ESL Teaching Styles and Learning Styles

All of us do not learn in the same way. Our personality, our way of thinking, our preferences for pictures, sounds or actions determine our learning style. Whether we want to learn a language like English or French or whether we want to learn car driving, motor racing or cooking delicious food, we can improve our performance by analysing our own learning styles. We can become efficient learners if we understand our way of learning, evaluate our own strengths and weaknesses, learn from past experiences to plan for the present and future and continuously try to become better learners with each experience of learning. Teachers do have their own preference for specific learning styles, and that influences their teaching styles. If they want to make their teaching more effective, they need to understand their students' learning styles and adapt their teaching strategies accordingly.

Everyone needs to learn how to learn. But teachers have to do something more. They also have to learn how to help others learn. Good teachers do more than this. They go one step further and help others learn how to learn.

Whether you are beginning an elearning program, teacher certificate course, a special program for disabled learners or a course for the corporate world, it is necessary to understand the particiants learning styles and your own teaching styles. If a team of people are involved in the courses whether they are formal degree programs or informal quality improvement programs, it is necessary to understand the teaching styles of all those who are asked to teach. A good balance can be arrived at by using the skills and preferences of different teachers.

Once the teachers are assigned to specific programs they need to find out answers to these questions:

What are the ways in which people learn?

What are the ways in which the particular age group of the students they teach learn?

What are their students' preferred ways of learning?

Then they need to find answers to a few introspective questions:

What are the ways in which teachers learn?

What are the ways in which a teacher of my context can learn?

What are my preferred learning styles?

What are my preferred teaching styles?

Putting these two together they should find ways of adapting their teaching styles to their students' learning styles. They also need to find ways of helping their students extend their horizon and learn to learn from styles other than their preferred ones.

There are a number of steps that are involved in adapting teaching strategies to learning styles of particular groups of learners.

Step 1: Identifying the learning styles of students

Step 2: Grouping them according to similar learning styles

Step 3: Identifying about 5 major styles of learning

Step 4: Planning classroom instruction according to these 5 styles of learning

Step 5: Preparing homework tasks which suit at least 10 learning styles and giving options to students

Step 6: collecting feedback from students

Step 7: Evaluating students' achievement through classroom observation and test performance

Step 8: Reflecting on the plan and evaluating classroom instructions based on students' performance & feedback

Step 9: Modifying and revising plans for future use

Step10: Replanning, teaching similar groups and reevaluation

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• Effective Learning