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Describing learners, Harmer, J. (2001). THE PRACTICE OF ENLGISH LANGUAGE…
Describing learners
Age
The age of the learners is an important factor in our decisions about how and what to teach. For example, the childrens learn faster the languages than the adults.
Young children
This especially those up the ages of nine or ten, learn differently from older children, adolescents, and adults in the following ways:
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They have limited attention span; unless activities are extremely enganging they can easily get bored, losing interest after ten minutes or so
Adults
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Adults are never entirely problem-free learners, and have a number of characteristics wich can sometimes make learning an teaching problematic:
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They may have experienced failure or criticism at schoool which makes them anxious and under-confident about learning a language.
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Learner differences
On this case all learners have differents ways to learn and proccess the information, more knowledge as "Multiple Intelligences".
Aptitude
Is the capability or abolity to learning languages than others. They didn't appear to measure anything other than general intellectual ability event thought they ostensibly liiked for linguistic talents.
Learners styles
Conformist: These are students who prefer to emphasise learning "about language" over learning to use it. They tend to be dependent on those in authority and are perfectly happy to work in non-communicate classrooms, doing what they are told.
Concrete learners: Though they are like conformist, they also enjoy the social aspects of learning and like to learn from direct experience. They are interested in language use and language as communication rather than language as a system.
Convergers: These are students who are by nature solitary, prefer to avoid groups, and who are indepent and confident in their own abilities, they are analytic and can impose their own structures on learning.
Communicative learners: These are language use orientated. They are comfortavle out of class show a degree of confifence and a willingness to take risks wich their collagues may lack.
Language Levels
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The plateu affect: While learners at beginner level find it easy to see progess in their abilities from one week to the next, the same is not so easy for students at higher levels.
Methodology: Is a particular procedure or set of procedures demonstrating library research methodology the issue is massive revision of teaching.
Language: We need to adjust the classroom language we use to the level we are working with the language materials we expose students to should be of a completly different level too, not only in terms of complexity.
Topics: One problem with some beginner coursebook material in particular is the way in wich quite complex topics are reduced to banalities because the language available at the level makes it impsooible to treat them in any depth.
Harmer, J. (2001). THE PRACTICE OF ENLGISH LANGUAGE TEACHING (3.a ed.). Longman.
