Kuwaiti College Students’ Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences

Abstract

The study was focused on discovering the dominant learning styles and multiple intelligences that were exhibited by English as a foreign language (EFL) Kuwaiti students at the College of Basic Education (CBE) in Kuwait. One aim of the study was to rank order their most dominant learning styles and multiple intelligences. Another aim was to draw implications for teaching strategies and study materials that suit the Kuwaiti students’ learning styles and multiple intelligences. Data collection utilized a data elicitation instrument divided into two parts: one on learning styles (Oxford, 1998), and one on multiple intelligences (Christison, 1998b). Part one of the instrument targeted the students’ learning styles and part two was focused on their multiple intelligences. The researchers employed the Excel software program to generate means, percentages, rankings, and standard deviations. Data analysis identified the dominant learning styles of Kuwaiti students which were dominated by a global learning style, followed by an intuitive style, then closure-oriented, and then a visual, and finally an extroverted learning style. As for multiple intelligences, the Kuwaiti students were mainly interpersonal, visual, kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, naturalist, intrapersonal, and lastly musical. Implications for research were drawn for conducting further studies in other EFL settings in order to develop teaching techniques that accommodate students’ learning styles and multiple intelligences and to design teaching tasks and activities that further expand students’ existing learning styles and multiple intelligences.