Styles and Strategies
Chapter 5
Terminological Distinctions
• Process
• Style
• Strategy
Process
• The most general of the three
concepts.
• It is characteristic of every human
being.
• It is a global account of how people
learn.
Style
• It refers to consistent and enduring tendencies
or preferences within an individual.
• Styles are those general characteristics of
intellectual functioning and personality type
that pertain to you as an individual.
• Styles vary inter-individually: from one
individual to another.
Strategies
• Strategies are specific methods of
approaching a problem or task.
• They are ways of achieving a particular end, or
solving a particular problem.
• Each one of us has a host of possible
strategies, which vary from moment to
moment, from one situation to another.
• Strategies vary intra-individually.
Learning Styles
• Definition:
Learning styles are cognitive, affective, and
physiological traits that are relatively stable
indicators of how learners perceive, interact with,
and respond to the learning situation.
Explanation: Your individual ways of learning which
are relatively stable (i.e. do not change much),
and which reflect your own personal cognitive,
affective, and physical characteristics.
Examples of Learning styles
Field Independence
• Your ability to
perceive a
particular item in a
“field” of
distracting items.
Field Dependence
• The tendency to
depend on the total
field, to the extent that
you do not perceive the
embedded parts.
• The total field is
perceived as a unified
whole.
Field Independence
• Advantage:
• It enables a person to
distinguish parts from a
whole, to concentrate on
details.
• Disadvantage:
A person sees only the parts,
fails to see the whole
picture.
Field dependence
• Advantage:
• It enables a person to
perceive (get) the whole
picture of a problem, an
idea, or an event.
• Disadvantage:
A person may get distracted
easily, and may not be able
to see details or variables.
Field Independence/Dependence and 2nd
language Learning
Field Independence
Field Dependence
• Closely related to
• More successful in
classroom learning
learning in natural
which involves
settings.
analysis, attention to
• Tend to prefer
details, exercises.
inductive
learning.
• Prefer deductive
types of learning
Conclusion
• Both styles are important.
• Brown maintains that F. independence/ dependence
do NOT need to be in complementary distribution.
• It is the burden of the teacher to understand the
preferred style of each learner to find the
appropriate way of presenting the material.
• There is also a burden on the learner to invoke the
appropriate style for the context.