METODIKA ENGLESKOG JEZIKA (HARMER)

CHAPTER 5 (Ch 6 – missing)

DESCRIBING LEARNERS

A Age
The age of our students is a major factor in our decisions about how and what to teach.
People of different ages have different needs, competences and cognitive skills.
One of the most common beliefs about age and language learning is that young children
learn faster and more effectively than any other age group.

A1 Young children
Young children, especially those up to the ages of nine or ten, learn differently from
older children, adolescents and adults in the following ways:
- They respond to meaning even if they do not understand individual words.
- They often learn indirectly rather than directly – that is they take in information from
all sides, learning from everything around them rather than only focusing on the precise
topic they are being taught.
- Their understanding comes not just from explanation, but also from what they see and
hear and, crucially, have a chance to touch and interact with.
- They find abstract concepts such as grammar rules difficult to grasp.
- They generally display an enthusiasm for learning and a curiosity about the world
around them.
- They have a need for individual attention and approval from the teacher.
- They are keen to talk about themselves and respond well to learning that uses
themselves and their own lives as main topics in the classroom.
- They have a limited attention span; unless activities are extremely engaging, they can
get easily bored, losing interest after ten minutes or so.

It is important, when discussing young learners, to take account of changes which take
place within this varied and varying age span. (...) while pupils who are 10 and 11 years
old and like games, puzzles and songs most, those who are 12 and 13 years old like

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activities build around dialogues, question-and-answer activities and matching exercise
most.
Piaget suggested that children start at the SENSORI-MOTOR STAGE, and then
proceed through the INTUITIVE STAGE and the CONCRETE-OPERATIONAL
STAGE before finally reaching the FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE where
abstraction becomes increasingly possible. (= JEAN PIAGET’S STAGES OF
DEVELOPMENT)
In the first place, good teachers at this level need to provide a rich diet of learning
experiences which encourage their students to get information from a variety of sources.
They need to work with their students individually and in groups, developing good and
affective relationships. They need to plan a range of activities for a given time period,
and be flexible enough to move on to the next exercise when they see their students
getting bored.
Teachers of young learners need to spend time understanding how their students think
and operate. They need to be able to pick up on their students’ current interests so that
they can use them to motivate the children. And they need good oral skills in English
since speaking and listening are the skills which will be used most of all at this age. The
teacher’s pronunciation really matters here, too, precisely because children imitate it so
well.
Conclusions about what a classroom for young children should look like. It should be
bright and colourful, with windows the children can see out of, and with enough room
for different activities to be taking place.

A2 Adolescents
- are often seen as problem students; with the right goals, can be responsible enough to
do what is asked of them.
- Adolescence is bound up with a pronounced search for identity and a need for self-
esteem; adolescents need to feel good about themselves and valued; often have an acute
need for peer approval, too – are extremely vulnerable to the negative judgements of
their own age group.
Herbert Puchta and Michael Schratz see problems with teenagers as resulting, in part,
from the teacher’s failure to build bridges between what they want and have to teach
and their students’ worlds of thought and experience and advocate linking language
teaching far more closely to the students’ everyday interests (...)

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With teenagers we are able to discuss abstract issues. Part of our job is to provoke
intellectual activity by helping them to be aware of contrasting ideas and concepts
which they can resolve for themselves – though still with our guidance.

A3 Adult learners
Adult language learners are notable for a number of special characteristics:
- They can engage with abstract thought, meaning we don’t have to rely exclusively on
activities such as games and songs.
- They have a whole range of life experience to draw on.
- They have expectations about the learning process, and they already have their own set
patterns of learning.
- Adults tend, on the whole, to be more disciplined than other age groups, and, crucially,
they are often prepared to struggle on despite boredom.
- They come into classrooms with a rich range of experiences which allow teachers to
use a wide range of activities with them.
- Unlike young children and teenagers, they often have a clear understanding of why
they are learning and what they want to get out of it. Motivation is a critical factor in
successful learning, and knowing what you want to achieve is an important part of this.
Many adults are able to sustain a level of motivation by holding on to a distant goal in a
way that teenagers find more difficult.

