CELTA Assignment 2 – Focus on the Learner –

Part A: Whole Class Profile (430 words)

The class consists of about 9 students of a mixed age group; predominantly young adults consisting of 3 males and 6 females.
The class is a strong pre-intermediate group and struggles with long sentence formation. Most of the students are have been
born and brought up in Maharashtra and differ in the origins of their hometowns and mother tongue ranging from Marathi to
Bihari and Urdu.Most students are interested in improving their English for professional purposes. Dileep wants to teach his
peers back at his hometown in Palghar while Sonam and Shivangi want to sound more confident and fluent for applying to
jobs. All the students have studied up till senior year of junior college and most of the girls are pursuing BCom. They have had
formal English education up until their 12th standard from schools where the medium of education has been Hindi. This has a
major influence for them in forming sentences in English. For example: verb(-ing) is overused (I was wanting to go for the
movie instead of I wanted to go for the movie) or use of a double past ( I didn’t knew about it instead of I didn’t know about it).

Over the course of 2 weeks, the students have been carefully observed for their behavioural patterns and class interactions.
While Sharifis playful and enjoys class activities,Rajan is usually quiet and accepts that he is not as fluent in the language as his
peers, thus motivating himself to learn the language better. Dileep started off as a very shy person who liked to be by himself
and not interact much with his peers; but over the lessons, has started taking an interest in peer and group activities.
Shraddha, Dileep and Shivangi are the stronger students of the class and equally motivate their peers to understand the
language. Sonam and Sarita have a fairly good understanding of the language at their level though Sonam may tend to distract
the ones sitting close to her. Shaheena and Priyanka choose to remain quiet during classroom activities though Priyanka may
smile shyly and give an answer if encouraged or nudged long enough. The students equally enjoy individual, peer and group
activities. Shivangi and Shraddha are particularly social and help to lift the class morale. Care has to be taken not to pair up the
shy students with one another. A class mingle activity has proved rather useful in eliciting language from all the students
equally. I intend to encourage more pair work and group activities seeing that the class enjoys this more than individual work.