Students ’ Learning Style Preferences of English at Universitas Pamulang

To have insight of the students learning style is vital since it can facilitate teacher to teach and decide what methods as well as activities are appropriate for the students, for instance, in learning English. For the students in the future, it is hoped that they can recognize their own learning style preferences in order to be able to learn successfuly, because the students themselves may have no ideas of learning styles they prefer. They just imitate what their friends do, and the teacher does not understand what the students are like and what they prefer in learning. As the consequence, it will not result in any good effect for the improvement for their successful teaching and learning. Hence, both teacher and students, particularly the teachers need to know the students’ characteristics and their learning style preferances. This study adapted the Style Analysis Survey (SAS) model proposed by Oxford (1995) concerning the the student learning style preferences. The samples of this quantitative study involved 60 students who consisted of 30 of non-English and 30 English students at UNPAM. The data taken from quetionnaire were analyzed by using SPSS into descriptive statistic. It was found that the student learning style preferences of both non-English and English students mostly fell on the Social and affective. Meanwhile, for the individual learning style preferences of each group of students are Physiological and Cognitive executive (II) in which non-English students will remember things better if they discuss them, and English students prefer realism instead of new, unstested ideas.


INTRODUCTION
Everyone is a unique human being since they have different characteristics and behaviour each other.An extravert will try to think out, focus on the outer world of people, whereas the introvert will think through, focus on the inner world, and thinkers will tend to make decision based on logic, but feelers based on personal and humanistic consideration (Jung in Felder 2005).Dornyei (2005) says that individual differences (IDs) are characteristics or traits in respect of which individual may be shown to differ from each other.
In a learning process, individual differences can obviously be seen on how a student learns.One student in a calssroom, for example, may feel comfortable when learning if his teacher asks him to sit and do tasks as the activites.
Meanwhile, other students will feel excited as being asked to perform a dialog or just to complete vocabularies by competing with friends.Those learning activites above are common to take place in a classrom and the students give a teacher pictures that they are different in responding the tasks.Other students differences arise from many variables such as age, attitude, motivation, intelligance, langguage aptitude (Felder 2005).To deal with such a wide varieties of learner differences in order to create a successful learning, the teacher, therefore, should be able to recognize the students' characteristics as well as their learning style preferences.
There are many theories of learning styles that can be condensed and examined in four dimensions (Acharaya 2002), firstly is personality of learners.It is divided into two: a.
dependence/independence learner.Dependence learners will look at patterns or relationships between parts first before looking at the whole picture, but independence ones will look at the whole pictures first and isolate or break it down into smaller part after (Witkin & Goodenough, 1981).b.
Secondly is information processing which consists of: a.
metaconitive: how people construct their views.
The way the students learn consistenly that reflects underlying causes of behaviour is called students learning style (Keefe 1979:4).It is the unique collection of individual skill and preferences that effects how a person perceives, gathers, and process information.Characteristic cognitive, affctive and physiological behaviours serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment (Keefe 1979:4).Nunan (1995:168) mentions learning tyles as the student preferences ways of going out about learning.Brown (2002:6) defines learning styles as ways of remembering thoughts and ideas and of practising skills.In detail Brown in Hension and Eller ( 1999: 292) expalians that elements in basic stimuli in the curent and past environtment effect individual'ability to absorb and retain information.All the definitions suggest that each student in class will have various learning style prefernces.
If both teacher and students can recognize and understand their own learning styles, they, particularly teacher, can create techniques better suited to the students in order to achieve successful learning.Isemoger & Sheppard (2003) in Acharaya (2002) believe that knowing the studnts learning styles can be the way to get more personal to the students and promote greater educational productivity.Reid (1987) conducted a research of ESL college students with different cultural background; Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Arabic, and Korean.The research reported that there were significants differences of the students learning styles preferences involving visual, auditory, kinesthetics, tactile, group, and individual learning styles in relation to to cultural diversity.
Regarding to the importance of research on the leaning style preferances in order to create a successful learning, this study intends to find out the learning style preferences of Non-English and English students in post-graduate level.Explicitly, this study will answer the following questions: 1.
What are the most learning styles preferred by the two groups of Non-English and English students in learning English ? 2.
What are the most leaning styles preferred by each group of students?3.
What are the individual learning styles preferred by each group of students?

RIVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
How do students differ?
Learner differences are the variations from one student to another on many variables such as age, attitude, motivation, intelligance, langguage aptitude (Felder 2005).Intelligence is one's capacity for logic, communication, problem solving and many aspects related to learning.In recent years, veiws of intelligance have emerged.The most popular one is multiple intelligences proposed by Howard Gardner (1983).He suggested that all people have different kind of intelligences. 1.
Verbal-Linguistic intelligence (well-developed verbal skill and sensity to the sound, meaning and rhythms of words) 2.
Logical mathematical intelligence (ability to think conceptually and abstractly, and capacity to disccern logical and numerical patterns) 3.
Spatial-visual intelligence (capacity to think in images and pictures, to visualize accurately and abstractly) 4.
Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (capacity to control one's body movement and to handle objectly skillfully) 5.
Musical intelligences (ability to produce and appreciaterhythm, pitch and timber) 6.
Interpersonal intelligence (capacity to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, motivations and desires of others) 7.
Intrapersonal intelligence (capasity to be self-aware and in tune with inner feelings, value, beliefs, and thingking proccess) 8.
Natularist intelligence (ability to recognize and categorize plants, animals, and other objects in nature) Gardner further explains that human potential can be tied to one's preferences to learning.Human potential lies in the fact that people have a unique blend capabilities and skills (intelligences).

Ausubel
Ausubel believes that individual learning is based upon what the individual already knows; the key individual difference variable is one's cognitive structure or a mental map of existing knowledge.They key component in Ausuble's theory is meaningful learning.He believes that individual is able to acquire more knowledge if the new information is meaningful thereby facilitating subsumption into the existing cognitive structure.Ausuble would support pretesting to determine exactly what a student knows.New information would not be introduced without ensuring the new knowledge could be tightly linked and connected to the students existing cognitive structure.He would use to elaborate multiple choice, visual, pictures, sequencing, grouping, and sorting activities to determine the organization of the learner's cognitive structure.Ausubel would group students who have related knowledge and differentiate direct instruction.Instruction should be systematic, direct, and explicit with the learner to make more connections and anchor concept meaningfully into the cognitive structure.If instruction does not take individual differences into account by considering what the learner already knows, instruction will result in rote, temporary, and arbitrarily anchored connections that will soon be lost.

Bandura
Bandura's theory of learning relies heavily on the concepts of self-efficacy, self-regulation, and modeling.Each of these components is largely influenced by individual differences between learners.Self-efficacy describes how an individual feels about his or her capabilities to accomplish a particular task.Bendura notes that self-efficacy influences an individual's choices, amount of effort, persistence, and esteem.Self-efficacy is a purely individual concept.Within a classroom of students, it is likely that there are as many different levels of efficacy for a specific learning as there are students.These differing levels have a complex influence on how best to conduct instruction.
Bandera also notes the importance of modeling.Modeling is learning vicariously through watching others and seeing them receive rewards or punishment.Modeling is largely influenced by individual differences.In order for modeling to be effective, a learner must find the model competent, powerful and/or prestigious, and relevant.For modeling to be effective, the rewards a model receives must be relevant to the learner.This value is determined by the individual.The determination of a model's overall effectiveness is determined solely by the individual learner.
Self-regulation is important for learning.Self-regulation is the ability an individual has to make choices concerning in which behaviors he or she will participate.Through self-regulation the learner can decide not to do something that he or she learned through modeling.There are three steps of the selfregulation process: 1. Self-monitoring, 2. Judging performance, 3. Self-response.Each of the steps in this process is conducted the individual level.An individual's ability to successfully conduct the self-regulation process greatly influences success in learning.
Bandera believes that instruction should be altered to account for individual differences.Instruction must be based on modeling, self-regulation, and self-efficacy.Instructor should develop environment to create and encourage self-efficacy wihtin individual learners, which is most effectively done by direct encouragement of students and providing opportunities for students to experience mastery of succes in particular learning tasks.Self-efficacy can also be influenced through positive modeling in which students observe others experiencing success at a particular acadamic task.Instruction on self-regulation includes the introduction of strategies, how to use them, and what the benefits are of self-regulated learning.

