UP LANGUAGE CONSULTANTS - São Paulo - Brasil
Cambridge CELTA
Written Assignment 2: Focus on the learnerTrainee: Marcos Chagas F. da Silva
TP´s Case Study
A) Students´ Backgrounds: students in the intermediate group are basically young adults, ranging from 18-25, few of them on the verge of reaching thirties and two of them, over 40. They are Brazilians, except for a foreigner male who is exactly one of the “over 40” mentioned. Their reasons for studying English vary: improve pronunciation, become better readers, get better job opportunities or travel abroad. Most of them have already studied in schools or with private teachers.
B) Students´ Learning Styles: students in this level think that overcrowded rooms don´t help students´learning in the sense of time management and students participation.. According to one comment: “It ends up diminishing students opportunities to speak”. Apart from that, another common point of view taken into account is about reading comprehension tasks. They say: “It´s hard to link all the ideas”.
C) Classroom Behaviour: students started the reading for gist proposed by the teacher on September 24th by showing difficulties in the process of grasping the correct meaning of words as well as in pronunciation. The foreigner student, for instance, translated words from the handout into his L1 language, spanish. Meanwhile, I could perceive some students pronouncing the word “psychiatrist” /səkajətrəst/ as “psychactress” /səkæktrəs/ (light stuttering) right after it had been uttered by the teacher while others got the meaning of “house-sit” as “district of a city”. Owing to that, students agreed they have deficiencies in pronunciation, word order, and question formation.
TP students´ Main Strengths
I decided to approach students Manuel and Inês since they´ve been the oldest students in this level I´ve been teaching for. Manuel is 48, Chilean, concerned with improving his pronunciation and studied English in...