Describing Learners

Miguel Barquero Karolina

Portuguez Ana María Posas

The Age Factor

Teaching Children : Myth. Learn faster and more effectively than any other group.

Teaching Teenagers: Myth.Unmotivated and uncooperative. They Are often more effective learners.

Teaching Adults: They may have greater difficulty in approximating native speaker pronunciation

Much also depends upon individual learner differences and upon motivation.

Young children

Their understanding comes in several ways: what they see, hear and touch

They find abstract concepts and grammar rules difficult

Need for individual attention and approval from the teacher

Eager to talk about themselves and respond well to learning about topics such as their home

They can be bored if the activity is not interesting enough

Adolescents Are often seen as problematic students Great ability for abstract thought and passionate commitment Search for identity and self-esteem Peer approval is more important than the attention of the

teacher Herbert Puchta and Michael Schratz see problems from

teenagers as result of teachers failure to build bridges between what they want and have to teach and their students worlds of thoughts and experience

We must give them tasks which they are able to do

Adult Learners They can engage with

abstract thought

They posses a whole life experience

They have expectations about the learning process

More disciplined than other age groups

Clear understanding of why they are learning and what they want to get out of it

On the other hand they have difficulties too:

They can be critical with some teaching methods

They may have negative experience in learning a language

They might worry that their intellectual powers may be diminishing with age

Learner Differences Linguistic aptitude tests (appeared in 50’s and 60’s) – predict

a student’s future progress.

Disadvantages:

They measure the general intellectual ability more than the lisguistic talents

They were especially suited to people who were analytic-type learner

They may discriminate between the most and the least “intelligent” students and they are less effective distinguishing between those who fall between these two extremes

Teachers tend to treat differently those students with high scores from those with low scores.

Both teacher and students should be

optimistic about all of the people in the

class, although the results of the tests

are good or not.

Good Learner characteristicsNeil Naiman Tolerance of ambiguity. Positive task orientation.

Ego involvement. High aspirations. Goal orientation. Perseverance.

Joan Rubin & Irene Thompson

Learning to live with uncertainty. Students who are independent, creative, who make intelligent guesses, who make their own opportunities for practice and who use contextual clues.

Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada

Characteristics can be classified in several categories (motivation, intellectual abilities, learning preferences), and some, such as “willing to make mistakes”, can be considered a personality characteristic.

Western-influenced methodologies

Promote learner autonomy and self-reliance. Encourage students to read texts for general understanding wihtout stopping to look up all the words they don’t understand. Students are asked to speak communictively and involved in creative writing.

Learner styles and strategies

According to Tony Wright:1. Enthusiast: looks to the teacher as a point

of reference and is concerned with the goals of the learning group.

2. Oracular: also focuses on the teacher but is more oriented towards the satisfaction of personal goals.

3. Participator: tends to concentrate on group goals and group solidarity.

4. Rebel: refers to the learning group as her/his point of reference, is mainly concerned with the satisfaction of his/her own goals.

• According to Keith Willing:

Convergers Students who are by nature solitary, prefer to avoid groups, and who are independent and confident in their own abilities. They are analytic and tend to be cool and pragmatic.

Conformists Students who prefer to emphasize learning “about language” over learning to use it. Depende on those in authority. Feel happy to work in non-communicative classrooms.

Concrete learners

Enjoy the social aspects of learning. Like to learn from direct experience. Interested in language as communication rather than language as a system. enjoy games and groupwork in class.

Communicative learners

Language use oriented. They are comfortable out of class. Show confidence and willingness to take risks. Much more interested in social interaction with other speakers of the language. Perfectly happy to operate without the guidance of a teacher.

Frank Coffield, David Moseley, Elaine Hall and Kathryn Ecclestone identify an extremely large list of opposed styles which introduces a note of caution into our evaluation of different learner style descriptions.

Individual variations

• Neuro-Linguistic Programming: most people have one “preferred primary system” based on the VAKOG formulation.

• NLP gives teachers the chance to offer students activities which suit their pimary preferred systems.

Individual variations

• MI theory: Howard Gardner suggested that we possess a range of “intelligences” instead of a single one.

• All people have all of these intelligences, but in each person one (or more) of them is more pronounced.

We can establish WHO the different students in our class are and recognize HOW they are different through:

observation formal devices; for example, questionnaires,

tests, and feedbacks.

What to do about individual differences?

Questionnaires: we might ask students what their learning preferences are.

When answering comprehension about reading passages I prefer to work:A) on my own B )with another studentC )with a group of studentsTests: we might try to find out which preferred sensory

system our students respond toThe Lead Vak Test/Read and imagineFollow each instruction in your mind and give yourself a mark 0=impossible 1=difficult 2=OK 3=easy___SEE a kangaroo ___HEAR a song ___FEEL excited___SEE your toothbrush ___HEAR your own voice ___FEEL grass under your feet___SEE a plate of food ___HEAR the birdsong ___FEEL your fingers on a piano changes to a call alarm keyboard

b

Feedback: either face to face or written. We might find out how our students liked an activity, we just performed in class.

Feedbacks, questionnaires, tests and our observation will help us to build a picture of the best kind of activities for the mix of individuals in a particular class, but it does not mean that everyone will be happy all the time but most the class will be engaged with the learning process.

Advanced

Upper intermediate

Mid-intermediate

Lower intermediate/pre-intermediate

Elementary 

Real beginner False beginner 

Language levels

ALTE

A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2Can complete basic forms and write notes including times, dates and places

Can complete forms and write short simple letters or postcards related to person al information

Can write letters or make notes predictable matters

Can make notes while someone is talking or write a letter including non-standard questions

Can prepare/draftProfessional correspondence, take reasonable accurate notes in meetings or write an essay which shows an ability to communicate

Can write letters on any subject and full notes of meetings or seminars with good expression or accuracy

Some techniques and activities are suitable for some levels; we should take our students’ level into consideration while choosing techniques and activities.

We will give to our students more support when they are at beginners or intermediate levels, than we need to do when they are more advanced.

At Lower levels, we might have our students to repeat sentences and phrases chorally. Furthermore, repetition and drills can help get over this and allow them to practice in a enjoyable and stress free way.

Methodology