Bruner
Individual differs in what type of prior knowledge they bring to learning task.Each indivual has a cognitive structure built from prior learning experiences which differ from any to other leaners.The instructor should adjust instruction to fit the learner's current state of understanding.Bruner believes that every individual has the ability to acquire knowledge.The key to reaching each individual with knowledge is instruction.Bruner thinks that any student learns best through a process of discovery.
Bruner classifies an individual's cognitive ability using three stages: enactive (use of manipulatives), iconic (use of visual images), and symbolic (use of language and reasoning).Unlike Piaget, Bruner sees these stages as developing and accumulating during the learner's educational process and does not link the stages necessarily to age or physical development.This aspect of Bruner's theory demonstrates an individual difference, which is the rate at which learners move through these stages.Children should be provided with study materials, tools, and activities that are matched to and capitalize on their developing individual cognitive abilities.Bruer would alter curriculum and instruction based on an individual learner's interests.In this vein, Bruner woud allow the individual students to change topics, rebuild and revisit the curriculum while simultaneously varying learning mode (enactive, iconic and symbolic) and pace to meet an individual leaner's needs.
Each individual constructs a world through representation of his or her experiences with it.Education is concerned with assisting each individual in develoving or constructing a world.The personalization of knowledge, i.e. making it meaningful and useful in regards to the learner thinking, attitudes, and feelings, creates interest in learning.If instruction does not heed the individual's particular position, i.e. their prior knowledge, schema, or mental models they bring to learning environment, then learnig will not occur successfully for that individual.

Gagne
According to Gagne, the level of prerequisite skills acquired by students may differ by student; therefore, instruction must meet the needs to the individual learner.Gagne determined that a set of order intellectual skills made up an instructional plan for teaching a particular concept.Mastery of lower level skills would promote deeper understanding and acquisition of more complex intellectual skills.Even though Gagne's learning hierarchy presents a fixed learning sequence, all students may not have attained mastery of lower level prequisite skills creating multiple entry points where different students may enter into the learning sequence.These multiple entry points require the techer to assess students'abilities and skills to determine each student's position within the learning hierarchy in order to tailor the instructionby the learning tasks.Unless instruction begins at each student's individual level, the student will not acquire the skils necessary skill to solve complex problems related to learning.A variety of instructional activities would then be developed to ensure mastery of the sequenced prerequisite skills required for the learning goal, permitting students to work at their own pace.

Skinner
Skinner would propose that individual differeces among students come from the fact that each student comes from different environments in which their learning behaviour has been shaped and reinforced in various ways.Therefore, what may be considered a positive reinforcer for one students (or group of students) my not promote positive learning behaviour for others.This change in behaviour is the point at which learnig occurs.Advanced student learning occurs through the shaping process, in which the teacher reinforces successive approximations in individual student behaviour toward the desired leaning outcome.If teachers do not adjust their instruction to individual student needs, then the steps that the student makes toward the instructional goal cannot be reinforced; thus shaping (and learning) cannot occur.Teachers must diagnose the current level of behaviour of the student and create an environment that allows for various rates of progression to fit the needs of the individual learner.The idea to begin each learner at a point where they can produce desired responses and be reinforced for those responses.Teacher must monitor each student closely and provide immediate feedback for ech student's rogeress.Give the constrains and reality of the classroom, it is difficult for one teacher to monitor and reinforce the progress of a class thirty or so individual learners.As an alternative, Skinner proposes the use of computer-assisted intruction (CAI), in which computers prensent the information and provide immediate feedback to the individual learner.

