Abstract
Following a brief review of recent trends in research on learning styles and cognitive styles, this paper reports on a preliminary study which examined learning style preferences of high school EFL learners and teachers. A questionnaire about 20 types of English language teaching/learning activities were given to more than 3,000 high school English teachers and students to interpret their perceptual learning style preferences in accordance with Reid's (1987) initial application. The results show the learning style preferences for Japanese high school English teachers to be similar to those of Japanese samples in previous studies, while those of Japanese EFL learners demonstrate significantly different distributions. The results also indicate that some factors such as students' school levels, school types and gender do influence their learning style preferences, while teachers' factors do not seem to. The implications for teachers of Japanese high school EFL learners are also discussed.
