Visual and Verbal Learners

We propose to classify the ways people receive sensory information as visual, verbal, and other (tactile, gustatory, olfactory). Visual learners prefer that information be presented visually—in pictures, diagrams, flow charts, time lines, films, and demonstrations—rather than in spoken or written words. Verbal learners prefer spoken or written explanations to visual presentations. The third category (touch, taste, smell) plays at most a marginal role in language instruction and will not be addressed further.

This categorization is somewhat unconventional in the context of the learning style literature (e.g., Barbe & Swassing 1979; Dunn, Dunn, & Price 1978), in which sensory modalities are classified as visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Since the five human senses are seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, we suggest that “kinesthetic” does not properly belong on a list of sensory input modalities. A student’s preference for motion or physical activity of some sort during the learning process belongs in a separate learning style category: our proposed system and Kolb’s (1984) model place it in the active/reflective dimension, and the familiar model based on Jung’s typology (Lawrence 1993) includes it in the extravert-introvert dimension.

The distinction between the visual-auditory and visual-verbal classifications has to do with whether reading prose is more closely related to seeing pictures (which leads to the visualauditory contrast) or to hearing speech (visualverbal). Three mechanisms have been proposed for the process of extracting lexical significance from written words (Martin 1978): direct access (the reader jumps directly from the printed form of the word to its lexical meaning), indirect access (the printed words are translated internally into sounds before information about their meaning can be located in lexical memory), and dual encoding (lexical memory can be reached either directly or

indirectly). An extensive body of research supports a form of the dual encoding hypothesis.

Direct access is possible when words are familiar or when artificial conditions imposed in a research setting make speech encoding inefficient; however, when material is unfamiliar or difficult, lexical memory is speechaccessed (Crowder & Wagner 1992). The implication is that expository prose of the sort one finds in books and on classroom chalkboards is much more likely to be speech-mediated than directly accessed when silently read, and so belongs in the verbal rather than the visual category.

Most people extract and retain more information from visual presentations than from

written or spoken prose (Dale 1969), while most language instruction is verbal, involving predominantly lectures, writing in texts and on chalkboards, and audiotapes in language laboratories. Given the preference of most students for visual input, one would expect the last of these modes of presentation in particular to be unpopular, an expectation borne out in research cited by Moody (1988). When community college students were asked to rank-order 13 instructional modes, including lectures, discussion, slides, field trips, and audiotapes, audiotapes ranked at or near the bottom for the overwhelming majority of students surveyed.

Recent studies of learning styles in foreign language education (e.g., Oxford & Ehrman 1993) consistently place reading in the visual category, implying that instructors can meet the needs of visual learners solely by relying on written instructional material. Certainly visual learners learn better if they see and hear words in the target language, but so do auditory learners: presenting the same material in different ways invariably has a reinforcing effect on retention. The challenge to language instructors is to devise ways of augmenting their verbal classroom presentation with nonverbal visual material—for example, showing photographs, drawings, sketches, and cartoons to reinforce presentation of vocabulary words, and using films, videotapes, and dramatizations to illustrate lessons in dialogue and pronunciation.