Korean Students’ Learning Styles and Their Focus on Form Learning Under Implicit and Explicit Conditions

The current research is aimed at exploring the relationship between individual learning styles and the focus on form learning. To establish learning styles, four modalities―visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic styles―were employed. For the focus on form learning, implicit and explicit learning modes were adopted. A total of 110 Korean 11th grade high school students participated in this study. They were randomly divided into four conditions: (1) more implicit, (2) less implicit, (3) more explicit, and (4) less explicit. Then, the participants undertook pre- and post-grammatical judgment tasks, followed by a VARK questionnaire (Fleming, 2001) to determine their preferred learning styles. The results indicated that the Korean EFL learners preferred kinesthetic learning the most (37.3%), followed by aural (30%), read/write (20%), and visual (14.5%) learning modalities. In addition, a two-way ANOVA revealed that it was not the learning styles but the two learning conditions that created the primary effect on the students’ target form learning. In addition, between the implicit and explicit learning modes, the explicit condition played a significant role in the students’ target form learning. Along with the interactions between implicit and explicit learning, some pedagogical implications were addressed.