LEARNING STYLES AND COGNITIVE STYLES

A.    INTRODUCTION

            For beginners, there are a confusing excess of labels and style dimension, a shortage of valid and reliable measurement instruments, a confusion in the underlying theory, and the practical implications put forward in the literature.

B.     WHAT ARE LEARNING STYLES?

            Learning styles refer to an “individual’s natural, habitual, and preferred way of absorbing, processing, and retaining new information and skills”. The concept represents a profile of the individual’s approach to learning, a blueprint of the habitual or preferred way the individual perceives, interacts with, and responds to the learning environment. The concept of learning styles offers a “value-neutral approach for understanding individual differences among linguistically and culturally diverse students”. Learning styles correlate more highly than others with desired aspects of language performance in specific settings.

C.    BASIC CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

            Style is a “strategy used consistently across class of tasks and probably has a physiological basis and are fairly fixed for the individual”l. Strategy is used for task- or context-dependent situations, whereas style implies a higher degree of stability falling midway between ability and strategy. The literatures on learning styles uses the terms learning style, cognitive style, personality type, sensory preference, modality, and others rather loosely and often interchangeably.

            The first is cognitive, referring to a stable and internalized dimension related to the way a person thinks or processes information; the second is the level of the learning activity, which is more external and embraces less stable functions that relate to the learner’s a continuing adaptation to the environment.

D.    COGNITIVE STYLES

            Cognitive styles are usually defined as an individual’s preferred and habitual models of perceiving, remembering, organizing, processing, and representing information. There is an unspecified relationship between cognitive styles and cognitive abilities. Cognitive abilities refer to the content and the level of cognition, whereas cognitive styles refer to the manner or mode of cognition. In practical terms, both style and ability affect student task performance, the increase of ability improves task performance for all students, whereas the effect of style depends on the nature of the task.

1.      Problems with the Notion of Cognitive Style

            The main problem has been that the style literature has failed to provide a common conceptual framework for scholars that would have allowed successful communication among them. Cognitive style is still contested whether this style actually exist indicates the ultimate weakness of the concept and therefore its research should be abandoned; it expresses “some of our intuitions about student” and facilitates “appreciation for the divergent approaches to thinking and learning”.

2.      Riding’s System

a.      Wholist-Analytic Style Dimension

            This dimension, determine whether individuals tend to organize information as an integrated whole or in discrete parts of that whole. The typical characteristics of wholists: (a) tend to see a situation as a whole, (b) are able to have an overall perspective, (c) appreciate the total context, (d) are ‘big picture people and consequently, (e) can also easily lose sight of the details.

b.      Verbal-Imagery Style Dimension

            This dimension, determine whether individuals are outgoing and inclined to represent information during thinking verbally or whether they are more inward and tend to think in mental picture or images; in other words, verbalizers are superior at working with verbal information, whereas imagers are better at working with visual or spatial information.    

E.     LEARNING STYLES

1.      Kolb’s Model of Learning Styles

a.      Kolb’s Two Main Dimensions

            Kolb’s learning style construct is based on the permutation of two main dimensions, concrete vs. abstract thinking and active vs. reflective information processing.

b.      Kolb’s Four Basic Learner Types, or Learning Style Patterns

            Four basics learner types:

1)      Divergers (concrete & reflective)

2)      Convergers (abstract & active)

3)      Assimilators (abstract & reflective)

4)      Accommodators (concrete & active)

2.      Assessing Cognitive and Learning Styles

a.      Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory (LSI)

            There was also a significant negative correlation between ‘active’ and ‘reflective information processing’ orientations. On the other hand, there was no substantial intercorrelation between the components associated with the two different dimensions.

b.      Riding’s Cognitive Styles Analysis (CSA)

            CSA focuses on cognitive styles rather than learning styles, which allows it to target a narrower and more precisely definable domain. It utilizes rather test respondent performance directly (computer-based).

F.     COGNITIVE AND LEARNING STYLES IN L2 STUDIES

1.      Research Into Field Dependence-Independence in L2 Studies

            Field independent are better at (a) focusing on some aspects of experience or stimulus, (b) separating it from the background, and (c) analyzing it unaffected by distraction. Field dependents are characterizes by: (a) more responsive, and (b) tend to have a stronger interpersonal orientation and grater alertness.

