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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