Vygotsky
Vigotsky believes that the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the prime determinant of individual differences and development among students.He defines the Zone of Proximal Development as the discrepancy between the child's capacity to solve problems independently and the child's ability to solve problem with assistance.Vigostsky maintains that social interaction with a more knowledgeable person is critical for cognitive development.This interaction helps the child attain a higher level of development that can be achieved alone.
Te adult should scaffold instruction by adjusting the level of his or her assistance in response to the child's performance.If these adjustments are not made then the student will not attain a higher level cognitive development.Vigotsky also believes that individual differences can be attributted to culture.He states that students first learning connetions on the social level with their environment and other people; then, learning connections are manifested at the individual level.Since culture plays an assential role in cognitive development, it should be incorporated during instruction.Out of school experiences should be related to school experiences for optimal learning to take place.Although Vygotsky ackknowledges the relevance of individual difference, he does not believes that we should focus more on the student's potential by facilitating problem solving in a social context.

Learning styles
Learning style is the way a student learns.It helps one improves quality of learning.By understanding, for instance, a student own personal style, teachers can facilitate the student by adapting the learning process and technique they use.Brown (2002:6) defines Learning Styles as ways of remembering thoughts and ideas and of practicing skills.Meanwhile, Keefe says (1979) says that " Leraning styles are characteristic cognitive, effective, and physiological behaviours that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environtment."Keefe classifies three broad categories of learning style charateristics: 1.
Cognitive styles are preferred ways of perception, organization and retention; 2.
Affective styles present the motivational dimentions of the learning personality, each learner has a personal motivational approach; and 3.
Physiological styles are traits deriving from a person's gender, health and nutrition, and reaction to shcool physical surroundings, such as preferences for levels of light, sound, and temperature.Furthermore, Keefe explains that styles are hypothetical constructs that help to explain the learning (and teaching) process.Because learning is an internal process, we know that it has taken place only when we observe a relatively stable change in learner behaviour resulting from what has been experenced.
Almost in line with Keefe, Neil D. Fleming's Vark, sometimes VAK (varklearn.com)proposes a model which expended upon earlier Neuro-linguistic programing (VARK) models: visual learners, auditory learners, reading-writing prefereces learners, and kinesthetic learners or tactile learners.Fleming claimed that visual learners have a preference for seeing (think in pictures, visual aids that represent ideas using methods other than words, such as graphs, charts, digrams, symbols, etc.).Auditory learners best learn through listening (lecturer, discussion, tapes, ect).Tactile/kinesthetic learners prefer to learn via experience-moving, touching, and doing (active exploration of the world; science projects; experiments, etc).Its use in instruction allows teachers to prepare classes that address each of these areas.Students can also use the model to identify their preffered learning style and, it is claimed, maximize their learning by focusing on the mode that benefits them the most.

METHODOLOGY
This study was an attempt to find out learning style preferences of postgraduate students majoring in Non-English and English in learning English.The locus of this study was conducted at Pamulang University to 60 students of semester II and VI.To get the data about the student learning style preferences, the students were asked to answer questionnaire describing the learning styles they have been prefering in the following categories: almost alway, often, sometime, and never.Items of the questionnaire were composed in simplified and clear describtions to make it easy to be understood, especially for scientific and pedagogical terms that may create difficulties or lead to misunderstanding.All items were conducted in multiple-choice task from asking the subjects to indicate the frequency of use of the given learning styles.The data were collected and by using Oxford's Style Analysis Survey (1995) and analyzed using SPPS ver.22 for Windows into descriptive statistic.

