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Students’ Learning Styles, Self-efficacy and its Correlation with their Social Interaction
Abstract
This cross-sectional study has been prepared to investigate the self-efficacy levels and preferred learning styles of EFL learners at Gaziantep University School of Foreign Languages GUSFL along with revealing the relationship between these two variables and the learners’ social interaction. The present study was conducted in March of 2017-2018 academic year. The participants are students, who are learning English as a foreign language. The total number of participants is 312 from different nationalities, but mainly Turkish and Syrian, male and female. Before start applying the questionnaire, the tool’s three variables were checked and proved their reliability (Learning Styles =, 732; Social Interactions =, 799; Self-Efficacy =, 900). The next step was conducting the questionnaire. It’s worth mentioning that elements such as gender, nationality, proficiency level and age were taken into consideration while collecting and analyzing the data. The results indicated that learners use various learning styles and don’t rely on a particular one. However, the logical learning style registered the highest score (20,416) whereas, the lowest learning style was the reading and writing learning style (16,737). As for the student’s self-efficacy level, the participants showed a high level of self-efficacy (30,096 with a standard deviation of 6,498) especially the male participants where the results indicated a statistically significant difference in favour for men (p>, 05). Furthermore, as the study is concerned with uncovering any possible relationship between these three variables, the analyzed data has shown that there is a positive relationship between the learners’ preferred learning styles, their self-efficacy, and their social interaction. The article highlights how these variables are correlated with each other. Additionally, the results showed a major difference between Turkish and non-Turkish participants in terms of their social interaction.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.10n.4p.42
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