However, adults are never entirely problem-free learners, and they have a number of
characteristics which can sometimes make learning and teaching problematic.
- They can be critical of teaching methods.
- They may have experienced failure or criticism at school which makes them anxious
and under-confident about learning a language.
- Many older adults worry that their intellectual powers may be diminishing with age.
They are concerned to keep their creative powers alive.

B LEARNER DIFFERENCES
B1 Aptitude and intelligence

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Some students are better at learning languages than others. At least that is the generally
held view, and in the 1960s it crystallised around the belief that it was possible to
predict a student’s future progress on the basis of linguistic aptitude tests. But it soon
became clear that such tests were flawed in a number of ways. They didn’t appear to
measure anything other than general intellectual ability even though they ostensibly
looked for linguistic talents. Furthermore, they favoured analytic-type learners over
their more “holistic” counterparts, so the tests were especially suited to people who have
little trouble doing grammar-focused tasks.
Another damning criticism of traditional aptitude tests is that while they may
discriminate between the most and the least “intelligent” students, they are less effective
at distinguishing between the most and the least “intelligent” students, they are less
effective at distinguishing between the majority of students who fall between these two
extremes. It has been suggested that students who score badly on aptitude tests will
become demotivated and that this will then contribute to precisely the failure that the
test predicted. Moreover, teachers who know that particular students have achieved high
scores will be tempted to treat those students differently from students whose score was
low. Aptitude tests end up being self-fulfilling prophecies whereas it would be much
better for both teacher and students to be optimistic about all of the people in the class.

B2 Good learner characteristics

Neil Naiman and his colleagues included a tolerance of ambiguity as a feature of good
learning, together with factors such as positive task orientation (being prepared to
approach tasks in a positive fashion), ego involvement (where success is important for a
student’s self image), high aspirations, goal orientation and perseverance.
Joan Rubin and Irene Thompson listed 14 good learner characteristics, among which
learning to live with uncertainty is a notable factor. But their version of a good learner
also mentions students who can find their own way (without always having to be guided
by the teacher through learning tasks), who are creative, who make intelligent guesses,
who make their own opportunities for practice, who make errors work for them not
against them, and who use contextual clues.
Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada summarise the main consensus about good learner
characteristics: can be classified in several categories (motivation, intellectual abilities,
learning preferences), and some, such as “willing to make mistakes” can be “considered
personal characteristic”.

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Much of what various people have said about good learners is based on cultural
assumptions which underpin much current teaching practice in western-influenced
methodologies.

B3 Learner styles and strategies

The methodologist Tony Wright described four different learner styles within a group.
The ENTHUSIAST looks to the teacher as a point of reference and is concerned with
the goals of the learning group. The ORACULAR also focuses on the teacher but is
more oriented towards the satisfaction of personal goals. the PARTICIPATOR tends to
concentrate on group goals and group solidarity, whereas the REBEL, while referring to
the learning group for his or her point of reference, is mainly concerned with the
satisfaction of his or her own goals.

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Keith Willing, working with adult students in Australia, suggested four learner
categories:

B4 Individual variations
There are two models in particular which have tried to account for perceived individual
variation, and which teachers have attempted to use for the benefit of their learners.
a) NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING:
According to practitioners of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), we use a number
of “primary representational systems” to experience the world. These systems are

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described in the acronym “VAKOG” (Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic, Olfactory and
Gustatory).
b) MI theory: MI stands for Multiple Intelligences, a concept introduced by the 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. He listed seven of these:
Musical/rhythmical, Verbal/linguistic, Visual/spatial, Bodily/kinaesthetic,
Logical/mathematical, Intrapersonal and Interpersonal. All people have all of these
intelligence, he said, but in each person one (or more) of them is more pronounced.
If we accept that different intelligences predominate in different people, it suggests that
the same learning task may not be appropriate for all of our students.

B5 What do to about individual differences

Our task as teachers will be greatly helped if we can establish who the different students
in our classes are and recognise how they are different. We can do this through
observation or through more formal devices: asking students about their learning
preferences in questionnaires, etc.

