Matching and stretching learners' learning styles

Creating and sustaining learners’ active involvement in learning requires an understanding of their learning style preferences. Through a questionnaire survey and participant observations, this study sought to explore the extent to which teachers understand their students’ language learning styles as well as teacher-student style mismatches in Vietnamese EFL classrooms, which have brought about students’ dissatisfaction and low performance. The study found Vietnamese EFL learners more intuitive than sensing, more visual than verbal, more active than reflective, and more sequential than global. After matching the distribution of learning styles, this action research applied the multi-style teaching strategies suggested by Kolb (1984) and Felder (1993) to stretch students’ learning style patterns. While guiding students into certain learning styles, teachers had to guid themselves into the teaching styles they are not accustomed to. The benefits of style matching and stretching were confirmed beside the failures in the class where adult learners failed to respond to style stretching strategies and in the class where the teacher failed to respond to students’ learning styles. These failures remind teachers that other learner factors, teacher factors, and learning environment factors always exist beside learning and teaching styles as promoters or hinderers to style matching and stretching strategies.