LEARNERS’ LANGUAGE LEARNING STYLE PREFERENCES AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR CRITICAL THINKING ABILITY IN AN IRANIAN EFL CONTEXT

The study aims at exploring learners’ learning style preferences and investigating the significant relationship (if any) between the learning style preferences and their critical thinking ability in an Iranian English as a foreign language context. To this end ninety Iranian EFL students were selected. They were from University of Sistan and Baluchestan and Islamic Azad University of Zahedan. The data was collected through two questionnaires: Willing’s (1988) learning style questionnaire and Honey’s (2004) critical thinking questionnaire. Descriptive statistics of the data revealed that communicative learning style had the highest mean value (M=18.84). So, the most preferred learning style used by Iranian EFL learners was proved to be communicative learning style. Concrete learning style and analytical learning style were in the second and third ranks respectively, while authority oriented type of learning styles had the lowest mean (M=16.51). The Pearson Correlation analysis showed that there was a statistically significant association between Iranian EFL learners’ communicative learning style and their critical thinking ability at p < 0.01 significant level. Besides, analytical learning style was in statistically significant relationship with critical thinking (p < 0.05). The study contains pedagogical implications for teachers, syllabus designers and learners who want a profound language learning and teaching process. As it has been identified many of Iranian university students are communicative-oriented learners, there should be a reasonably safe indicator for the general direction to consider in designing text books for such learners.