C Language levels
Students are generally described in three levels: BEGINNER, INTERMEDIATE and
ADVANCED, and these categories are further qualified by talking about REAL
BEGINNERS and FALSE BEGINNERS. Between beginner and intermediate we often
class students as ELEMENTARY. The intermediate level itself is often sub-divided into
LOWER INTERMEDIATE and UPPER INTERMEDIATE and even MID-
INTERMEDIATE.
In recent years, the Council of Europe and the Association of Language Testers in
Europe (ALTE) have been working to define language competency levels for learners of
a number of different languages. The result of these efforts is the Common European
Framework (a document setting out in detail what students can do at various levels) and
a series of ALTE levels ranging from A1 (roughly equivalent to elementary level) to C2
(very advanced).

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D Motivation
At its most basic level, motivation is some kind of internal drive which pushes someone
to do things in order to achieve something. In his discussion of motivation, Douglas
Brown includes the need for ego enhancement as a prime motivator.
In discussions of motivation an accepted distinction is made between EXTRINSIC and
INTRINSIC motivation, that is motivation which comes from OUTSIDE and from
INSIDE.
Most researchers and methodologists have come to the view that intrinsic motivation
produces better results than its extrinsic counterpart – the chances of success will be
greatly enhanced if the students come to love the learning process.

D2 External sources of motivation

The motivation that brings students to the task of learning English can be affected and
influenced by the attitude of a number of people. It is worth considering what and who
these are since they form part of the environment from which the student engages with
the learning process.
1) The goal – one of the strongest outside sources of motivation; frequently is provided
by a forthcoming exam. Other goals: a general desire to be able to converse in English,,
to be able to use English to get a better job or to understand English-language websites,
etc.
2) The society we live in – How important is the learning of English considered to be in
the society the student lives in? or e.g.. Are the cultural images associated with English
positive or negative? All these views of language learning will affect the student’s
attitude to the language being studied.
3) The people around us, e.g. the attitude of parents and older siblings, and/or of a
student’s peers.
4) Curiosity – at least a mild interest in who their new teacher is and what it will be like
to be in his class or her lessons. This initial motivation is precious.

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D3 The motivation angel
- a statue in the north-east of England, 20m high – the Angel of North provides us with
a satisfying metaphor to deal with the greatest difficulty teachers face in terms of
motivation. We have the ability to create motivation in students where, initially, there is
none.
The angel needs to be built on the solid base of the extrinsic motivation which the
students bring with them to class. And on this base we will build our statue in five
distinct stages.

1) AFFECT – a good teacher is someone who asks the people who don’t always put
their hands up and a good teacher is someone who knows their students names. In other
words, students are far more likely to stay motivated over a period of time if they think
the teacher cares about them. This can be done by building good teacher-student
rapport, which in turn is dependent on listening to students’ views and attempts with
respect, and intervening in an appropriate and constructive way.
2) ACHIEVEMENT - nothing motivates like success. Nothing demotivates like
continual failure. The longer the success continues, the more likely students are to stay
motivated to learn. Part of a teacher’s job, therefore, is to set an appropriate level of
challenge for the students. This means setting the tests that are not too difficult or not
too easy, and involving students in learning tasks they can succeed in.
3) ATTITUDE – Teachers must have confidence in their professional abilities. Students
need to believe that we know what were are doing. They have to know that we know
about the subject we are teaching. When students have confidence in the teacher, they
are likely to remain engaged with what is going on. If they lose that confidence, it
becomes difficult for them to sustain the motivation they might have started with.
4) ACTIVITIES – It sometimes seem to be suggested that students only enjoy activities
which involve game-like communication and other interactive tasks, but not necessarily.
Different students have different styles and preferences. We need to try to match the
activities we take into lessons with the students we are teaching.

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5) AGENCY – is a term borrowed from social sciences. Here is appropriated to mean
something similar to the agent of a passive sentence, that is, in the words of some
grammarians, the person or thing “that does”.
A lot of the time, in some classes, students have things done TO them and, as a result,
risk being passive recipients of whatever is being handed down. We should be equally
interested in things done BY the students. When students have AGENCY, they get to
make some of the decisions about what is going on, as a consequence, they take some
responsibility for their learning. For example, we might allow students to tell us when
and if they want to be corrected in a fluency activity rather than always deciding
ourselves when correction is appropriate and when it is not.
!!! Important to remember that may not be the same for all students and in all cultures.

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