Đỗ Thị Linh Chi – 20193494

English Language Teaching

Chapter 5: BEING LEARNERS (Summary)

5.1. Age factor

Because people of different ages have different needs, competencies, and cognitive skills, the age
of students can be major factor deciding how we teach them.
 One common belief is that young learners learn faster than ones from other age groups.
 Young learners can easily have accurate pronunciation but older children (from the age of 12
– through adolescence) actually do better as language learners for their increased cognitive
abilities.
 “Critical period hypothesis” (CPH) indicates that there is a “critical period” for language
learning that ends around puberty. However, older children show themselves effective
learners because of their developed intellectual skills that provide them with the ability to
understand how language works, demonstrating that there is nothing to do with critical
period.
Young learners
 A lot of theories have shown that children go through various stages in their lifetime.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to clearly identify young learners due to children’s constantly
changing cognitive and emotional faculties, different characters, and rates of development.
2 possible groups can be:
 Younger children (5 upwards)
 Older children (10 upwards)
 Some recommendations for teachers of young learners:
 Having rich experience and extensive skills to encourage students to get information from
various sources
 Spending time understanding how their students think and operate
 Creating bright and colorful classroom
 Providing diverse types of learning activities to trigger learners’ curiosity and interest in
lessons
 Teenagers
 Teenagers appear to have intense emtion, problems with authority, and highly developed
sense of fair and right things in their life. In contrast, they possess huge energy, sense of
humour, creative thinking, and capacity for abstract thought.
 Recommendations for teaching this age group:
 Make what we do relevant to the students’ lives
 Join class activities when necessary
 Involve teenagers in decisions about what they are doing to encourage their engagement
Adults
 Advantageous characteristics: the ability to engage with abstract thought, life experiences,
learning expectations, self-discipline, higher potential motivation.
 Disadvantageous ones: being uncomfortable with unfamiliar teaching methods, anxiety about
learning, missing lessons, potential difficulties in pronunciation.
 Recommendations:
 Including various recycling activities to improve learners’ short-term retention & using
pair work
 Relating learners’ prior knowledge to learning
 Agaisnt thinking adult learners’ classes are always serious
5.2. Learner differences
Learner styles
 Perceptual preferences: include visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory.
 Personality factors: extroverted or introverted
 Multiple intelligences (MI): musical, verbal, visual, kinaesthetic, logical, intrapersonal,
and interpersonal
 How we process things
 Little correlation between individual learner differences and different levels of success, but it
is more useful to encourage students to think about their preference in learning, thereby design
best-fitted strategies and activities.
5.3. Motivation
Understanding the nature of motivation
 Extrinsic (coming from outside) and intrinsic (coming from inside)
 Instrumental (leverage the language to get a new job or live somewhere new..) and
integrative (wish to be part of the language speaking community)
 Zoltan Dornyei (2014) defines 3 motivational factors: Ideal L2 self, Ought-to L2 self, and L2
Learning experience.
What affects motivation
 Attitudes of Students’ familities to learning of foreign languages
 Their peers’ attitudes
 Curiosity
 Relizing the importance of learning another language
What teachers can do about student motivation
 Affect: feeling and emotion are important, so it is essential to provoke students’ excitement,
self-esteem, and motivation.
 Achievement: make grades transparent and provide a reasonable level of challenge
 Activities: make the materials and activities relevant to students’ lives and interests & vary
activities used in class
 Attitude: be confident in what we are teaching to make students believe in us
 Agency: avoid letting students be passive recipients by getting them make some decisions
about what is going on
5.4. Levels
From beginner to advanced: real beginner – false beginner  elementart  lower-/pre-
intermediate  mid-intermediate  upper-intermediate  advanced
The CEFR levels: proposes a 6-level frame to describe students’ levels: A1, A2, B1, B2,
C1, C2
Other frameworks of language proficiency: The Global Scale of English compared
(Pearson) includes Academic English – Professional English – Young Learners
5.5. Learner autonomy
Challenges when encouraging students to be autonomous include the students themselves,
institutional factors, and teacher’s expectation.
Learner training/strategy training
 Learner journal: using reflection to provoke students’ ability to manage themselves and plan
 Strategy training: provide learners the opportunity to experience different learning strategies
so that thay can opt for the best one
 Goal and processes: get students thinks about the goal of learning and setting their own
planning
Autonomy tasks
 Teachers shoud set tasks and ask students to take charge of them on their own. This requires
students engage themselves in learning, elevating their autonomy.
Open learning, self-access centres and student ‘helpers’
 Open learning: giving students choices in what , where, and how to learn so that they will be
self-determined and independent.
 Providing self-access centre for students to go to study on their own: arrange the centre, think
about how students go around, whicb corner is the most popular to students
 Students ‘helpers’: allow students to become ‘expert’ to support each other
Provoking student choice
 Allow students to choose their desire discussion topics
 Let students discuss the syllabus, content of the lessons, …
 Ask their feeling about the course
Outside the classroom: show students how they can learn on their own outside the classroom
 Suggest them to research for information on the Internet and any other source
 Encourage students to talk to themselves
 Give time for students to share what they learn from outside
Homework
 To some extent, homework is not enjoyed by both students and teachers
 Some recommendations:
 Select engaging HW tasks
 Quanlity not quantity
 Compliance measures
 Different responses
All in the mind
 Critical thinking is key element of learner autonomy because it provokes students’ self-
thinking about what they are doing and experiencing.
 Some ways to encourage critical thinking in classroom:
 Ask students to analyze the content and topic
 Create debates
 Encourage students to raise questions about the lesson and ask what they think