2.      The Area of Sensory Preferences

            This dimension concerns the perceptual modes or learning channels through which students take in information. Four preference types:

a)      Visual learners (learners absorb information most effectively through ‘visual’)

b)      Auditory learners (by lectures or audiotapes, discussion or group work)

c)      Kinesthetic and tactile learners (body experience and touching learning)

G.    ASSESSING LANGUAGE LEARNING STYLES

1.      Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire and Learning Style Indicator

            PLSPQ involved confirmatory factor analysis and follow-up interviews containing direct and open-ended questions. Because the authors viewed the reduce PLSPQ item pool and their reinterpretation of its internal structure to represents a new instrument, they called it LSI.

2.      Style  Analysis Survey and Learning Style Survey (SAS & LSS)

            The SAS is a user-friendly test, with a self-scoring sheet, explanations about the results, and some practical tips and suggestions. LSS is a further improvement of the SAS. LSS show the following final changes relative to the SAS.

3.      The Ehrman & Leaver (E&L) Construct

            The E&L Construct has only one superordinate style dimension that is provided, with the two poles labeled ectasis and synopsis. The primary difference between the two extremes is that an ectenic learner wants or needs conscious control over the learning process, whereas a synoptic learners more to preconscious or unconscious processing.

4.      Skehan’s Conceptualization of a Learning Style Construct

            Skehan’s cognitive theory of L2 learning and processing is that learners can be characterized by a ‘dual-coding’ approach to language learning and performance, made up of a rule-based system and a memory-based system. Two types learners are proposed by Skehan are analysis-oriented and memory-oriented.

H.    PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

            There the procedure consists of four steps:

1.      Students are invited to a voluntary consultation, aimed at improving learning effectiveness both of those who are having difficulties and those who think they are doing fine.

2.      Once a student has decided to take advantage of this offer, he or she completes a

diagnostic learning style queationnaire.

3.      The third step is the interpretation of the questionnaire results.

The final step is the follow up, whereby a designated Learning Consultant makes sure that the recommendations made during the consultation process are put into practice. Students are then welcome to return for follow-up consultations with a counselor on any emerging issue.

original resource: Suparman, Ujang. 2010. Psycholinguistics: The Theory of Language Acquisition. Bandung: Arfino Raya.

COMPREHENSION ABILITY IN ADULT READERS

A.    INTRODUCTION

            Readers construct detailed mental representation of texts with relative ease. Reading is a complex, intellectual skill, requiring the coordination of multiple component processes. Three levels of the processes when readers are trying to make sense of the ideas: word level (to encode the printed word, sound-based representation, retrieve its meaning from memory), sentence level (involved in understanding “who did what to whom” in a sentence), and discourse level (reflects features of the real or imaginary world that the text describes).

            Poor comprehenders have difficulty making inferences to integrate ideas in a text, to answer question, and to identify main ideas and themes. Reading comprehension involves language specific processes as well as domain-general cognitive abilities-sensation, perception, attention, memory, and reasoning.

B.     INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN WORLD-LEVEL ABILITIES

            In beginning readers, word-identification skill is strongly related to measures of phonological awareness-explicit knowledge about the phonological structure of the language. The three task that are most commonly used to assess adult reader’s word-level abilities are: naming, phonological decision, and orthographic decision. Verbal efficiency theory suggests two ways that deficits in word-identification skill can influence comprehension performance: (1) Comprehension processes that depend on high quality, lexical representations, such as syntactic analysis. (2) Slow retrieval of lexical codes can compromise higher-level interpretive processes by consuming WM resource that would otherwise be devoted to these processes.

            Verbal efficiency theory emphasizes three characteristics: (1) word-level ability, (2) WM capacity, (3) print exposure.

C.    WHAT ARE THE STATUS OF COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS FOR POOR QUALITY REPRESENTATION?

            If poor comprehenders can quickly and accurately select context-appropriate senses of ambiguous words, their failure to make topic-related inference should be attributed factors other than poor quality sentence representations.           Both good and poor comprehenders recognized targets faster when they were preceded by primes from the same that different proposition. Only good comprehenders showed topic-priming effects-difficulty rejecting topic words that were related to the passages. Good and poor comprehenders showed differences in (a) their ability to integrate information from different parts of the story (b) their ability to elaborate their representation with topic-related information.

