Describing learners

1. Bucur Ana Maria
2. Bunea Camelia-Teodora
3. Ciubotariu Corina
4. Deák Márta
5. Olariu Loredana-Éva

 is the major factor in deciding what to teach and
how to teach it
 different ages have different needs, competences
and cognitive skills (for e.g.. Children have facility in
pronunciation)
 it is admitted that teenagers are often more effective
learners (age of 12)

Jean Piaget suggested that children have different
stages in developing, such as:
 Sensor-motor stage
 Intuitive stage
 Concrete operational stage
 Formal operational stage
 -Leo Vygotski pointed out the so called ZPD
(Zone of Proximal Development)
 -Erik Erikson and Abraham Maslow saw
development as being the child’s confidence
and self esteem
 -Reuven Feuerstein admitted that children’s
cognitive structure can be altered with a
modifier

Especially 9 and 10 year old children learn differently
in the following ways:
 They respond to meaning even if they do not understand
some words
 They often learn more indirectly than directly
 Their understanding comes in several ways: what they
see and what they hear
 They find abstract concepts and grammar rules difficult

 Learning and curiosity
 Need for individual attention and approval from
the teacher
 Keen to talk about themselves and respond well
to learning about topics such as their home
 They have a limited attention span, they can be
bored if the activity is not interesting enough

 are often seen as problematic students
 search for identity and self-esteem
 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
 we are able to discuss abstract issues
 our aim is to provoke intellectual activity by
helping them to be aware of contrasting ideas ,
concepts

 Adult language learners have a great number
of special characteristics :
 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
 They have a clear understanding of why they are
learning and what they want to get out of it
 Able to sustain a high level of motivation

 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

Linguistic aptitude tests (appeared in 1950s and
1960s) – predict a student’s future progress.
 Disadvantages:
 -they measure the general intellectual ability more
than the linguistic 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 the majority of
students who fall between these two extremes;
 -teachers tend to treat differently those students
with high scores from those with low scores.

ADVICE!
Both teacher and students
should be optimistic about all
of the people in the class,
although the results of the
linguistic aptitude tests are good
or not. 

ð Neil Maimann & his colleagues a good
learner has:
 a tolerance of ambiguity;
 positive task orientation;
 high aspirations;
 goal orientations;
 perseverance.

2. Joan Rubin & Irene Thompson listed 14
learner characteristics such as:

 learning to live with uncertainty;
 students who can find their own way (no being
guided by the teacher through learning tasks);
 students who are creative;
 students who make intelligent guesses;
 students who make their own opportunity for
practice;
 students who make errors work for them not against
them ;
 students who use contextual clues.

3. Patsy Lightbown & Nina Spada identify
several categories, such as:
 motivation;

 intellectual abilities;

 learning preferences;

 personality characteristics ( e.g. “willing to
make mistakes”)

ADVICE!

A. All the teachers should:
 appreciate self-reliant students & promote

learner autonomy as a main goal;
 encourage students to read texts for general

understanding without stopping to look up all
the words they don’t know;
 ask students to speak communicatively even

though they have difficulty because of the
words they don’t know or can’t pronounce;
 involve students in creative writing.

ADVICE!

B. Our students can be successful even if they do
not have all the characteristics we consider
important for a good learner. Just believe in them
and help them to be good language learners!

I. Tony Wright- 4 different styles of learners in a
group:

1. The ‘enthusiast’-looks at the teacher as a point of
reference and is concerned with the goals of the
learning group;
2. The ‘oracular’ –also focuses on the teacher, but is
more oriented towards the satisfaction of personal
goals;
3. The ‘participator’ –tends to concentrate on group
goals and group solidarity;
4. The ‘rebel’ –is mainly concentrated with the
satisfaction of his or her own goals.

II. Keith Willing suggested 4 learner categories:
 Convergers - solitary students who prefer to avoid

groups;
- independent and confident in their own abilities;
- analytic students who can impose their own
structures of learning;
- tend to be cool and pragmatic.
2. Conformists -students who prefer to emphasise
learning ‘about language’ over learning to use it;
- tend to be dependent on those in authority;
- happy to work in non-communicative classrooms,
doing what they are told;
- prefer to see well-organized teachers.

3. Concrete learners
-enjoy social aspects of learning;
-like to learn from direct experience;
-interested in language use and language as
communication rather in language as a system.

4. Communicative learners
-language use oriented;
-much more interested in social interaction with
other speakers of the language;
-happy to operate without the guidance of a
teacher.

There are also many other categorizations and it is
very difficult to find the best one, so we should do
as much as we can in order to understand the
individual differences within a group because
every group is different and has its own needs.

There are two models which have tried to explain
the individual variations and which can be
useful for teacher in order to use them for the
benefit of their learners:

 Neuro- Linguistic Programming (NLP)

 Multiple Intelligences Theory (MI Theory)

According to its practitioners, we use a number of
‘primary representational systems’ to
experience the world, described as VAKOG:
 Visual- we look & see;

 Auditory- we hear & listen;

 Kinaesthetic-we feel externally, internally or

through movements;
 Olfactory- we smell;

 Gustatory- we taste things.

People use all these systems but every person has a
‘preferred primary system’- some are stimulated by
music (their preferred primary system is Auditory),
others, whose primary preferred system is Visual
respond most powerfully to images. Things become
more complicated when a person ‘sees’ the music or
has a strong sense of different colours for different
sounds.

