The CATESOL Journal

Designing and presenting lessons is the center of the teaching process. Every day teachers must make decisions about the instructional process. A teacher’s approach can have an enormous impact on the effectiveness of his or her teaching. Understanding students’ preferences toward teaching approaches and teaching styles can create opportunities for teachers to make adjustments that better serve their students. Many teachers continue using traditional teaching approaches, so the question exists of whether or not these teaching approaches are meeting the educational needs of the learners. This article addresses this question and discusses a qualitative study involving the preferences of 225 Taiwanese EFL university students toward 3 main teaching approaches (instructor centered, student centered, and content centered) and offers pedagogical suggestions. Through a statistical analysis, the research findings indicate that the participants can clearly recognize the differences among the teaching approaches, have a clear preference toward the student-centered approach, and hold more positive attitudes toward student-centered learning.