UNIT 13 LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS

                                                     

                                     

                                                    LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS

Learner characteristics have to do with learner´s motivation, their learning style, learning strategies, and maturity and the experiences they had acquired before when learning the first language. These important elements are related to the attitudes that learners have while learning a language, the way they learn it,  their reactions to the different teaching styles.  

Every person has a different learning style; it means the ways in which he/she want to remember things or information. Each person knows the best way to enjoy and learn a language, it could be: visual in which learners acquire the knowledge by looking or watching, then we have auditory in which  the learner learn through listening and hearing, next we have kinesthetic people that learn best by touching things. Additionally, we have some other learning styles such as group, individual, reflective, impulsive, analytic and autonomous. On the other hand, we have the learning strategies which are the system learners use to learn language. “Learning strategies are special ways of processing information that enhance comprehension, learning, or retention of the information”. (J. Michael O'Malley, 1990) In this way they identify what they need to improve.

I would like to teach my students by repetitions, to provide feedback is very essential because they need to know where their mistakes are.one of the good strategies is to avoid the use of Spanish in the classroom so students are going to get accustomed to the use of English, and the last thing I would like to do is to avoid using false friends in English.as the example provided taken from (Lewington, 2010)

Remember that learners with different learning styles learn in different ways so we as future teachers mush help them to recognize their own learning strategy.

Bibliography:

J. Michael O'Malley, A. U. (1990). Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. New York.

Lewington, R. (2010). Common Mistakes in English Made by Spanish Speakers.