulties did
you have to learn the language? What strategies did you use to learn it?
Styles and Strategies
Processes
Style:
Intellectual functioning
that make you different
from others.
Strategies:
methods of
approaching a problem
or task
Learning Styles
Cognitive style  learning style
cognitive, affective, and physiological traits that are
relatively stable indicators of how learners
perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning
environment.
a general predisposition, voluntary or not, toward
processing information in a particular way.
People’s styles are determined by the way
they internalize their total environment, and
since the internalization process is not strictly
cognitive, we find that physical, affective, and
cognitive domains merge in learning styles.
FI / D
Represents the ability to perceive
particular, relevant items or factors in
a “field” of distractive items
Enables you to distinguish parts from
a whole, to concentrate on
something, to analyze separate
variables without the contamination
of neighbouring variables
The tendency to be “dependent” on
the total field so that the parts
embedded within the field are not
easily perceived, although that total
field is perceived more clearly as a
unified whole
Field dependence is synonymous
with field sensitivity.
Too much FI may result in cognitive
“tunnel vision”
You perceive the whole picture
FI tends to be generally more
independent, competitive, and selfconfident
FD people tend to be more socialized,
to derive their self-identity from
persons around them, and are usually
more empathic and perceptive of the
feelings and thoughts of others.
FI/D in language learning
It is closely related to
classroom learning
It involves analysis,
attention to details, and
mastering of exercises, drills
and other focused activities.
By virtue of these people’s
empathy, social outreach,
and perception of other
people, they’re successful in
earning the communicative
aspects of a second
language
They seek natural, face-toface communication
Left- and Right-brain functioning
The left hemisphere is associated with logical,
analytical thought, and with mathematical and linear
processing of information.
The right hemisphere perceives and remembers
visual, tactile, and auditory images; it is more
efficient in processing holistic, integrative, and
emotional information
Left-brained / Right-brained
They prefer a deductive
style of teaching, better at
producing separate words,
gathering the specifics of
language, carrying out
sequences of operations,
and dealing with
abstraction, classification,
labelling, and reorganization
They appear to be more
successful in an inductive
classroom environment,
deal better with whole
images, generalizations,
metaphors, emotional
reactions, and artistic
expressions.
Ambiguity Tolerance
The person who is tolerant of ambiguity is free
to entertain a number of innovative and creative
possibilities and not be cognitively or affectively
disturbed by ambiguity and uncertainty.
In there are words that differ from the native
language, rules that not only differ but that are
internally inconsistent because of certain
“exceptions,” and sometimes a whole cultural
system that is distant from that of the native
culture.
Successful language learning necessitates
tolerance of such ambiguities.
On the other hand, too much tolerance of
ambiguity can have a detrimental effect. People
can become “wishy-washy” accepting virtually
every proposition before them, not efficiently
subsuming necessary facts into their cognitive
organizational structure.
Intolerance of ambiguity also has its advantages
and disadvantages.
Certain intolerance enables one to guard against
the wishy-washiness, to close off avenues of
hopeless possibilities, to reject entirely
contradictory material, and to deal with the
reality of the system that one has built.
But intolerance can close the mind too soon,
especially if ambiguity is perceived as a threat;
the result is a rigid, dogmatic, brittle mind that
is too narrow to be creative. This may be
particularly harmful in second language
learning.
It has been found that ambiguity tolerance can
predict the success of language learners.
Impulsivity and Reflectivity
There are two styles that are closely related to
the reflectivity/impulsivity (R/I) dimension:
intuitive and systematic styles.
An intuitive style implies an approach in which a
person makes a number of different gambles on
the basis of “hunches,” with possibly several
successive gambles before a solution is
achieved.
Teachers tend to judge mistakes too harshly,
especially in the case of a learner with an
impulsive style who may be more willing than a
reflective person to gamble at an answer. It is
also conceivable that those with impulsive styles
may go through a number of rapid transitions of
semigrammatical stages of SLA, with reflective
persons tending to remain longer at a particular
stage with “larger” leaps from stage to stage.
Systematic thinkers tend to weigh all the
considerations in a problem, work out all the
loopholes, and then, after extensive reflection,
venture a solution. Reflective students are
slower but more accurate than impulsive
students in reading.
the other hand, a reflective person may require
patience from the teacher, who must allow
more time for the student to struggle with
responses.
Visual and Auditory
Another dimension of learning style is the preference that
learners show toward either visual or auditory input.
Visual learners tend to prefer reading and studying charts,
drawings, and other graphic information, while
auditory learners prefer listening to lectures and audiotapes.
Most successful learners utilize other visual and auditory
input, but slight preferences one way or the other may
distinguish one learner from another, an important factor for
classroom instruction.
STRATEGIES
Strategies
Learning
Strategies
Communication
Strategies
Learning Strategies
Styles are general characteristics that differentiate one
individual from another; strategies are those specific “attacks”
that we make on a given problem.
The field of second language acquisition has distinguished
between two types of strategy: learning strategies and
communication strategies.
The former relate to input –to processing, storage, and
retrieval, that is, to taking in messages from others. The latter
pertain to output, how we productively express meaning, how
we deliver messages to others. .
Learning Strategies
Language learning strategies into three main categories:
– Metacognitive strategies indicate an “executive” function, strategies
that involve planning for learning, thinking about the learning process
as it is taking place, monitoring of one’s production or comprehension,
and evaluating learning after an activity is completed.
– Cognitive strategies are limited to specific learning tasks and involve
more direct manipulation of the learning material itself.
– Socioaffective strategies have to do with social mediating activity and
interacting with others (see page 125)
Two major forms of strategy use have been documented:
classroom-based or textbook-embedded training, now called
strategies-based instructor , and autonomous self-help
training. Both have been demonstrated to be effective for
various learners in various contexts.
Communication Strategies
Learning strategies deal with the receptive domain of
intake, memory storage, and recall.
Communication strategies pertain to the
employment of verbal or nonverbal mechanisms for
the productive communication of information.
Communication strategies are “potentially conscious
plans for solving what to an individual presents itself
a problem in reaching a particular communicative
goal. (see page 128)
STRATEGIES-BASED INSTRUCTION
Two major forms of strategy use have been documented: classroom-based
or textbook-embedded training, now called strategies-based instructor ,
and autonomous self-help training. Both have been demonstrated to be
effective for various learners in various contexts.
Strategies-based instruction is the result of the application of learning and
communication strategies to classroom learning. The key is to offer the
learner autonomy, and one of the most important goals of language
teaching should be the facilitation of that autonomy.
Several different models of SBI are now being practiced in language
classes around the world.
Teachers need to help students to become aware of their own style
preferences and the strategies that are derived from those styles. Through
checklists, tests, and interviews, teachers can become aware of students’
tendencies and then offer advice on beneficial in-class and extra-class
strategies.
Teachers can embed strategy awareness and practice into
their pedagogy. As they utilize techniques as communicative
games, rapid reading, fluency exercises, and error analysis,
teachers can help students consciously and unconsciously to
practice successful strategies.
Certain compensatory techniques are sometimes practiced to
help students overcome certain weaknesses.
Textbooks include strategy instruction as part of a contentcentred approach (see pages 132 - 135)