Feeding the ELT Students' Needs Through Kolb's Learning Styles Inventory

Abstract

Contrary to learning styles seem the same as what abilities refer, they are related to them in the sense that they decipher how individuals desire to use their capabilities. There have been diverse learning styles theories intent to explain the individual differences on account of the acceleration and the amount of absorbed knowledge. Learning styles have been defined under the notions of cognitive, affective and physiological attributes that serve as nearly strong indicators of how learners distinguish, combine, and reciprocate to the learning phenomena which gains importance and provide basis for language education process as well. Thus, this study aims to determine the learning styles of English language teaching (ELT) students studying at Amasya University, Faculty of Education in 2017-2018 academic year. The participants of the study consist of totally 109 out of 122 from 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade students of English Language Teaching Department. The data collection instrument was Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory including four sets of work labeled as Concrete Experience, Reflective Observation, Abstract Conceptualization, and Active Experimentation and the students were expected to rank order the 12 items listed for each category via assigning a 4 to the word which best characterizes their learning style, a 3 to the next best, a 2 to the next, and a 1 to the least characteristic word. By this way, ELT students’ dominant learning styles which refer to their learning profiles has been specified descriptively. Furthermore, the learning styles of ELT students has been interconnected with the content of the courses they need to take during their teacher education process and suggestions for the members of ELT departments has been provided based on the findings of these learning styles.