People are different and learn in different ways, of course, perhaps regardless of whatever unique language-specific mechanisms we might believe are at play in the process. It’s only natural, then, that the teacher should strive to meet her students’ learning styles in the best possible way.
Or is it?
I have spent most of my career being told that, in class, I should try to cater to as wide a range of learning styles as possible and that, indeed, makes a lot of sense. Visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners, for example, will benefit from different communication channels, so a lesson that tries to strike a balance between hearing, seeing and moving/touching is likely to help more students learn. That can hardly be disputed.
There’s one element of the learning styles equation, however, that still puzzles me.
Certain learning traits -let’s call it that- tend to impact students’ performance and perhaps ultimate level of achievement in very definite ways. Take field dependence and field independence, for example.
Field-dependent learners tend to pay less attention to form, rules and analysis. They tend to view language more globally and take the new input as it comes, if you will. Field-dependent learners will often (though not always, of course) want to get things done and get meaning across at the expense of accuracy.
A teacher who wishes to meet the student’s learning styles, in this case, might adopt a more “holistic” approach to input processing/language analysis and a more lenient attitude towards errors and lack of precision. But shouldn’t she be doing the exact opposite? Shouldn’t these students be shown how to process the input in a different way and be trained, for example, to break down language into small parts, monitor their speech and so on and so forth?
Similarly, field-independent students who are over-analytical and tend to favor form at the expense of meaning, analysis at the expense of synthesis and accuracy at the expense of fluency perhaps need a teacher who can show them new ways to process and use the language (new learning styles, if you will) and who can, for example, dissuade them from over analyzing.
So the point that I’m (tentatively) making is that, perhaps, when it comes certain learning styles, a little antagonism might actually be beneficial in the long run.
Thanks for reading.
If you enjoyed this post, try this one and this one, which also talk about different learning styles.
As a learner, what I’ve noticed is that my learning style has changed over the years for a number of personal reasons. For instance, I’ve become more confident, so I’m less hung up on the fear of making mistakes. I have also become less patient, which has resulted in wanting to put the message across more quickly and without worrying so much about form. So yes, at this stage of the game I’d probably benefit from a little exposure to some field-independent exercises.
On a different note, what I always found reassuring about teaching at a school was that, if I wasn’t very good at catering for one particular style, I could always fall back on my colleagues – one of them would.
Good food for thought as always, hun x
Eli,
So what you’re basically saying is that the deeper level emotional changes you went through somehow affected your learning style. Very interesting. Could it be, then, that field (in)dependence is less of a given than it’s often made out to be? Could it be that people’s degree of field (in)dependence can change over time, largely irrespective of what the teacher does in class? I would have to know a lot more about general education theories to answer these questions, but, as usual, what you’ve said has made me stop and think.
A lot.
Interesting discussion, Luiz and Eli. According to Brown (2000), “… cross-culturally, the extent of development of a FI/D style as children mature is a factor of the type of society and home in which the child is reared. Authoritarian or agrarian societies, which are usually highly socialized and utilize strict rearing practices, tend to produce more FD. A democratic, industrialized, competitive society with freer rearing norms tends to produce more FI persons.” That perhaps would account for Eli’s change over the years. It also made me stop and think. Best regards, Maria Rita
Thanks for stopping by, Maria Rita, and for the Brown quote, which I was unaware of. I’d never thought about field dependence and field independence as social constructs, so, again, thank you for the input. Very interesting.