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

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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 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

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Generally speaking, Michelle presents several grammatical mistakes; however, her

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

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

… 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

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

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

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

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Learning Strategies Lesson Planning Form

Content Area : Grammar Topic: Giving directions

Grade : 4 grade highschool

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

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

appropriate for the lesson.

“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

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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

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.

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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 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.

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9. REFERENCES

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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