Learn Your Learner; Assess Later: Addressing Individual Learner Differences in a Writing Class

Abstract

We all have a way in which we best learn.  Likewise every student in our class has a different preferred learning style, which can make it difficult for us to be the most effective teacher especially in a writing course.  However, by trying to find out the learners’ differences and incorporating various methods into our teaching, we may be able to reach the majority of our students and can yield optimum result in our writing class. In the different studies of learner characteristics in applied linguistics, learning attitudes, strategies and motivation have received most attention. These learner individual difference variables have usually been seen as background learner variables that modify and personalize the overall trajectory of the language acquisition processes (Dörnyei, 2009). This paper, thus, sheds light on different types of learners based on their learning strategies that define students’ preferences and guide a teacher to design her/his lesson. This is very important for a heterogeneous class for any kind of mismatches between the teaching style of a teacher and the students’ learning styles, we will not be able to attain the objective of a course that might result in a demotivated class and the extreme consequence might be the increase in the drop outs from the university.

Keywords: Multiple Intelligences, Learning Styles, Learning Strategies, Individual Learner Differences