Basilan State College

Graduate Studies
Master of Arts in Teaching
English

EDE 202
Language Teaching Approaches,
Methods, Techniques, and their
Applications
Describing
Learners

RICKY C. SEDILLO JR., LPT

Discussant
 The Age Factor
 Teaching Children
the younger, the better, brain plasticity, Steven Pinker,
Lateralization.

 Teaching Adolescents
Myth, Unmotivated, surly and uncooperative.

 Teaching Adults
greater use of abstract thought. Self-motivated
 Young Children
 They respond to meaning even if they do not understand
individual words.
 They often learn indirectly rather than directly.
 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 have a limited attention span.
 Adolescents
Secondary school students.
Less motivated and present outright problems.
A person who is searching for individual identity
But if they are engaged, they will have:
A great potential for creativity.
A great capacity to learn
Passionate commitment to things.
The teacher should:
Provoke student engagement with materials which
are relevant and involving.
Encouraging the students to respond to texts and
situations with their own thoughts and experience,
rather than just by answering questions and doing
abstract learning activities.
Give them tasks which they are able to do, rather
than risk humiliating them.
Ask them to address learning issues directly.
Discuss abstract issues with them.
Provoke intellectual activity by helping them to be
aware of contrasting ideas and concepts which
they can resolve by themselves.
 Adult learners
 They can engage with abstract thought.
 They have a whole range of life experiences to draw on.
 They have expectations about the learning process and
they already have their own set patterns of learning.
 More disciplined than other age group and they are
often prepared to struggle on despite boredom.
 They come into classrooms with a rich range of
experiences.
 They have a clear understanding of why they are
learning and what they want to get out of it.
 LEARNER DIFFERENCES
Linguistic Aptitude Tests- predicts 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.
 Teachers tend to treat differently those students with high
scores from those with low scores.
 GOOD LEARNER
CHARACTERICTICS
According to Neil Maimann & his colleagues, a good
learner has:
 A tolerance of ambiguity;
 Positive task orientation;
 High aspirations;
 Goal orientations;
 Perseverance.
Joan Rubin & Irene Thompson listed several learner
characteristics such as:

 Learning to live with uncertainty;

 Students who can find their own way;
 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.
 LEARNER STYLES AND
STRATEGIES
Tony Wright listed 4 different styles of learners in a
group.
1. The ‘enthusiast’- looks a the teacher as a point of
reference and is concerned with the goal 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’- mainly concentrated with the satisfaction
of his or her own goals.
Keith Willing suggested 4 learner categories.
1. Convergers- solidarity students who prefer to avoid
students:
 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 emphasize
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 teacher.
3. Concrete learners
Enjoy social aspects of learning;
Like to learn from direct experiences;
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.
 INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS

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)
 Neuro-Linguistic Programming
(NLP)
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 (Auditory), others,

whose preferred system is Visual respond most
powerful to images.

Things become more complicated when a person

‘sees’ the music or has a strong sense of different
colors for different sounds.
 Why is NLP important for
teachers?
Teachers can offer students activities which suit
their primary preferred system;

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.
 MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES
THEORY
MI Theory is 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 kinesthetic
 Logical/mathematical
 Interpersonal
 Intrapersonal
 What to do about individual
differences?
 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.
 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.
 MOTIVATION
 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.
 Intrinsic- comes from within an individual.
 Researchers and methodologists came to view that
intrinsic motivation produces better results than
extrinsic.
 External Sources of Motivation
 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

closed to students.

 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 the
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.
 Students stay motivated and self-esteem is likely to be
nurtured.

Achievement
 Student’s real sense of achievement.
 Teachers job are to set an appropriate level of challenge
for students and guide them towards 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 students 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 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
 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.
 Real agency occurs when students take responsibility for
their own learning
 We can help them by teaching them to use dictionaries
effectively and 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.
THANK YOU
FOR
LISTENING!