UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE LA SANTÍSIMA CONCEPCIÓNFACULTAD DE EDUCACIÓN

PEDAGOGÍA EN EDUCACIÓN MEDIA EN INGLÉS

“LANGUAGE LEARNER PROFILE”

Course: English Methodology IITeacher: Roxanna Correa

Students’ names: Camila Cuevas - Angel Sandoval Villarroel

Concepción, September 23th, 2013

INDEX

i. Language Learning Strategies Framework…………………………………………….3

ii. Learner’s background…………………………….………………………………………5

iii. Interview……………………………………………………………………………………6

iv. Phonetic transcription……………………………..………………………………………8

v. Analysis and examples:

a. Phonetics and phonology………………………………………...………………9

b. Lexis………………………………………..………………………………………9

c. Grammar………………………………………………………………………… 10

vi. Lesson Plan……………………………………………………………………………….13

vii. Lesson plan evaluation…………………………….……………………………….……15

viii. Conclusions………………………………………………………………………….……16

ix. References………………………………………….……………………………….……17

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1. LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES FRAMEWORK

Throughout many years it has been very difficult to find out a successful or a

standard way to teach language. Many approaches and methods have been

created to discover what the key is to teach successfully and to make the

learning process more efficient for students. Chamot (2004) points out that it is

important to have some strategies to make the teaching process easier and

more helpful for our students, because learning strategies involve techniques

for understanding, remembering, and using information and skills to model the

new content. These techniques can help students by showing them explicitly

how to learn a certain area of the target language, which will facilitate the

developing of their independence and confidence as learners. In addition,

students increase their motivation by becoming more successful in school and

much more aware of their own critical thinking and learning process.

Three additional learning strategies are considered to be essential when

acquiring a second or foreign language. These strategies are: Planning, which

refers to set goals and identifying steps to achieve that aim; monitoring, which is

related to checking your comprehension while completing a task and identifying

specific problems you might have; and evaluating, which is connected to

assessing yourself on how well you have completed the task.

Chamot and Robbins (2010) in their CALLA handbook, present five different

phases that involve the learning process. These phases are: Preparation,

presentation, practice, self-evaluation and expansion.

In the preparation phase, it is relevant to identify clear objectives as well as

the strategy the student is going to use to develop new vocabulary. This phase

consists of motivate all the students in the class. In presentation, the teacher

presents the new information in varied ways to make students clearly

understand the target content. When presenting, it is recommended to

emphasize the strategy that will be used and to connect students’ prior

knowledge. Then, in practice, the type of task is essentially important, it has to

be authentic and it has to provide collaborative work with classmates so they

can complement their knowledge with each other. After that, during the self-

evaluation phase, students reflect on their own performance and evaluate how

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well they did by assessing the strategy they used. During this step, students will

identify their main difficulties and obstacles that made them not to achieve the

goal previously proposed. Finally, expansion is concurrent with students’

personal decisions about the strategies that they find more effective for them,

so they can apply the same strategies to new areas or other subjects by

modelling them according to the new context.

Eventually, having some strategies into account to achieve students’ goals

during a task or activity seems to be vital to make students’ learning process

successful. Therefore, as teachers, it is indispensable the use of strategies in

the classroom to master both students’ self-reliance and their own pace of

learning.

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2. LEARNER’S BACKGROUND

Michelle Rodriguez is an 18-year-old girl, who is in her 4th grade in an

elementary school called “Colegio Amanecer” located in Coronel. Michelle

explains she has been exposed to English language since 5th grade in primary

school. She admitted that the learning process was very weak until she got in

elementary school, where the English level is higher. Throughout these four

years she has been asked to do many tasks such as dialogues, oral reports and

brief research, which have been very challenging for her.

When Michelle was 10 years old, she began to listen to English music,

influenced by her older siblings and demonstrating a special preference for Hip-

Hop. At that age, she continues learning when starts to look for some of the

lyrics in order to understand what the songs were about. In addition to this,

Michelle declares that she and her family tend to watch several movies during

the week, most of them with Spanish subtitles. She thinks that it is a good idea

to do this, because the idea to compare both languages makes it easier to

understand their different structures.

