A Descriptive Study of Teaching Styles in Freshman English Classrooms

his study aimed at investigating teaching styles as well as related beliefs of a representative group of EFL teachers from the Modern Languages Division (MLD) of the School of Foreign Languages (SFL) at Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU). The study addressed the following research questions: 1) What are the EFL teachers’ teaching styles? 2) What are the language teachers’ beliefs about their learners’ learning styles? 3) How do the EFL teachers consider matched instructional designs? The research study involved 30 EFL teachers from the MLD of the SFL at EMU. Among the same group of the teachers 10 volunteered to participate in interviews. In accordance with its descriptive research purposes, the study employed Peacock’s (2001) modified version of the PLSPQ ‘Perceptional Learning Style Preference Questionnaire’ (Reid, 1987) as well as 2 semi-structured interviews, based on Reid’s hypotheses (1987, 1995) and Doyle and Rutherford’s (1984) suggestions on matched instructional designs. The Cronbach’s Alpha scores revealed .73 for the teachers’ questionnaire which indicated reliability of the data collection instrument. Further, the overall analysis of the EFL instructors’ questionnaire responses indicated that the language teachers favored a repertoire of several teaching styles such as group, visual, auditory and kinesthetic (3.52≤M≤3.65). However, the teacher respondents expressed less favorable preferences for the application of individual and tactile teaching style (M=3.11, and M=2.94, respectively). Importantly, the majority of the EFL instructors reportedly applied group teaching style frequently (M=3.65). Furthermore, the analysis of English teachers’ interview reports overall demonstrated their mostly positive beliefs about their learners’ learning styles in terms of 7 emerging themes as follows: the importance of learning styles in teaching, application of learning styles in teaching, related effects on teaching, awareness of teaching styles, teachers’ awareness of their students’ learning styles, learners’ awareness of their own learning styles, and effects of learning styles on learning. Finally, the examination of the language instructors’ interview reports provided their mostly favorable insights in relation to the Doyle and Rutherford’s (1984) suggestions on matched instructional designs. Consequently, the current study suggests that EFL teachers and their line managers take into account the findings related to the content, structure and delivery of the freshman English language courses on offer, as well as consider the study results for teacher training and professional development at the institution. Keywords: Teaching styles, learning styles, matched instructional designs, EFL teachers, teachers’ beliefs