FINDING AND DISCUSSION
Identifying the most learning style preferred by both non-English and English students.
The data about students learning style of English were collected by using Oxford's Style Anaysis Survey (1995) which consists of 22 items distributed into six subscales: (a) Physiological (items1 to 6), (b) Social and affective (items 1 to 4), (c) Cognitive and executive (I) (items 1 to 4), (d).Cognitive (items 1 to 4), (e).Cognitive and executive (items 1 to 4).These SAS 22 items were evaluated on 4-point Likert scales (from 0-3).The number indicates how often the student chosed the learning style.,1 = never or almost never, 2 = sometime, 3 = often, and 4 = always or almost always.To identify the most learning styles preferred by Non-English and English groups of students at UNPAM, it was identified by corresponding to the mean score of each learnig style as shown o table 1  The overall mean of learning style preferences score is 2.58.It explains that the students were moderet user of learning styles.It is also seen that the physiological and cognitive exeutive (II) learning styles are the least preferred by the respondents.It demonstrates that some students hardly learn a language by using sensory chracteristics such as visual, auditory, and hand-on/ kinestheti.Perhaps the students have not been exposed very often to do the tasks or activities using vedio, tape or any game requiring them to move and mingle in class.As a result, the highest score occurs in social and affective learning style in which the students prefer involvement of others in the learning process.The result on table and figure 2 above shows both groups of students chose social and affective as their most learning styles preference of English.However, the Non-English' result also shows the highest mean score (2.68) on cognitive.This indicates that the group preferred and employed two learning styles when learning English.For the least-chosen learning styles, the cognitive and executive (II) were chosen least frequently by the Non-English (2.31) and the English respondents (2.6).Cognitive and executive (II) refers to aspect how a learner approaches tasks (Oxford in Reid 1995Reid : 1995: 208-15): 208-15).It implies that both groups of students still need to be led in approching their tasks.They need to be told of things they have to prepare or to do concerning their tasks and responsibiities.
Identifying the individual learning styles preferred by each group of students As mentioned in previous section, there are 22 items of individual learning style under the five learning styles.Those are 6 individual styles under the physiological dimension, 4 individual styles under the social and affective dimensions, 4 individual styles under the cognitive and executive (I) dimensions, 4 individual styles under the cognitive dimension, and 4 individual styles under the cognitive and executive (II) dimensions.The table below shows the differences of SAS individual learning stye chosen by both groups.There were 60 respondents divided into 30 Non-English and 30 English students.The table 3-7 show the differences of SAS individual learning style chosen by both groups.

