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Assignment 1 Focus Onpdf
Assignment 1 Focus Onpdf
Focus on the learner
Part A. Learner’s profile.
Carolina and Marta are thirty-three years old, they were friends before starting this
course and they both live in Madrid (Spain), although Carolina is from Colombia. Their
mother tongue is Spanish and their level of English is A2 (pre-intermediate).
They both hold a degree. In Marta’s case, she studied Human Resources and works
recruiting profiles for a private company. Carolina is an Industrial engineer and she also
works for a private company. Carolina never learned English at school because in Colombia
it’s not a part of the schools program, nor the educational system, but she started to take
classes a year ago. Marta learned English at school, but she never took it seriously as she
found it too difficult, so she stopped when she finished studying. Four years ago she started
taking classes again.
They are learning English as they are aware of the importance of being fluent in this
language when it comes to improving their career prospects. However, Marta affirms that
she also learns it for pleasure; she feels motivated when she is able to understand songs and
conversations in English. The external motivation of opting for a promotion makes them
both highly stimulated students, even though Marta is the only one with internal
motivations.
At the interview they both said that they enjoy working in pairs or groups and doing
activities with visuals so they can get fluent at speaking and practise pronunciation, as it is
one of the main areas they want to work on and they find more difficult. Therefore, being
visual learners, the preferred approach to their learning style will be to use pictures and
symbols that identifies or exemplifies what is displayed on the board and use graphic
elements over just words. Tasks such as discussing photos of different scenarios are the
ones they can benefit more from.
On the basis of the conducted interview and their performance in class, their
weaknesses and strengths are:
Grammar: they both can construct affirmative and negative sentences in present
and past tenses with ease in most cases but they show difficulties to form questions
properly, especially using the past.. For example, they would often miss the auxiliary
and change the main verb to past: *when she began playing a musical instrument?
Lexis: they are able to use the vocabulary learned from previous classes in the
following lessons accurately, although they usually translate expressions and
colloquialisms in their speech (e.g. ‘In other moment’ or ‘in my point of view’).
Pronunciation: they can articulate well when learning the terms in class, but they
are not able to maintain the correct pronunciation throughout the lesson. Is
particularly difficult for them to hear and produce the different-ed sounds (past
tenses).
Speaking: while Marta hesitates more than Carolina when expressing herself and
her opinions, she is usually aware of her errors and corrects herself on the spot.
Although Carolina’s speech is more fluent, she tends to make grammar mistakes
that she doesn’t produce when doing exercises.
Writing: spelling mistakes are common on both Marta and Carolina when writing
words that haven’t been seen during the lesson. Nevertheless, they are able to
produce accurately expressions learned in previous lessons, like ‘I absolutely love’.
Reading: they find sometimes more difficult to get through a long paragraph or text
than a dialogue, although Carolina has less difficulties in this area. Nonetheless,
they are both very capable of finding the information required on the established
time.
Listening: they often struggle to understand some of the answers to specific
information mixed in a conversation (radio interviews). They get better results
when the information comes in shorter sentences (short dialogues).
Part B. Language problems and activities suggested.
Scrivener (2011:89) affirms that it’s necessary to know the individual reasons of
each student -consciously known or not- to teach better. Therefore, taking the problems
above and their needs into account, it will be useful to them to focus on exercises of
grammar and pronunciation.
As they both work in an office environment, being able to communicate properly in
English is their priority. Focusing on the way they express themselves when making
questions (grammar) will improve their security and fluency when speaking in English.
Developing good pronunciation skills is also essential to have a conversation with native
speakers and to understand them.
Grammar: Marta and Carolina make a common mistake in Spanish and Catalan
learners as, when speaking these languages, ‘there is no word order in questions and
auxiliaries play no part in them’ (Coe, 2001: 99). This also causes problems with the
production of these sentences when doing exercises (e.g. *what she did when she was
twelve? *what did she when she was twelve?).
Even though they both think that what they need to practise is speaking, at their
English level I think it can be more effective to reinforce their basic grammar knowledge,
which indirectly will affect their speaking skills.
The task I chose focuses on the practise of questions in past and present simple, it
involves visual elements and it can be worked in pairs, both methodologies that Carolina
and Marta enjoy.
Pronunciation: as, in Spanish, the vowels are the links between the consonants,
they are all pronounced; Marta and Carolina, like many Spanish students, have problems to
identify and produce the different -ed phonetical endings during the speech.
The chosen exercise involves a visual element and a listening practise. It allows
them to follow what is said as it’s written and gives them the opportunity to concentrate on
the different pronunciation of the -ed clauses.
to
Bibliography:
Scrivener, J. (2001) L
earning Teaching, 3rd edition. Oxford: Macmillan Education.
Coe, N. Speakers of Spanish and Catalan, Swan, M. and Smith, B. (Eds.) (2001) Learner
English: A teacher’s Guide to Interference and Other Problems. 2nd ed., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bowler, B. and Parminter, S. New Headway. Pronunciation course. Oxford University Press.
Murphy,R. (2012) English Grammar in Use, 3rd edition. Cambridge University Press.