Aural Study Strategies
The aural (auditory) strategy is part of a four-category system included in the VARQ questionnaire. According to the VARQ website, the VARQ questionnaire provides educators and learners the ability to find their learning styles and preferences. This involves the way information is being taught, heard and retained. There are four different types of categories: visual, aural, read/write and kinesthetic. Most people are drawn to a particular category and sometimes people fall into more than one. An aural learner learns mostly by hearing and repetition.
The definition of auditory is pertaining to the sense of hearing (Jones, 2003, p. 547). An auditory learner will retain more information and learn best from group discussions, speaking and following directions instructed to them. Often an auditory learner will need to talk things out before thinking about the ideas or facts before speaking. Also, they learn through repetitiveness and might repeat something that has already been talked about or asked. Therefore, the learner would feel more comfortable to know and repeat the material in his or her own way.
The preferred strategies for an auditory learner should always include hearing and speaking. Attending class is very important as well as taking notes and being involved in open discussion. Also, whenever it is possible, auditory learners will benefit from oral presentations and power points. Noise makes a difference when it comes to study time. Learners get easily distracted by noise and easily distracted by silence. Having light music without words in the background will help learners work better. They would rather attend class lectures than reading from a textbook. People also benefit from using a recorder to record the class lectures and listen to them rather than going over class notes. Explaining the material to a different person also aids in the learning experience for an auditory learner.
Some identified strategies are to remember the tone of voice your educator is using, remembering interesting stories and recalling examples or jokes. This will aide in recognizing the material from voice recognition. They also understand the true meaning of someone’s words by listening to the change of tone in someone’s voice. Past studies in auditory voice evaluation training have shown that listeners showed improvement in detecting subtle differences in voice quality (Chan, Li, Law, & Yiu, 2012). When dialing someone’s number they pay attention to the way it sounds on the phone and they recall it by the sound it made when the keys were pressed. Note taking should be spacious for when the learner comes back and adds in more information from the textbook, video or recordings. It will be helpful to ask others if they are willing to listen to the lecture that way learners fully understand the topic and content. Reading assignments out loud and summarizing the notes is also helpful with learning. When taking a test imagine talking to the examiner and make sure there is a quiet and calm environment where you can recall ideas to ensure that there is no distraction.
Changes need to be made to improve learning strategies including practicing out loud, paraphrasing and explaining the material to other people that are willing to listen and give back positive reinforcement. Before starting a new assignment set