This descriptive study attempted to explore teaching styles by eliciting beliefs of a group of English language teachers through Peacock’s (Int J Appl Linguist 11:1–20, 2001) Perceptual Teaching Style Preference Questionnaire and interviews based on Reid’s hypotheses (TESOL Q 21:87–111, 1987; Learning styles in the ESL/EFL classroom. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1995) on learning styles and Doyle and Rutherford’s (Theory Pract 23:20–25, 1984) suggestions on matched instructional designs. The mixed methods research design was adopted in the current study, and concurrent triangulation was used to corroborate the findings. Study findings indicated that the participants reportedly applied the group teaching style more frequently than the other styles and favored a repertoire of the visual and auditory perceptual teaching styles. Although participants were mostly positive about the importance of learning styles, effects of perceptual teaching styles on learning, and the matched instructional design, they did not believe that their students were aware of their own learning styles and noted various curricular and administrative constraints in relation to implementation of the matched instruction. Consequently, the current study suggested that the language teachers and their line managers should consider effective planning and implementation of the entire teaching operation in relation to the matched instructional design in their classrooms. Also, it is recommended that as part of their professional development, the classroom practitioners are encouraged to explore their students’ “voices” and raise their learners’ awareness regarding their learning styles for more effective teaching–learning processes.

It has been observed that Turkish university students suffer in L2 writing when they lack background knowledge about the writing topic. Triggered by this observation, this study intended to explore effectiveness of content-schemata activation for scaffolding Turkish students in their challenging L2 writing practices. Study participants, students studying at an English-medium university in Turkey, were asked to write an essay on a specific topic at the beginning of the week before participating in any activities and then they were asked to write a second essay on the same topic after being engaged in various skills activities designed to activate their content-schemata. The same procedure was repeated for seven weeks with a different topic each week. To gather data, students' first and second essays were compared and students' and teachers' perceptions regarding their experiences in English writing classes were elicited through questionnaires. As study findings reveal that content-schemata activation leads to the production of better essays in terms of content and that both students and teachers are positive about the use of skills activities for idea generation prior to essay writing, integration of activities that would activate students' content-schemata into the language curriculum in other ESL/EFL educational contexts is highly recommended.