Learning Styles of English as a Second Language (ESL) Upper Primary School Students

Abstract

People in general have different ways and methods of perceiving, processing and dissecting information thus leading to learners practising a certain learning style. The chosen learning style allows individual to acquire and process knowledge in any subjects taught in schools specifically among students who learn English as a Second Language. The purpose of this research is to investigate the most common learning styles of English as a Second Language (ESL) upper primary school students.The sample consisted of 30 students from Year 4,5, and 6 from one of the Sekolah Jenis Kebangsaan Cina (SJKC)s in Port Dickson district.This research utilizes the quantitative approach to determine the pattern of learning styles of the ESL upper primary school students. Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model (FSLSM) has been adopted in supporting this research. The items for this research’s questionnaire has been adopted and adapted from FSLSM to collect data on the students’ learning style preference because it has been used widely in the field of learning styles and also due to its credibility and suitability to this research. The questionnaire consists of two parts; Section A with 2 items and Section B with 44 items. The items substantiating 4 dimensions and 4 sub-scales, that is to say perception (sensing / intuitive learners), procession (active / reflective learners), input (visual / verbal learners) and comprehension (sequential / global learners). Every dimension comprises of 11 items. The questionnaire set was distributed to 30 upper primary. The data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 20 where descriptive analysis was used to analyse frequency. Results from the analysis showed that in whole, the ESL upper primary school students of this SJKC are more dominant in visual (80%) than verbal style (20%) for input dimension; followed by sequent (76.7%) than global style (23.3%) for comprehension dimension; active (56.7%) than reflective style (43.3%) for procession dimension and intuitive (60%) than sensing style(40%) for perception dimension. The findings of this research, the research suggests that educator should pay more attention in selecting and employing the most apt teaching method to cater the learning styles that have been reported.