Abstract

This study investigated the effects of learning-style based activities on students’ reading comprehension skills and self-efficacy perceptions in English foreign language classes. A quasi-experimental, matching-only pretest-posttest control group design was utilized. The study was conducted with freshmen university students majoring in Elementary Mathematics Education at Necmettin Erbakan University in the fall semester of academic year 2012-2013. English was one of their compulsory courses and their self-reported language level was A1/A2 in terms of the self-assessment grid included in the Language Passport which is one of the three components of the European Language Portfolio. A total of 39 students in the experimental group and 39 in the control group participated in the study. The learning-style based activities were implemented in the experimental group, while the control group continued with routine classroom instruction without any attention to their learning styles. Both groups received three one-hour sessions weekly, for a total of eight weeks. Both the Reading Comprehension post-test scores and the Self-Efficacy Scale for English post-test scores were significantly different in favor of the experimental group. Also, a significant moderate positive correlation was found between English reading comprehension achievement and English self-efficacy. It can be concluded that learning-style based activities enhanced reading comprehension skills and English self-efficacy perceptions during this study.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.