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3. TAPED INTERVIEW

Interviewer (I)

Student (S)

1) I: Hi Michelle, how are you?

S: Fine.

2) I: Yeah, uhm… how old are you?

S: Uhm, I am eighteen years old.

3) I: Eighteen?

S: Yes…

4) I: Umm… When’s your birthday?

S: Ehm, my birthday is… mmm… December thirty.

5) I: Alright... what kind of music do you like?

S: I like emm… Hip-Hop music.

6) I: Michelle, what’s your favourite singer or band?

S: My favourite singer is Eminem, eh because is a great… emmm he

is ammm… he… he is a good… so… uhm... I like.

7) I: Do you like the way he sings?

S: Yes.

8) I: Ah ok... uhm what’s your favourite song of that artist?

S: My favorite song is a “The love the way you lie”, eeh... because…

eeh… singer with Rihanna and she is a beautiful and like eeh… his

style.

9) I: Ah ok... Uhm Michelle… would you like to be a famous artist?

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S: No, really no.

10)I: Why?

S: Ehh... because is a… ehh… have a normal… normal life... eh with my

parents and my sister.

11)I: Ah ok... what’s your favourite sport?

S: My favourite spot… sport is a… basketball... and football.

12)I: Ah… Do you play basketball?

S: Yes.

13)I: And what’s your favourite basketball player?

S: Emmm my favourite team is a… Lakers.

14)I: Lakers? Ahh, ok. And your favourite basketball player? I don’t know,

uhm… Michael Jordan or… any other?

S: Mmm… emmm Cole Brian.

15)I: And where is he from? United States? Spain?

S: Mmm… United State.

I: Ah ok. Ok, that’s it. Thank you very much.

S: Thank you.

I: Bye.

S: Bye.

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4. PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION

Question #8

I: Ah ok... uhm what’s your favourite song of that artist?

S: My favorite song is a “The love the way you lie”, eeh... because…

eeh… singer with Rihanna and she is a beautiful and like eeh… his

style.

I: Ah ok... Uhm Michelle… would you like to be a famous artist?

S: No, really no.

I: Why?

S: Ehh... because is a… ehh… have a normal… normal life... eh with my

parents and sister.

I: /ɑː (ok) (uhm) wɒts jə ˈfeɪvərɪt sɒŋ əv ðæt ˈɑːtɪst/

S: /maɪ ˈfeɪvərɪ sɒn ɪz ə ðə lʌv ðə weɪ jʊ laɪ | (eeh) bɪ

ˈkɔːz (eeeh) ˈsɪnʤər wɪð (Rihanna) ænd ʃiː ɪz ə

ˈbjuːrifəl  ænd laɪk (eeehh) hɪz staɪl/

I: /ɑː (ok)/ /(Uhm) (Michelle) wʊd jʊ laɪk tə biː ə ˈfeɪməs ˈɑːtɪst/

S: /noʊ ˈriːəliː noʊ/

I: /waɪ/

S: /(Ehh) bɪˈkɔːz ɪz ə (ehh) hʌv ə ˈnɔːrməl | ˈnɔːrməl laɪf eɪ wɪð maɪ ˈperənts ænd ˈsɪstər/

5. ANALYSIS AND EXAMPLES

a) Phonetics and Phonology

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RP Student

Birthday /ˈbɜːθdeɪ/ /ˈbɪrddeɪ/

Thirtieth /ˈθɜːtɪɪθ/ /ˈθɪrtɪː/

Great /greɪt/ /greət/

Sport /spɔːt/ /espɔːrt/

Michelle is quite fluent at the moment of answering questions, and it is very

easy to understand her due to her good intonation and word stress.

