Exploring Learners’ Experiences of VARK-Based Activities in Story Comprehension:A Qualitative Study

This qualitative study explored learners’ experiences of Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic (VARK)-based activities in story comprehension, with particular attention to perceived usefulness, responses to comprehension difficulties, and future strategy choice. Fourteen learners from secondary school were treated as the participant group for this manuscript and completed a bilingual open-ended reflection questionnaire after participating in VARK-oriented story activities. The five questionnaire prompts asked learners to identify the modality that helped them most, describe what they did when they did not understand, reflect on a non-preferred modality, identify the easiest part of the story and the modality that supported it, and state which approach they would use first in future reading. The data were analysed thematically following Braun and Clarke’s approach. The interpretation was guided by an integrated conceptual framework drawing on Fleming and Mills’ VARK model and Zimmerman’s Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) framework. Four themes were developed: (1) modality-specific support for comprehension and engagement, (2) strategic regulation of comprehension difficulties, (3) usefulness beyond preferred modalities, and (4) movement towards multimodal learning flexibility. The responses indicated that no single VARK modality was perceived as universally superior. Instead, learners associated different modalities with different functions, including maintaining engagement, visualising story events, supporting listening, remembering information, and learning vocabulary. Learners also reported help-seeking, dictionary use, translation, rereading, repetition, videos, and subtitles when comprehension broke down. Exposure to non-preferred modalities further showed that preference and usefulness were not necessarily identical. The study concludes that VARK is most defensible when used as a reflective scaffold for exploring multiple learning approaches rather than as a basis for fixed learner labels or instructional matching.

VARK, story comprehension, learning preferences, multimodal learning, self-regulated learning, metacognition, thematic analysis

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