The Relationship between Learning Styles and English Educational Development of High School Students in Myandorud/Mazandaran based on Kolb’s Model

Learners’ knowledge of their learning styles positively influences their educational development (Lynch et al, 1998) which also assists teachers in selecting appropriate teaching methods. Accordingly the present research is aimed to determine the learning style relation of high school Iranian students in learning English to their educational development in an EFL environment. The corpus includes 130 female high school students in Myandorud town of Mazandaran/Iran, and the study is performed on the basis of Kolb's Learning Style Inventory questionnaire. The average of student marks are considered as educational development indicators and the collected data are analyzed using descriptive (frequency distribution, Central tendency/ dispersion parameters) and analytical statistics (t test, Pearson correlation test, Chi square test). According to the triple categorization of cognitive, affective, physiological learning styles, the questionnaire tool allowed the classification of learning styles into 4 groups of converging, accommodating, assimilating, and diverging. The data analysis indicated a significant relationship between high school learners’ learning styles and their English educational development.

Keywords:

Learning Styles in EFL learners , High school English learning , Training