Nevertheless, she makes some minor mistakes when pronouncing some words

that represent a challenge even in the written form. The /θ/ phoneme seems to

be difficult for her since there is not such sound in Spanish which explains why

she could not articulate it properly.

b) Lexis

Michelle’s vocabulary storage presents some faults and lack of some function

words as seen in question 4; she did not use the preposition in before the

month and in question 6 Michelle forgot the noun ‘singer’ when trying to give a

complete characteristic to her favourite artist. Another problem is presented at

the moment of using words either as a verb or as a noun. In question 8, firstly

the student forgot to mention the personal pronoun ‘he’ to refer to the singer

(line 2), secondly, used to word singer instead ‘sings’ (line 2), and thirdly, she

made a mistake using the wrong possessive pronoun his instead ‘her’ when

referring to a woman’s style (line 2). Then, in question 10, the interviewee

seemed not to remember the form ‘I like to…’ and after a long hesitation she

finished the sentence with the reason why she did not want to be famous.

Finally, in question 13 it can be observed that the student misunderstood the

question by mentioning her favourite basketball team, but not her favourite

basketball player.

c) Grammar

Generally speaking, Michelle presents several grammatical mistakes; however,

her answers are clearly understood and related to what she was asked. Now,

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there are some sentences that need to be more complete in order to achieve a

good understanding.

During the interview, we focused mainly in the way she linked her ideas,

notwithstanding, the lack of vocabulary made her speech sounds quite slow

producing a lot of hesitation in her answers. In question 6, the student was not

able to express her whole idea, but at the end of the sentence she did not

mention the object pronoun ‘him’:

“He is a good… so… I like (him).”

In question 8, at the moment of giving the reason why she likes that song,

Michelle shows a problem with the use of determiners as well as in question 11

and the use of personal pronouns:

“(…) she is a beautiful and (I) like eeehh… his style.” (question 8)

“My favourite spot… sport is a… basketball…” (question 11)

Then, in question 9, two mistakes are noticeable. The first mistake is the wrong

expression of negation: “No, really no.” instead ‘No, not really’. The second

mistake is when she gave the reason of her answer by omitting the form ‘I like

to…’

In the following table Michelle’s mistakes are shown and contrasted with their

correct use:

What the student said What the student wanted to say

He is a good… so… I like. (Q6) He is a good singer, so I like him.

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… because… eeeh… singer with Rihanna and she is a beautiful and

like eeehh… his style. (Q8)

… because he sings together with Rihanna and she is beautiful and I like

her style.

No, really no. (Q9) No, not really.

Because is a… ehh… have a normal… normal life with my parents

and my sister. (Q10)

Because I like to have a normal life with my parents and my sister.

My favourite spot… sport is a… basketball and football. (Q11)

My favourite sport is basketball and football.

WRITING TASK

WRITING TASK ANALYSIS

During this task, Michelle worked with a dictionary to find the meanings of the

words she did not know. Despite that, she made the two typical mistakes when

students use a dictionary, one is the use of incorrect words in different contexts,

and the other is the word-by-word translation.

Instruction: Write a short story including the following five words: Mother – house – cat – city – run

“My mother went out house in the car. When she was in the car for city, appeared a cat running and she killed it. When she arrived work she felt guilty all day”.

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In the first sentence, Michelle does not make use of the prepositions that would

create a more specific description of her story; the lack of prepositions can be

seen in the sentence:

“My mother went out house in the car”.

This is explained she should have used: ‘My mother went out the house and

got into the car’.

Moving on to the second sentence, we can identify two main problems; firstly,

there is a wrong use of the preposition ‘for’ (“for city”) which is why we consider

Michelle should have used ‘across the city’ instead.

“When she was in the car for city, appeared a cat running and she killed it”.

Secondly, we can see a problem with syntax, “appeared a cat running…” (verb

+ subject), so our student has a difficulty when following English grammatical

structures with Spanish grammatical structures at the moment of translating.

Finally, in the last sentence, the only problem we identified is the wrong use of

the verb ‘arrive’ referring to ‘get’ to a certain place or activity, ‘work’ in this case.

6. LESSON PLAN

Learning Strategies Lesson Planning Form

Content Area : Grammar Topic: Giving directions

Grade : 4 grade highschool

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Objectives

Content knowledge/Skills: At the end of the class the S will be able to learn

how to use the imagery strategy to learn prepositions through a speaking

activity.

