The existence of individual learning styles is a hot topic in contemporary education theory and practice. There is an ongoing debate on whether learners benefit from teaching methods that are tailored to their perceived learning styles. The majority of educators believe that such styles do exist and a striving industry benefits from this concept. However, experts conclude that the evidence on t...

In an era of increased accountability in assessing student learning outcomes, greater emphasis has been focused on factors that influence student learning. In this paper we examine the impact of instructional methods and information technology on student learning styles, all critical factors affecting student learning. A research framework that suggests the relationship of instructional process...

Task-based language Teaching (TBLT) has occupied the pertinent literature for some long years. However, the role of specific task type in developing specific skill type seems to be amongst the intact issues in the literature. To shed more light on this issue, the present study was conducted to compare the effect of jigsaw and decision-making tasks on improving listening and speaking abilities o...

The term "learning styles" refers to the concept that individuals differ in regard to what mode of instruction or study is most effective for them. Proponents of learning­style assessment contend that optimal instruction requires diagnosing individuals' learning style and tailoring instruction accordingly (pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork, 2009). There are several methods or theories that d...

The goal of this study is to evaluate to what extent listeners are capable of distinguishing between professional speaking styles based only on prosodic cues. The four speaking styles contemplated in the study – TV news, religious, political, and interview speech – were recorded in the context of normal use from Brazilian television and low-pass filtered to remove semantic information. The part...

This study presents an approach to the task of automatically classifying and detecting speaking styles. The detection of speaking styles is useful for the segmentation of multimedia data into consistent parts and has important applications, such as identifying speech segments to train acoustic models for speech recognition. In this work the database consists of daily news broadcasts in Portugue...