Category Physiological
Non  3 above inform that all individual learning styles which were grouped into physiological had mean scores in the range of 1.6 to 3.
The least individual learnig style choosen was A5/Ph5, namely "I avoid sitting at a desk if I don't have to".This indicates some students need the lecturers or teachers to change classroom arrangement requiring them not to sit on their chairs all the learning process.The low result is not surprising since Indonesian students usually study inside the classroom.Perhaps it will be easier for the teachers or lectures to control the students during learning.The fact above can be a clue for all facilitators to create new atmosphere in order to help students reach successful learning.4 show that the mean score of individual social and affective learning styles were between 2.4 to 3. It indicates that almost all students chose social and affective as their learning preference.They seem to enjoy the involment of others in the learning process.This shows the characteristics of Indonesian who like gathering in doing their activites.5 above inform that all individual learning styles which were grouped into cognitive and executive (I) had mean scores in the range of 2.3 to 3. The least individual learnig style choosen was C4/Cogex(I)4, namely "I avoid too many options".It explains that some students might not feel confortable when learning if the leturers assigned them tasks in the form of multiple choice, since most students in tertiary level are aquired to complete their tasks not only by answering the questions but also by explaining them.For the highest individual learning they chose C3/Cogex(I)3, "I prefer realism instead new, unsteated ideas".This could happen since the students did not have enough vocabulary to understand, for instance, implied main idea in a reading passage.Therefore, lecturers or teachers may create techniques to overcome the problem.7 above inform that all individual learning styles which were grouped into cognitive and executive (II) had mean scores in the range of 1.9 to 2.7.The least individual learnig style choosen was E4//Cogex4, namely "Lists of task make me feel tired or upset".It may imply students' laziness or tiredness since most of them are also workers.And there were three highest learning style preferences, namely E1/cogex1 for Non-English and E3/coegex3 for English." I like to let things happen, not plan them" was for Non-English."I reach decisions quickly" and "I like to let things happen, not plan them" were for English group.It indicates the students are not solw learners.They could understand the lesson quickly and were always ready for new one.The findings of this study inform different ways of how the students in tertiary level, particularly at UNPAM, approach learning.The differences between the two groups of students are expected to promote successful learning and prevent any obstacles that could cause problems during the learning process.
Based on the mean scores of the learning style chosen either in overall or individual SAS, it can be concluded that both non-English and English students preferred social and affective learning style when learning English.They seem to enjoy the involment of others in the learning process.This shows the characteristics of Indonesian who like gathering in doing their activites.The lecturers and teachers, therefore, can create tasks and activities which require the studets to work in groups such as presentation, completing an essay, correcting errors ect.However, the non-English students also showed their likness on cognitive that explains how the students deal with ideas.Interestingly, cognitive executive was the least chosen.It indicates that the students still need to be led in approaching their tasks.They need to be told of things they have to prepare and to do concerning their tasks and responsibilities.Last finding was that the non-English and English students had chosen different preferences on individual learning style, namely Physiological in which they remember things better if they discuss them loud, and Cognitive executive (I) in which they prefer realims instead of new, untested ideas.These last findings reveal that, firstly, the students need to be led into a group discussion in doing their taks.A lecturer can provide topics of reading and ask the students to share their understanding of what they have been reading.The lecturer can help them with the grammar and vocabulary.Secondly, for those who chose Cognitive and executive, the lectures may help the students with activities such as to write what they have been seeing in their environment or what is happening in their campus.In addition, Data on table and figure 5 inform ,firstly, that some students might not feel confortable when learning if the leturers assigned them tasks in the form of multiple choice, since most students in tertiary level are aquired to complete their tasks not only by answering the questions but also by explaining them.Secondly, this could happen since the students did not have enough vocabulary to understand, for instance, implied main idea in a reading passage.Therefore, lecturers or teachers may create techniques to overcome the problems.The lectueres may teach vocabularies that the students need before reading, or review strategies in teaching the four skills.The two techniques above will benefit both lecturers and studets to achieve sucessful teaching and learning.In other words, all findings show leacturers and teachers that learner differences and students learning style preferences do exist in a classromm.Hence, as facilitators, lecturers and teachers need to realize of this phenomena in order to help the students' difficulties in learning and to create successful learning.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: The most learning styles preferred by Non-English and English students

Fig. 7 .
Fig. 7. Results of Cognitive and executive (II) preferred by both groups proposes Style Analysis Survey (SAS) as a learning styles measuring instrument in the following figure:

Table 1 :
The most learning styles preferred by Non-English and English students

Table 2 :
Average SAS results by each group of students Fig. 2. The most learning styles preferred by each group of students.

Table 3 .
Results of individual physiological preferred by both groups Fig. 3. Results of individual physiological preferred by both groups Data on table and figure

Table 4 .
Results of individual social and affective preferred by both groupsData on table

Table 6 .
Results of Cognitive preferred by both groupsData from two groups of Non-English and English on table 6 above inform that all individual learning styles which were grouped into cognitive had mean scores in the range of 2.3 to 3. The least individual learnig style choosen was D1/Cog1, namely "I ignore details that do not seem relevant".And the highest one is D4/Cog4, "I prefer detailed answers instead of short answers."It indicates that both groups were moderate user of cognitive learning style.