The Interplay between Gender and Learning Styles: Implications for Second Language Teaching

Abstract

Learning styles refer to the variation that exists in the ability of people to accumulate interpret and assimilate information A learning style is an individual s preferred way of learning and scholars Reid 1995 Wagaman 2008 Montgomery and Groat 1998 to mention a few have established that when a teacher s style matches the student s learning styles then learning will occur Research evidences Howe 1997 Burham 2008 and Sax Leonard 2008 support that gender plays a unique role in the way we learn This paper thus seeks to investigate the relationship if any between gender and learning styles with its possible implications for language teaching The paper draws conclusions that majority of females preferred learning style is the diverging and assimilating thinkers than doers while a greater percentage of the males fall under converging and accommodating learning styles doers than thinkers Girls are motivated by the desire to impress adults while boys are motivated by the object or material to be learnt This of course has serious implications for language teaching Lastly language teachers are encouraged to develop their instructional packages to cater for the differences in the students gender and learning styles Other stakeholders in the education industry are to accommodate the knowledge of different genders and learning styles in educational planning