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Abstract
In response to the developments made in language education through the shift of emphasis from teachers and teaching to learners and learning, increasingly, research has focused on language learners' styles and other characteristics. This paper investigates the effect of gender on taking intuitive or analytical approaches in learning English as a foreign language. The study included 50 adult EFL learners of both genders who took part in IELTS listening/speaking classes and answered Allinson-Hayes (1996) Cognitive Style Index. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data and interpretation of the discriminating items showed that male students preferred to adopt a more analytical approach compared with female students who predominantly adopted more intuitive approaches. This conclusion was supported through the use of the t-test for independent samples.
Keywords: EFL learning styles; analytic learners; intuitive learners; gender and ELT
Introduction
Within the field of education, a general but ongoing shift has taken place in the last few decades, resulting in less stress on teachers and teaching and greater emphasis on learners and learning. One consequence of this shift was an increasing awareness and interest in resources for learning styles and language learning strategies in foreign and second language teaching and learning. As a result, researchers have stressed that effective learners, while acquiring or producing language, use a variety of strategies and techniques in order to solve the problems they face. Accordingly, a new line of research in the area of EFL has devoted to the identification of how learners process new information and the kinds of strategies they employ to understand, learn or remember the information (Abu Shmais, 2003). In this relation, Aliakbari and Hayatzade (2008) note that research on language learning strategies began in the 1960s, particularly after the developments in cognitive psychology, and have received much attention since late 1970s. From then, researchers in the field have broadened our understanding of the processes learners use to develop their skills in L2. The evidence to date suggests that people differ consistently from each other in their preferences for certain ways of processing information and that these differences are measurable (Gorham, 1986; Moran, 1991).
From another perspective, as Sunderland (2000) notes, language teachers have recently become increasingly aware of the gender variable in language learning...