Page 24 - ELG1705 May Issue 447

COMMENT

A lack of

evidence is

not my

style

Melanie Butler argues that learning styles are not
the only problem. Most of British-style ELT
needs a stronger evidence base

oward Gardner is not a fan styles is not only incoherent and unsupported Cambridge Assessment, a department of the
of ‘learning styles’. The by research studies but also damaging. ‘Such university.
Harvard professor of education neuromyths create a false impression of Evidence or no evidence, however, the
confessed in 2013 that the individuals’ abilities, leading to expectations Cambridge English Teaching Framework has
Htendency of many people and excuses that are detrimental to learning,’ been pretty keen on learning styles. At the
to link the discredited theory to his own they wrote. time of writing, it turned up in the syllabus for
work on multiple intelligences drives him ‘to Unsurprisingly, the signatories included four the Teaching Knowledge Test. Teachers taking
distraction’. Learners have different styles, he academics from Cambridge, the university a Celta were required to teach ‘a class with an
agrees, but the attempt to bunch them into whose educational values include, according awareness of learning styles’ and could use it as
neat groups is incoherent. Repeated empirical to its website, ‘the close inter-relationship ‘evidence of learning in a written assignment’.
studies of the systematic use of the theory On the syllabus for the Delta, the level
in the classroom have shown they make no We simply do required for fully qualified status, the term
measurable difference to learning outcomes. ‘learner/learning style’ appeared three times as
In mainstream education in the UK, it is not have enough often as the term ‘phonology/phonological’. It
now normal to monitor how well a method or research on long also appeared rather more than ‘corpus’, which
intervention works by setting up a randomised is cited once, and ‘syntax’, which doesn’t turn
control trial with a statistically significant term learning up at all.
sample size. You prepare a baseline test, use When the Gazette raised the issue with the
the method systematically on the intervention outcomes Syndicate, the body responsible for academic
group and measure the difference in learning oversight for Cambridge exams, Cambridge
outcomes between the two groups. The between teaching, scholarship and research’. English wrote back to us to say it was in the
Education Endowment Foundation, one of the What is surprising is that the Cambridge process of replacing the term ‘learning styles’
main sponsors of such studies, has completed English Teaching Framework says that learning with the term ‘learning preferences’.
one on learning styles. Its finding? ‘Low impact styles, ‘e.g. visual, auditory, kinaesthetic’, should So what’s the difference? In a Google
for very low cost, based on limited evidence.’ be taught at every level of teacher development search for ‘learning preferences’, 90 per cent
The thirty leading academics who recently (see page 10). If UK EFL has a professional of search results used ‘learning preferences’
signed a letter on the matter published in the system of training at all, this framework is synonymously with ‘learning styles’ and made
UK’s Guardian newspaper are much more designed to embody it. After all, it was drawn direct reference to Visual and Kinaesthetic
damning. They say the theory of learning up by Cambridge English, the ELT section of learning. Does Cambridge have a new, shiny,

24 May 2017

p24-25.indd 2 4/27/2017 1:04:08 PM