Review of Learning Styles Addressed Through CALL

Karen Yeok-Hwa Ngeow's article "Extending Practice: Enhancing and Extending Learning Styles Through Computers" raises several points of valuable practice for teachers of ELL and in general: to give students a meta-cognitive awareness of their preferred learning styles and to design activities that allow students to use those strengths to complete assignments in a meaningful manner. Part of her theory is that by tuning students in to their best practice learning styles they can concentrate more on the language meaning they are encountering or creating and less time trying to adapt information that is in an unfamiliar format; thus, challenging them twice when the goal is really language acquisition.

I Like Ngeow's ideas, and I think that any good teacher tries to account for these learning styles, BUT, the teachers are also drawn by a Siren's song toward their own preferences in learning styles... because it seems natural to them that all good learners could learn it that way. Of course, this is why we have teacher training, to try to counteract some of these disabling tendencies.

Of course, the programs that Ngeow recommends are a bit dated, if only in the versions listed. If this article were updated there would be no shortage of programs that would fit the bill for the various learning styles she has mentioned. The moviemaker/iMovie programs seem to be a popular alternative to call in all sorts of visual, musical, and spatial intelligences that PoweerPoint might have been best suited for in the recent past. Obviously podcasting, blogging, wikispacing (new verb?) are all reasonable alternatives to the class newsletter.

I guess that we just need to stay focused on how this new generation is learning and how computer technology may not only have made our studetns more computer preferent, but also more open to our bag of tricks as CALL teachers.