Learning to programme requires complex cognitive skills that computing students find it arduous in comprehension. PP (pair programming) is an intensive style of programme cooperation where two people working together in resolving programming scenarios. It begins to draw the interests of educators as a teaching approach to facilitate learning and improve programming performance. The approach of PP, its model, benefits and limitations as well as the LS (learning style) preference are presented in the first part of this paper. The research findings and discussion on the application of PP involving 96 first year computing students are incorporated in the second part of this paper. The participants in these two intact classes were randomly assigned either to the experimental group that received PP or to the control group that received DI (direct instruction) method only. In PP group, students worked in pairs based on the visual-verbal LS dimension and those of DI group work individually. During a seven-week treatment, both groups applied program flowcharts and pseudocode in solving programming tasks. This study used two assessment methods--the formative and summative to examine the students' programming achievements. Two programming assignments were used as a formative assessment tool, also the CPPT (computer programming performance test) as the second tool which comprises of a pre-test, an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test, was administrated to assess the students' programming recall and retention. The result findings indicated that students in PP group significantly outperformed those in DI group for both the formative and summative assessments. However, only the visual and verbal students performed significantly better in recall than the retention. The analysis on the interaction effects revealed that learning is within inner self with regard to the instructional strategies applied and LS preference in classroom environment. In this case, the effectiveness of instructional strategies adopted to foster learning somehow depends on the type of learners. Therefore, educators should reflect on individual learning abilities while applying PP to stimulate students' engagement and critical thinking skills that subsequently will have positive influence on academic performance. (Contains 4 figures and 3 tables.)