THE EFFECT OF PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BASIC ENGLISH STUDENTS ON THEIR LEARNING STYLES AND ITS REFLECTION ON TEACHING PROCESS

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of some personal characteristics such as age, gender, type of high school graduated and the departments of the students on their learning styles. Learning Style Inventory (LSI) developed by Kolb in 1981 and amended in 1985 and translated into Turkish by A§kar and Akkoyunlu in 1993 was conducted on 777 students enrolled in English preparatory courses at beginner, pre-intermediate and intermediate levels at the School of Foreign Languages, Department of Basic English at Hacettepe University. T-test, Kruskal-Wallis Test, oneway variance analysis and the least significant difference method (LSD) were used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that the majority of the students preferred Assimilator and Converger learning styles. The results showed that, the studentsʹ learning styles did not differ according to their gender, age and their departments at the university. However it was also found out that the students who graduated from Science High Schools preferred Converger learning style whereas the other students who graduated from different high schools preferred Assimilator learning style.