Learning Style Preferences of East Asian ESL Students

Understanding learning-style needs of foreign students can help teachers avoid focusing on just their own learning styles and systematically add variety to their teaching patterns. Knowing the ways all students learn, indeed, is very important to good teaching. The main purpose of this research study was to investigate the learning style preferences of East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese) ESL students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Specifically, the investigator attempted to: (1) identify ethnographic variables that affect the differences in learning styles of these ESL students; and (2) identify self-perceived changes in learning styles of these ESL students since they came to the United States.