As a bilingual teacher (I teach English in a Spanish speaker country) I consider students’ perceptions and attitudes towards learning a language is significant and their learning styles as well, I am the one who helps them make right choices that will be critical to their performance. It is important to take into account that not only students learn, but also teachers do when different ways of thinking appear, that is why a language teacher must know several ways to guide learners to discover their own forms of learning and communicating their findings.
In my personal case, I definitely learn when I am interested in understanding, when I am motivated and when I have a clear purpose to learn, when I find it practical, when I see that specific “thing” is applicable in real life. Also, I have discovered I love when I SEE and share procedures, if I have the chance to follow a process to get a product I really get it. Additionally, I enjoy learning when I explain to someone or when somebody explains to me, talking, discussing, socializing are always helpful to acquire knowledge.
In short, it is difficult to determine what our learning style is when many factors affect the act of learning: as I said above motivation is relevant (the role of emotion is involved), when we socialize we enrich and clarify our knowledge (the role of interaction takes place), when we are aware of mistakes and we correct them (the way we face them are the result of affective factors), I would say there is a mixture of ways of learning and what we should do as teachers is to explore the variety of these ways students may have in order to develop their autonomy to learn by themselves.
