Languages and Education Consultant

Teaching how to learn

 

 

 

It can seem at first glance a bit strange to have to teach students how to learn, but it’s actually one of the most important tasks a teacher has.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before starting to teach myself, I had never stopped to consider that other people had different learning styles, and much less that they could not be aware of the best strategies to optimize their learning. While tutoring and advising students writing essays, I was able to really understand how little sometimes they knew about their own learning styles and tried to input in my classes some guidance towards how to study and reflect on their own learning styles and strategies, and also always try to mix different strategies that can appeal to different learning styles.

Several of my students want me precisely to support them in this getting to know themselves process, and it’s extremely gratifying when their grades start to get better and their own understanding of the contents they are learning, becomes clearer.  

What surprised me the most was that there were many students already at University level that had never learned how to study, and were now faced with increasingly difficult subjects and higher expectations, and were feeling completely stranded.  

People can have different learning styles, such as: visual (by seeing), auditory (by hearing), kinaesthetic (by movement); group (working with others), individual (working alone), social (interacting); reflective (thinking about things more in depth), impulsive (trusting their instincts) and analytical (studying rules).

There’s three main dimensions we can note here: the senses styles (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic); the environment styles (group, individual, social); and the cognitive styles (reflective, impulsive, analytic).

Of course it’s important to note that more often than not the individual has actually a combination of some of these styles.  For example, I’m a visual learner, who learns best by working alone and considering subjects in an analytic way primarily, but also reflective.

The senses dimension refers to which senses are the ones that allow us to receive and store more input of information. As such, with a visual learner a good learning strategy could be to read the information and make their notes as visually appealing as possible (I myself am a visual learner, and my notes have to be either typed on the computer or be written without any blots or smudges and preferably with coloured ink for titles, subtitles, etc). An auditory learner will learner primarily with listening to information, listening to the teacher and audio books, very useful in language learning. A kinaesthetic learner needs to be able to do, to produce. He needs to feel his/her body while learning and it will be the kind of learner that needs to write words down so the body remembers the movements associated with the writing.

Then, there’s the environment in which information is received more clearly and can be stored best. Some of us work best alone, given their own time to reflect on the points that we value most, or that are more of a challenge (individual learner), others work best when in group, listening to other people’s opinions and ideas (group learner), and by interacting with others, a very useful strategy in learning languages, where interacting with a native can be extremely productive, experiencing actual social situations (social learner).

When receiving information, we process it cognitively, and we can do it by trusting our instinct (impulsive), by thinking more in depth about the subjects (reflective) or creating patterns of rules in our minds that allow us to better understand and frame the new information (analytical).

So, it’s very important that every student, whether he/she is learning languages, or at school/University, reflects about his/her learning styles, and tries to develop strategies that can optimize their information input and storage.