Catering to your Adult ESL Students Learning Styles

Abstract

The ways in which an individual characteristically acquires, retains, and retrieves information are collectively termed the individuals learning style (Felder & Henriques, 1995). This particular study aims to contribute to the idea that by finding out the learning styles of adult ESL students, teachers in tertiary institutions could match their teaching styles to the adult learners learning styles for overall positive language learning outcome. This preliminary study gauged the learning styles of the specific 72 adult ESL students in the part-time degree programme at Universiti Malaysia Sabah. For this purpose, researchers utilised the Index of Learning Styles (ILS) of the Felder-Silverman model (1988) on subjects aged between 24 - 40 years old. This paper recommends teachers to find out the learning styles of his/her adult language students before beginning to teach so as to provide for an optimal learning environment. This paper also suggests several steps to address the needs of adult learners in the language learning context.