چکیده:
Learners differ in the manner of understanding, organizing, and retaining information or experience. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between perceptual learning style preferences and depth of vocabulary knowledge of 235 tertiary EFL learners (male = 89, female = 146) from two Iranian universities. The learners’ responses on Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (Reid, 1984) showed that kinesthetic, auditory, visual, and tactile modalities were found to be the major categories while individual and group styles appeared to be minor. Furthermore, the data from the Word Associates Test (WAT, Read, 2000) revealed that the participants’ mean scores on tactile style significantly correlated with WAT and its constituent parts (synonym and collocation). Despite the negative tendency towards group activities, the high-group learners had more major preferences than the low-group learners. Moreover, the mean scores of males’ auditory style was under the cut-off point for a major learning style and lower than that of females. However, males outscored females on WAT, synonym, and collocation. Yet, tactile modality significantly correlated with WAT, synonym, and collocation for females. Group learning was the least preferred style by the participants. Thus, in teaching vocabulary, especially depth dimension, different teaching techniques and materials should be provided selectively to attend to the learners’ diverse learning styles.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The Relationship between Perceptual Learning Style Preferences and Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge Is'haaq Akbarian*1 Mohammad Afzali-Shahri2 Javad Ghasemi-Rezveh3 Mahmood Salimi4 Received: 2019-10-12 | Revised: 2019-12-07 | Accepted: 2019-12-31 Abstract Learners differ in the manner of understanding, organizing, and retaining information or experience.
Therefore, this study investigates the relation- ship between perceptual learning style preferences and depth of vocabu- lary knowledge of 235 tertiary EFL learners (male = 89, female = 146) from two Iranian universities.
The learners’ responses on Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (Reid, 1984) showed that kines- thetic, auditory, visual, and tactile modalities were found to be the major categories while individual and group styles appeared to be minor.
In the same line, Naserieh and Anani Sarab (2013) studied style in relation to gender, age, and discipline among 138 Iranian graduate students and found that kinesthetic, tactile, and auditory modalities are seen as major, visual ones as minor, and group styles as negative.
In this respect, the present research aims tackle another aspect of this issue by answering the fol- lowing research questions (RQs): 1) Is there any relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ perceptual learn- ing style preferences and their depth of vocabulary knowledge?
Among the six learning styles, kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and tactile styles (Table 1) were categorized as major preferences, in line with Riazi and Man- soorian (2008) who investigated the preferred style(s) among Iranian male and female EFL students and also Naserieh and Anani Sarab (2013); however, visu- al style was minor in the last study.