Procedures

Preparation

In the first place, the student is asked to answer a learning strategies survey in

order to find out what her own personal strategy is and at the same time know

how she likes learning grammar.

“Today class we are going to learn how to give directions, but first, we are going

to concentrate on the different ways to learn grammar. I’m going to give you a

survey that you have to complete according to your preferences. Read each

sentence carefully, and if it matches with your characteristics mark with a tick

(✓) in the corresponding box. Once you have finished the survey, we will

discover which is your personal strategy and I will give you some advices on

how to work with them when you study at home”.

Presentation

Present the strategy using imagery and tell the student why it is useful and why

it is appropriate for the lesson.

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“Today we are going to learn how to use imagery. This strategy will help you

remember the prepositions that we will learn today because you will create a

mental image for both words and images. Imagery can be used for

remembering facts, for example when you study history, and when you need to

memorize the address of one of your friends. Let me give you an example of

how I use imagery. When I go to the supermarket, I always remember the

prices of the food I usually buy, because the price label is written in big and

bright colours. You know that every supermarket has its own particular colour,

and that makes it easy to remember. So, what I actually do is to read the

information (look at the images and texts) and afterwards, make a picture of that

information in my head. That’s how I remember prices”.

Practice

Give the student a worksheet with a list of verbs and prepositions she needs to

complete before doing the actual activity so she can have a guide when giving

directions. Discuss and correct her answers and tell her to use the strategy

discussed to try to both remember the correct use of the prepositions and also

reinforce her memory capacity. After that, give the student a map of the city she

lives in and ask her to choose one place to start from there (for example, the

square). Now ask her to help you get to different places in the city (bank,

church, school, etc.) because you need to do some paperwork so she has to

give you directions (turn to the left, at the corner, in front of, etc.). Tell her she

can use the worksheet to help herself.

Evaluation

Once the student has finished, give her the corresponding feedback on her

performance and then ask her to evaluate herself. Right down the mistakes she

made while giving the directions and explain why she made them. Lead a

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discussion in which the imagery strategy is analyzed and discuss how much it

helped her.

In order to finish this part, give her some time to memorize the use of the

prepositions using the imagery strategy. Give her another worksheet with a

different map and repeat the activity. Once it is finished, ask her if she would

use the imagery strategy again to help her memorize things.

Expansion

Ask the student to show you her geography or history textbook and ask her to

read and memorize the information using her memory and imagination.

7. LESSON PLAN EVALUATION

To start with, our lesson has several advantages. The development of our

strategy involves many cognitive areas that will be helpful for our student in her

learning process, due to it improves mental imagination through imagery of

words (prepositions in this case) and increase memorizing development in the

student’s brain. In addition, the strategy we selected is expandable, in other

words, it can be applied on other subjects or different contexts that our

interviewee could be complicated. On the contrary, our strategy presents an

important disadvantage, because memorizing using imagery requires a lot of

practice by part of the student, so the more exposure to this learning strategy

the more effective will be the acquisition of the target language.

8. CONCLUSIONS

Throughout this assignment, we discovered that the main problem of our

interviewee is related to prepositions. For this reason, we decided to reinforce

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her lack of prepositions when producing the target language through a lesson

using a strategy, which will help her to memorize many of them. Another

problem that we identified was the incorrect use of determiners such as ‘the’, ‘a’

or ‘an’ and the instance when to use them or not. We will try to cover them

together with prepositions as a whole in order to model her language production

in a better way.

During this process of interaction with an authentic student and after assessing

all the aspects of her language production, we could realize what the main

problems are when students learn a second language. This extensive review

has been very helpful for us, because it is related to what we will have to do in

the future with our own students in school, so we are more aware of the typical

mistakes students commit and we can deal with them by thinking of a solution

from now on.

9. REFERENCES

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Chamot, A. U. (1999). “Prediction with Story Telling” “The Learning Strategies

Handbook. Addison Wesley Longman.

Chamot, A. U. (2004). Issues in language learning strategy research and

teaching. Electronic journal of foreign language teaching, 1(1), 14-26.

Chamot, A. U., & Robbins, J. (2005). The CALLA Model: Strategies for ELL

student success.

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