Premium
Learning Style Differences: Gifted vs. Regular Language Students
Author(s) -
Trayer Marie
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
foreign language annals
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.258
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1944-9720
pISSN - 0015-718X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1944-9720.1991.tb00488.x
Subject(s) - psychology , style (visual arts) , german , mathematics education , learning styles , statistic , population , developmental psychology , linguistics , demography , mathematics , philosophy , statistics , archaeology , sociology , history
ABSTRACT This study focused on the learning style differences of gifted and regular adolescent foreign language students. Five hundred forty‐four second‐year high school language students of French, Spanish and German were given Kolb's Learning Style Inventory, which identifies four learning style types: diverger, assimilator, converger, and accommodator. The Chi‐square statistic was used to analyze differences between the regular and gifted language students. No significant difference in the learning styles of regular and gifted students was found, both groups having a higher percentage of assimilators than the other styles. However, when gifted and regular groups were separately analyzed according to each language, significant differences were found among the gifted and regular students studying French and those studying Spanish. There were more gifted Spanish students in the accommodator category than expected. The gifted French students had a higher percentage of assimilators than the regular French student population. The findings suggest that learning style is a factor in language instruction.