Learning How to Learn: An Analysis Through Styles and Strategies

Introduction

Over the ages, continuously many teaching learning methods and techniques of language have emerged and evanesced. They have their own underlying theoretical bases. These continual and acute changes in language learning and teaching theories along with the extant drift to increase learners’ autonomy have put the teachers’ self-confidence in a startlingly tough condition. So, the important part of giving priority to promote learners’ independent learning is never to be left unattended. Moreover, talents are not confined to biological limitations but can be heightened to an unlimited degree by virtue of long practice and varied training. Assorted studies on language styles and strategies apprise about ‘how’ and ‘how better’ the learners acquire the language through self- directed involvements. It is often observed that the teachers manifest their resistance towards the updated feasible facts and lie in the same track of conventionality. There is a plethora of current research sources in this regard, but often teachers follow no facts and evidence-based studies, thus lead the class in their own habits of conventionality, imposing certain selected preferences on the learners, irrespective of their attentiveness. There is still a need of more studies on the contradictory messing hypothesis of learning styles.

The educational philosophy revolving around ‘learning to learn’ has stimulated considerable debates in both theoretical and practical fields of education. Many researchers such as Coffield, Mosely, Hall, and Ecclestone (2004); Sternberg, Grigorenko, and Zhang (2008), Kozhevnikov (2007), Dunn (1990), Kolb (1984, 1985), Honey and Mumford (1992), Deshler and Schumaker (1986), Dunn and Griggs (1988), Cornett (1983), etc., have done extensive studies on the support of the existence of certain learning styles and about their impact on learning. However, in contrast to this, around these last four decades, the researchers like Pashler (2009), Kirschner and van Merrienboer (2013), Massa & Mayer (2006), Riener and Willingham (2014) have been active surging in the study of learning styles seeking more empirical evidences.