            In short, poor comprehenders have word-level and sentence-level processes that are accurate enough (a) to encode structural relations among concept in sentence (b) to use content in selecting the appropriate sense of an ambiguous word (c) to support reactivation of prior text information. Poor comprehenders appear to construct quality sentence representation.

D.    DO COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS RELATE TO SLOW WORD-LEVEL PROCESSING?

            A primary claim of verbal efficiency theory is that slow word-level processes can consume resources that would otherwise be devoted to higher-level interpretive ones. The researchers found that (1) word-decoding speed was a unique predictor of sentence processing, (2) working-memory capacity was not a reliable predictor of any level-1 coefficient. The coefficient associated with the number of function words in a sentence was predicted by WM capacity, but only when the other individual-differences factors were eliminated.

            In brief, verbal efficiency theory claims that slow and inaccurate word-level ability is associated with reading comprehension in adult readers as it is in children. Adult readers have word-level processes that are accurate enough for the construction of reasonably good sentence-level representation. Slow word-level processing appears to be predictive of reading comprehension, independent of other factors such as general verbal ability and WM capacity.

E.     INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN WORKING MEMORY

            WM is the theoretical construct used to refer to the system that is responsible for maintaining such information. To assess WM capacity, researchers used two measures: (a) the reading-span task [two activities: read aloud a set of unrelated sentences, presented one at a time, and recall the final work of each sentence once the entire set has been presented], (b) the operation-span task [participants perform simple arithmetic problems rather that read aloud].

1.      Limitations Due to Capacity Constraints

a.      The Capacity Theory of Comprehension

The capacity theory attributes individual differences in reading comprehension to variation in capacity, the total amount of activation available to the system. Studies that examine the relation between WM and discourse-level processes have found similar results: (a) high-span readers compared to low-span, are more accurate in finding the antecedent of a pronoun when the pronoun and its antecedent are separated by intervening sentences, (b) high-span readers are also more likely than low-span readers to show faster recognition of sentences that are thematically related.

b.      Separate-Sentence-Interpretation-Resource (SSIR) Theory

The foundation of The SSIR theory lies in neuropsychological data which concern the ability of patients to understand sentences containing complex syntactic structures. (1) One part of the WM system is specialized for analyzing syntactic structure used to determine sentence meaning [sentence interpretation]. (2) Another

part of the system is devoted to activities that involve conscious controlled processing [post-interpretive], these activities include: making inference to integrate ideas across sentences, using world knowledge in the interpretation of a text, remembering sentence content, and planning actions based on the meaning of sentences and texts. Like the capacity theory, the SSIR theory predicts a strong relation between WM capacity and discourse-level processing.

2.      Limitations Due to Poor Word-Level Ability and Insufficient Experience

a.      The Connectionist-Based Account

The connectionist-based account is based on connectionist approaches to language

processing. In the connectionist-based account, individual differences in performances on WM task arise from variation in two factors, (1) Individuals can vary with respect to basic sensory/perceptual abilities, primarily the ability to represent phonological information accurately. (2) Individuals can vary in reading experience. According to the connectionist-based account, variation in performance on span tasks is due to the same factors that influence all language tasks: word-level ability and print exposure.

b.      The Long-Term Working Memory (LTWM) Model

LTWM is a mechanism based on skilled storage and retrieval in long-term memory. Individuals who are skilled in mental calculated have large WM capacities as measure by digit span but do not show large capacities for other types of materials. The LTWM model is different from the connectionist-based account in that it includes a traditional view of a fixed-capacity WM system.

F.     INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SUPPRESSION ABILITY

            Suppression ability (cognitive inhibition) is an individual’s skill at ignoring or inhibiting distracting information and overcoming interference from a powerful response. Suppression diminished activation of the trace when their content is unrelated to the structure. Suppression is an automatic inhibitory mechanism or a controlled strategic one. In the controlled-attention view, variation in performance on both comprehension tasks and complex span tasks are due to individual differences in the ability to control attention, including the ability to suppress irrelevant information.           

G.    INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN PRINT EXPOSURE

            Comprehension skill is likely influenced by print exposure in at least three ways: (1) Individuals who read often are more likely to learn about rare words than are individuals who read seldom [vocabulary growth is likely to be accelerated in individuals who read often], (2) individuals are more likely to encounter complex syntactic structures in print than in speech, and (3) individuals who read often are likely to acquire ore world-knowledge than individuals who read seldom. Print exposure gives a strong effect on background knowledge via its effect on discourse-level processing.

