A Learning Style-based Grouping Collaborative Learning Approach to Improve EFL Students' Performance in English Courses

Learning English is an important and challenging task for English as Foreign Language (EFL) students. Educators had indicated that, without proper learning support, most EFL students might feel frustrated while learning English, which could significantly affect their learning performance. In the past research, learning usually utilized grouping, but few studies have considered the difference in group members’ learning styles. In this study, a learning style-based collaborative learning approach is proposed to cope with this problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, an learning style-based online collaborative learning platform has been developed. Moreover, an experiment has been conducted on a university English course to compare the learning performance and learning interest of the students who learn with the proposed approach and those who learn with the conventional collaborative learning approach. It was found that the homogeneous learning style groups outperformed the heterogeneous groups. Besides, those students who used the online English collaborative learning approach outperformed those who used the traditional paper-based English collaborative learning approach. Sequence analysis was also carried out to analyze the students’ online discussion.