Assignment 1 Lorna

Lorna Beduya

Assignment 1 Lorna

Part A. Learner profile and ability overview Learners have strong reasons why they want to study. Learners are motivated either for external reasons like getting a job promotion or internal motivation like setting oneself a personal challenge (Scrivener 2011). One way or the other, our students in the elementary level are most likely driven by a strong interest in developing their English language communicative skills. We have 20 students and majority of them are females, ages from 18- 35 years old while the rest are males, ages from 18 – 29 years old. All of them are Omani students and their L1 is Arabic except Fatemeh an Iranian, she speaks Persian as her L1. Fatemeh is a 35 years old housewife who lives in Muscat for four years now with her family. Most of our students in this level have been studying English since the 4th grade, except Fatemeh who began learning English in her school in Iran since she was 15 years old. Fatemeh shared her experience in learning English when she was in Iran; she said it was boring because the school where she studied used only one book in learning English language for the span of 15 years! Moreover, majority of our students in this class prefer to interact with visuals, kinesthetic and verbal-linguistic tasks. Most of the boys like Mossa and Faisal are comfortable in speaking in English not only to their male friends but also to female learners, this successfully happened when Teacher Samina conducted a speaking task where boys were paired with the girls. In relation to this, teachers can give them a variety of tasks that will maximize students’ abilities and skills and use these to learn English easily. Amur, Mohammed Nasser, Suhaad and Tayba are some of those learners who are good in grammar, vocabulary, speaking, and writing lessons while Mossa, Faisal and Nabil are weak in vocabulary, grammar and writing. Most of these weak students can hardly complete their tasks however; they are confident in speaking and tend to help each other during pair/ group work activities. Our students are Arabic speakers except Fatemeh and it would be good to give them vocab- match definition task and CCQs then drill these words for pronunciation. For a grammar lesson, I suggest to have more visual- kinesthetic materials ( pictures or a short video) and tasks ( T/F, gap fill) coupled with the right CCQs to check if students really understood and if they are able to use the functional language and apply them in a more personal and meaningful enrichment task. Part B. Specific development programme Language difficulty One common grammatical error students commit is the correct use of verb to be (am, is, are). Malak omitted “is” when she wrote “My talent reading…”(see appendix A) Since there is no verb to be in Arabic in the present tense, the verb to be (am,is,are) is usually omitted (Swan 2011). I suggest exercises 1. 3 – 1.4 from Grammar in Use (A self-study reference and practice book for elementary students in English) by Raymond Murphy (see appendix B) to help Ss practice the inclusion of the verb to be (am,is, are) in their sentences. In exercise 3.1, Ss write full sentences using (is/isn’t/ are/aren’t) and in 1.4 Ss will practice using the verb to be (am,is,are), allowing Ss to use language in a realistic content like writing a paragraph about their lives. Pronunciation difficulty One of the tasks we gave to our students to know our learners was to ask them to write something about themselves and talked about it. During our interview, Maisa mispronounced the words in which the consonants /p/ and /b/ occurred like (“My hoppies are…”) and (“My favorite colors is bink, purple…”) which were evident when she wrote and uttered them (See appendix C); and this was reinforced by my CELTA batch mate during interview. In answer to this problem, I suggest an adaptation of a pronunciation game called “Simple Sound Maze”, a helpful task/ game to practice our Ss correctly pronouncing the allophones /p/and /b/ and avoid spelling mistakes in writing words with these consonant sounds. (See appendix D) and for adaptation (See appendix E). Since Arabic speakers normally mispronounced consonants in which both /p/ and /b/ occur and misspell words with these consonant sounds in writing, these can be overcome by practicing contrastive pairs (Mitchell, El- Hassan 1989). In conclusion, teachers need to be aware of how consistent students pronouncing the words with the correct sounds during the conduct of drill and this will be evident when students are given meaningful tasks (pronunciation games). In addition, giving them more drills on words containing these allophones will be helpful for them. Word count: 863 References Murphy, Raymond (1997).EssentialGrammar in Use (A self-study reference and practice book for elementary students in English). Second Edition.Cambridge. Scrivener, Jim (2011).Learning Teaching (The Essential Guide to English Language Teaching). Third Edition.Macmillan Swan,Michael and Smith Bernard (2001).Learner English.Second Edition.Cambridge University Press. Baker, Ann (1982). Tree or Three? (An elementary pronunciation course).First Edition. Cambridge University Press. Mitchell,T.F. and El- Hassan, Shahir (1989 ).English Pronunciation for Arabic Speakers. First Edition.Longman. Hancock, Mark ( 2013). Pronunciation Games. 21th Printing. Cambridge University Press.

Log In

Assignment 1 Lorna

Related papers

Related papers