H.    INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE

            High-knowledge readers construct discourse models [recall, problem-solving, generalization, and knowledge-based inferences] in which text ideas are integrated with each other and with a large network of relevant prior knowledge. Low-knowledge readers construct text representations that are coherent at the sentence-level, but they lack the knowledge necessary to construct coherent discourse models. Low-knowledge readers can recognize ideas from a text, but can not use their representation to perform tasks that require conscious, reflective access to a discourse model.

            Background knowledge is essential for building retrieval structures in LTWM that expand a reader’s ability to hold large amounts of information in an accessible form. Background knowledge is facilitated by print exposure. Individuals who read often are exposed to more information about the world and they are more likely to create coherent discourse models that expand their knowledge base.

original resource: Suparman, Ujang. 2010. Psycholinguistics: The Theory of Language Acquisition. Bandung: Arfino Raya. 

IS THERE A PREORDAINED LANGUAGE ‘PROGRAMME’ ?

A.    INTRODUCTION

            Language may be set in motion by a biological clock, similar to the one which causes kittens to pone their eyes when they are few days old, chrysalises to change into butterflies after several weeks, and humans to become sexually mature at around 13 years of age.

B.     THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BIOLOGICALLY TRIGGERED BEHAVIOR

1.      The Behavior Emerges Before it is Necessary

            Without some type of inborn mechanism, language might develop only when parents left children to support for themselves. It would emerge at different times in different cultures and this would lead to greatly different levels of language skills.

2.      Its Appearance is not Result of a Conscious Decision

            Children acquire language without making any conscious decision about it. This is quite unlike a decision to learn to jump a 4-foot height, or hit a tennis ball, when a child sets herself a target, then organizes strenuous practice sessions as she strives towards her goal.

3.      The Emergence of the Behavior is not Triggered by External Events

            Children begin to talk even when their surroundings remain unchanged. Most of them live in the same house, eat the same food, have the same parents, and follow the same routine. No specific event or feature in their surroundings suddenly starts them off talking. In fact, according to more recent research, few children are truly deprived. In many cases, the supposedly ‘language impoverished’ children were just puzzled for a time when they were exposed to a dialect or accent unlike their own.

4.      Direct Teaching And Intensive Practice Have Relatively Little Effect

            In activities such as typing or playing tennis, a person’s achievement is often

directly related to the amount of teaching they receive and the hours of practice they put in. Even people who are not ‘naturally’ superb athletes can sometime win tennis tournaments through hard work and good coaching. But the same is not true of language, where direct teaching seems to be a failure.

            Parents who consciously try to ‘coach’ their children by simplifying and repeating may be actually interfering with their progress. Language that is impoverished is harder to learn, not simpler. Children appear to be naturally ‘set’ to extract a grammar for themselves, provided they have sufficient data at their disposal. Those who get on best are those who are exposed to a rich variety of language – in other words, those whose parents talk to them in a normal way.

5.      There is a Regular Sequence of ‘Milestones’ Correlating with Age And Other Aspects of Development – The Pre-Ordained Programme

            Babies hear merely a general mish-mash of sound, and only gradually notice details. However, infants may be capable of discriminating a lot or than we realize. They seem to be specially pre-set to notice the rhythms and sounds of speech. Probably they begin to ‘tune in’ before birth. Infants suck more strongly when they are aroused and interest in what they hear. The gradual change of cooing to babbling occurs around the time an infant begins to sit up. Children utter single words just before they start to walk. Grammar becomes complex as hand and finger co-ordination develops.

6.      There May be a ‘Critical Period’ for the Acquisition of the Behavior

            Children clearly start talking at about the age of 2. And it seemed possible that language ability ceased at around 13. Babies who have had this half of their brain removed in the first year of life have considerable language problems.

The example of these cases are three socially isolated children, Isabelle, Genie, and Chelsea, who was provided superficial support for this view. All three were cut off from language until long after the time they would have acquired it, they had been brought up in normal circumstances.

original resource: Suparman, Ujang. 2010. Psycholinguistics: The Theory of Language Acquisition. Bandung: Arfino Raya.