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Assignment One Focus on the Learner As a practicing teacher it may be necessary to write a report on a particular student in regard to their learning process. This report may be for a student’s employer or for further learning in a school or college environment. In this report I am observing and reporting on a student called Anna from Poland. Anna is a lady who has lived in Ireland for seven years. She arrived in Ireland with very limited English language skills. She said in her formative schooling English was not taught or at less not a priority in the educational system, at that time Poland was not part of the European
Union so I suspected that any English was self learnt. Anna is a very positive person, when she arrived in Dublin and started working as a cleaner she said that she was very lucky to have had a very good employer. She said that her employer was very patient and helpful to her in relation to her lack of language skills. She said that her early learning of words and sentences came from her fellow workers and Polish friends. To her credit, as time passed she was promoted to Manager and managed of a group of workers for her employer. At this point her development of the language came from the television and native speakers.
Anna is a well educated woman, she was a Teacher in Poland and from talking to her she seemed quite familiar with the dynamics of a classroom. She would be familiar with the element of visual aids, drilling and class activities. I noted that in the Elementary Class Anna is very motivated and clearly wants to improve her English and complete one of her ambitions to become a Teacher in Ireland! She is very aware that this requires a very high level of competency to reach this goal. This ambition is further intensified, because Just recently met an native English speaker and wants to be able to speak fluent English to his family.
In the classroom Anna is very interactive with the fellow students as she engages and participates lively in the classroom activities. She also asks questions and you can see her repeating the drilling of language and writing down notes. I feel this is ‘s strength. The enthusiasm to talk and understand the lesson is evident in her classroom participation. When I asked her, could I interview her, she was delighted and the next day she brought in a book that she is reading, I was very impressed with her reading this and when she read a paragraph in one of the chapters she understand the narrative quite well.
She is clearly self motivated and capable of exploring ways of learning. I think Anna’s strength is her self- motivation. She is nervous when she speaks because she feels her grammar is wrong. However, she can describe a topic when she is relaxed and talks slowly. She also mentioned that she uses the dictionary regularly when she is reading. When Anna reads in class I notice she finds the stress patterns in the language difficult. As Swan says it may be due to the regular penultimate- syllable stress of the mother tongue (Polish). It may sound like we eat our words.
I feel Anna’s learning style, is a ambition of three elements, Interpersonal, Kinesthesia and somewhat Interpersonal. Interpersonal,-‘ people who prefer direct involvement with others in a drawn to careers such as teachers, ministers and social work. ‘ 1 . Kinesthesia,- ‘ process information through hand and body movement, control and expression,’2. Interpersonal,- works alone (like her reading ) and pursue own interests, such as in Anna’s case her ambition to become a Teacher in Ireland. Anna’s strength in reading/ listening Reading She can read words slowly and verbalizes very slowly through the word.
She uses a dictionary to understand the meaning of the word She also is very aware of her lack of knowledge in relation to punctuation Listening She listens very carefully when you are talking to her and she repeats it She is very enthusiastic and engages with the other students to listen and learn Anna’s weakness in reading/listening Comprehending the meaning of the word, due to lack of vocabulary As a result of this she reads the sentence very slowly and tryst to understand the transcript, there is obviously a need for more classroom experience, particularly in vocabulary.
Her spelling is weak. She finds it hard to understand the stress syllables. Pronouncing mom words with equal prominence, for example, ‘politician, political’. Listening She attempts to pronounce all the words with nearly equal prominence With long words like ‘Justification’ she fails to produce secondary stress in longer words I noted Anna’s grammatical ability when I provided a Simple Present Quiz,3. The question, What do you do every day? Write four sentences.
This was her reply. I have everyday try to do English lesson. Everyday for relax reading polish books. Everyday I cook and do housework. I’m listening to music everyday I noted that she did not apply any punctuation in any of the sentences (grammar). The forth sentence is Present Continuous, she is adding -inning to the verb it is not an action happening now. It should be Simple Present. The second sentence should have some punctuation after, ‘everyday.