Cognitive Styles and their Effect on Learning Processes: A Study of One Learner

Abstract

A considerable number of research has been conducted into the area of individual differences in second language acquisition in order to understand the psychology of the learners and investigate the effect of these variables on language learning. Some of these variables are language aptitude, personality, motivation, learning strategies and learning styles. The main aim of this paper is to investigate one of the individual variables and attempts to explore the effects of this variable on learning procedures of a single language learner of English. The variable which is under investigation is cognitive style. A quantitative and a qualitative research method were employed to collect the data for this study. The results showed that the participant is a wholist learner where she prefers to look for the general picture in order to understand and complete the learning task in hand. This tendency, however, appears to be true with receptive skills only (i.e. listening and reading). On the other hand, the participant seems to change her preferred style (i.e. be more analytic) to finish the tasks that relate to productive skills (i.e. speaking and writing). Some pedagogical recommendations were proposed at the end of this article such as the application of multimodal approach in classroom is widely recommended to maximize students' potential and achieve the desired teaching effect by combining their learning styles and teaching tasks.