Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected longitudinally in the current study to decipher adult EFL learners’ autonomous learning in a CALL SAC;
nevertheless, the information is largely self-reported and lacking in convincing support from standard proficiency tests like TOEFL and GEPT. The overall administration of standard proficiency tests at the beginning and the end of each semester to objectively gauge students’ growth in language skills can elicit even more valid and reliable results.
In agreement with Lin’s (2010) and Ning’s (2008) criticism that students’
responses to the open-ended questions were largely null and void, a great number of our participants’ written replies to the question “What I have learned” were also invalid. Accordingly, a modified rubric for the item was proposed to elicit more meaningful and easy-to-analyze data from learners and to guide them reflect deeper
upon what they have learned with the assistance of explicit aspects as hints. Further investigation via adopting the new instrument to evaluate SAC visitors’ learning outcomes is therefore encouraged to verify its promising effect.
Another limitation mainly concerns the data collection process. Since this is a long-term documentation by a few SAC assistants’ help, information was recorded in an inconsistent way. In the process of classifying and analyzing the data, the researchers were often faced with difficulties matching numerous items which were filed in totally different formats or orders. As a result, it is inevitable to avoid data missing or discrepancy. Future researches can establish a unified coding system so that data can be saved in a rather consistent way.
Finally, participants involved in the study were all freshmen. Future studies can recruit students from different age groups to see if self-access learning’s efficiency increases or decreases as learners grow older. Moreover, comparing senior high students and undergraduates’ varied autonomy development in the SAC may provide teachers with inspiring ideas to enlighten their students in a different way.
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Appendix A
List of Recent Quantitative Empirical Studies on Learning Styles
Srichanyachon (2011)
Purpose
- investigate the relationship between learners’ English background knowledge and their language learning styles
Method
- 210 EFL undergraduates enrolled in fundamental English course at Bangkok university
- cognitive style survey adopted from Ichikawa (2001, cited in Shwalb, Nakazawa, & Shwalb, 2005)
Result
- Gender makes a significant difference in participants’
language learning styles; female students seem to have more styles than their male counterparts.
- Participants’ field of study has no impact on their language learning styles only when failure-resilience is taken into consideration.
- A positive relationship exists between participants’
English background knowledge and learning styles.
That is, students with high English background knowledge like to apply more language learning styles, especially strategy-orientation and process-orientation ones, than those with low English background knowledge.
Psaltou-Joycey &
Kantaridou (2011)
Purpose
- illustrate the learning style preferences, categorized into major, minor and negative domains, of students across eight fields of study
Method
- 1616 undergraduates learning foreign languages for academic purposes in two Greek universities
- Style Analysis Survey (SAS, Oxford, 1995)
Result
- Visual, intuitive-random, and global styles constitute major preferences in all eight fields.
- Closure-oriented, extroverted, and concrete-sequential styles vary between major or minor preferences.
- Hands-on, open, and analytic styles show a variation between minor and negative preferences.
- Auditory and introverted styles are negative in all fields.
Ghapanchi &
Dashti (2011)
Purpose - study the relationship between cognitive styles and EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance
Method
- 100 English-major sophomores from two universities in Iran
- six passages with nine reading comprehending questions for each: three display, three referential and three inferential
- Eysenck's (1990) impulsiveness questionnaire
Result
- There was no significant difference between low, medium and high impulsives with respect to their performance in display, referential and inferential reading comprehension questions. However, a trend in favor of low impulsives to outperform other groups when answering referential questions and a trend in favor of medium impulsives when answering inferential questions were outlined. adult ESL centers in northwest Arkansas
- VARK Learning Styles Questionnaire (Fleming, 1995 )
Result
- Note taking is the most preferred method of learning while visual learning is the least favored method of assimilating new knowledge and experience for all subgroups.
- Females favor auditory and multimodal learning styles whereas males favor note taking across all the participants.
- Hispanic males and females both prefer note taking and kinesthetic learning styles; however, Hispanic females choose aural learning styles significantly more often than their male counterparts.
- Asian students are the most aural and read-write but the least kinesthetic among the participants; besides, Asian males favor note taking and aural learning in particular.
- Participants differ by their level of English proficiency; explicitly, beginning- intermediate students favor aural learning styles more than advanced ones.
- Participants choose kinesthetic learning less as they grow older, while males tend to choose note taking
- 166 students from three different universities in Russia and New York were grouped into three populations: 67 Russian EFL students, 53 Russian ESL students, and 46 Asian (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) ESL students
- Learner Styles Indicator (LSI, Wintergerst et al., 2001)
Result
- LSI is a valid and reliable tool for assessing learning styles of ESL/EFL students
- Participants learn English under three modalities:
project orientation, group activity orientation, and individual activity orientation.
- These three groups of language learners clearly prefer group activity to individual work, with the Russian EFL and Asian ESL students favoring group work and project work.
Ehrman & Leaver (2003)
Purpose - establish a learner style profile schema for diagnosis and illustrate it with two student cases
Method
- 2 adult second language learners from a foreign service institute
- their own Learning Style Questionnaire
Result - These two cases are not clear-cut examples of
synoptic and ectenic learners. Instead, they reveal ambiguous or apparently contradictory information, which can be well presented and interpreted with the ten-scale learner style profile assessment.
Appendix B
List of Recent Empirical Studies on SALL and Autonomy
Sana & Imtiaz (2012)
Purpose - explore the impact of project based learning (PBL) in
Purpose - explore the impact of project based learning (PBL) in