Learning Style Preferences and their Relationship to Linguistic Competence

Abstract

The immediate objective of this paper is to determine the relationship between learning styles, demographic profile of the respondents and their linguistic competence. Primarily, this research endeavor desires to find out how learning styles sway students’ learning absorption specifically of the English Subject. The learning theories and models that underpinned the study were the constructivists’ and cognitivists’ theory of learning. The Dunn and Dunn learning style model which has five key elements, namely, environmental emotional; physiological; psychological and sociological was used. Communicative Competence model created by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei and Thurrel (1995) focusing on Syntax, Morphology and Orthography also supported the study. To gather the data needed, the researchers made a personally-drafted learning styles inventory and applied the descriptive correlational method to analyze the results.

An analysis of this study yields that the over-all pre-dominant learning style preference of the respondents is Sociological preference. The Demographic profile of the student respondents as to age, birth-order, monthly-income, gender, ethno linguistic origin, and parents’ educational attainment also showed significant relationship to the elements of learning style preferences. Lastly, it was found that Syntax has no significant relationship towards Environmental, Emotional, Sociological and Physiological Preference but has a huge correlation to Psychological Preference. Morphology, however, has no significant relationship to all the learning style elements. As with Syntax, Orthography showed no significant to all the learning style elements but Psychological Preference.