-teacher can offer students activities which suit their
primary preferred systems;
-teacher and students can see things from other
people’s points of view so they can be more
effective communicators and they can understand
each other better.

MI stands for Multiple Intelligences , a concept
introduced by Harvard Psychologist HOWARD
GARDNER .
in his book , Frames of Mind, he suggested that we do not
possess a single intelligence , but a range of intelligences
such as :
*Musical/rhythmical
*Visual/spatial
*Verbal/linguistic
*Bodily
*Logical/mathematical
* Intrapersonal
*Interpersonal

-every person has all of these intelligences, but
one of them is more pronounced
- if we accept this , we also have to accept the fact
that same learning task may not be appropriate
for ALL of our students

We can simply observe them or, more effectively,
we can establish from the beginning WHO the
different students are and HOW are they
different, using some formal devices such as
tests or questionnaires.

*When studying for a project, you feel more
comfortable and secure when
a. you work alone
b. you work in groups
c. you work with another student

This kind of questionnaires helps us to build a
picture of the best kind of activity for the mix
of individuals in a particular class. (the
feedback enables us, over time, to respond to
our students with an appropriate blend of
tasks and exercises; but it doesn’t mean that
we can make everyone happy , at least not all
the time)

Students are generally described
in three levels:
 Beginner
 Intermediate
 Advanced

•these are further qualified by
talking about real and fals
beginners
•between beginner and
intermediate we class student
as elementary
•intermediate level is sub-
divided into lower and upper
even mid-intermediate

The Council of Europe and the Association of
Language Testers in Europe (ALTE) heve been
working to define language competency levels
for learners of a number of different languages.

•ALTE standards are just one way to measure proficiency
•the level students have reached has often effect on their motivation
•sometimes students who arrive at, say an intermediate level tend to
suffer from the so-called ”plateau effect” so teachers need to be
sensitive by taking special measures to counteract it.
•such efforts may include setting achievement goals or other variations
in level dependent teacher behaviorist important in methodology and
in kind of language.

•some techniques and activities are suitable for some
levels, we should take our student’s level into
consideration while choosing techniques and
activities
•we will give student’s more support when they are
at beginners or intermediate levels, than we need
to do when they are more advanced

•students acquire language partly as a result of
the comprehensible input they receive
especially from teachers
•teachers should adjust their language according
to their student’s level

•at the most basic level ,motivation is some kind of
internal drive which pushes someone to do things
in order to achieve something.
Motivation can be:
•extrinsic: caused by some outside factors(passing
an exam, having financial reward)
•intrinsec: comes from within the
individual(enjoyment of the learning process itself,
desire to make yourself better)
•researchers and methodologists came to the view
that intrinsic motivation produces better results
than extrinsic

•The goal: one of the strongest outside sources of motivation,
which students perceive themselves to be learning for.
•The society we live in: the attitudes to language learning and
the English language in particular
•The people around us: the influence of people who are close
to students(family member ,friends)
•Curiosity: initial motivation, such as interest to see what it is
like
The motivation angel: needs to be built in the solid base of the
extrinsic motivation which the students bring with them to
class.
We need to build our own “motivation angel” to keep students
engaged and involved as lesson succeeds lesson, as week
succeeds week

Affect:
•Concerned with student’s feelings, when teachers
are caring and helpful
•Student’s stay motivated and self-esteem is likely to
be nurtured
Achievement:
•student’s real sense of achievement.
Teachers job’s are to set an appropriate level of
challenge for student’s and guide them toward
success, by setting tests that are not too difficult or
too easy. and involving students in learning task
they can succeed in.

Attitude
Students need to be confident in the teacher’s abilities. No
matter how nice teachers are students are not willing to
follow them without this confidence.
Our appearance, the way we walk and the way we stand
are also important for the student to be comfortable
with us
Students need to know that we know about the subject we
teach
They need to feel that we are prepared to teach English
and that we are prepared to teach a lesson in particular

Activities
The motivation of the students is more likely to
remain healthy if they receive tasks they enjoy
doing or if they see a reason behind an activity that
is asked of them
We have to adapt our activity types to all of our
students: some like game-like communication and
interactive tasks, to write songs and poems while
others would be more motivated by concentrated
language study and reading texts

Agency – term borrowed from social sciences
*here it has a close meaning to that of an agent of a
passive sentence; the person or thing ‘that does’

 sometimes students are passive recipients to things
that are handed down (‘done to them’) by us , but
we should be equally interested in things that they
do
 When students have agency they are somewhat
responsible for what they learn, because they take
part in the decision making process
 For example JJ Wilson thought that students
should be allowed to make decisions, give them
ownership of class materials, write on the board
while Lesley Painter was allowing students to
choose their own homework

Real agency occurs when students take responsibility for
their own learning
 we can help them by teaching them to use dictionaries
effectively, do research
We should not let the students have complete control over
the lesson, but the more we empower them, the more
they will remain motivated.

motivation may not be the same for all students in
all countries
research shows that in Chinese student are more
motivated by memorization and how much
information students can remember for an
exam while in Taiwan students promoted the
‘memorize a dictionary’ strategy (some
students even get new idioms sent to their
mobile phones)

Describing learners

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Describing learners (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Describing learners