1. UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE LA SANTÍSIMA CONCEPCIÓN
FACULTAD DE EDUCACIÓN
PEDAGOGÍA EN EDUCACIÓN MEDIA EN INGLÉS
“LANGUAGE LEARNER PROFILE”
Course: English Methodology II
Teacher: Roxanna Correa
Students’ names: Camila Cuevas - Angel Sandoval Villarroel

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Concepción, September 23th, 2013
INDEX
i.
Language Learning Strategies Framework…………………………………………….3
ii.
Learner’s background…………………………….………………………………………5
iii.
Interview……………………………………………………………………………………6
iv.
Phonetic transcription……………………………..………………………………………8
v.
Analysis and examples:
a. Phonetics and phonology………………………………………...………………9
b. Lexis………………………………………..………………………………………9
c. Grammar………………………………………………………………………… 10
vi.
Lesson Plan……………………………………………………………………………….13
vii.
Lesson plan evaluation…………………………….……………………………….……15
viii.
Conclusions………………………………………………………………………….……16
ix.
References………………………………………….……………………………….……17
1. LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES FRAMEWORK
Throughout many years it has been very difficult to find out a successful or a
standard way to teach language. Many approaches and methods have been
created to discover what the key is to teach successfully and to make the learning
process more efficient for students. Chamot (2004) points out that it is important to

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have some strategies to make the teaching process easier and more helpful for our
students, because learning strategies involve techniques for understanding,
remembering, and using information and skills to model the new content. These
techniques can help students by showing them explicitly how to learn a certain
area of the target language, which will facilitate the developing of their
independence and confidence as learners. In addition, students increase their
motivation by becoming more successful in school and much more aware of their
own critical thinking and learning process.
Three additional learning strategies are considered to be essential when
acquiring a second or foreign language. These strategies are: Planning, which
refers to set goals and identifying steps to achieve that aim; monitoring, which is
related to checking your comprehension while completing a task and identifying
specific problems you might have; and evaluating, which is connected to assessing
yourself on how well you have completed the task.
Chamot and Robbins (2010) in their CALLA handbook, present five different
phases that involve the learning process. These phases are: Preparation,
presentation, practice, self-evaluation and expansion.
In the preparation phase, it is relevant to identify clear objectives as well as the
strategy the student is going to use to develop new vocabulary. This phase
consists of motivate all the students in the class. In presentation, the teacher
presents the new information in varied ways to make students clearly understand
the target content. When presenting, it is recommended to emphasize the strategy
that will be used and to connect students’ prior knowledge. Then, in practice, the
type of task is essentially important, it has to be authentic and it has to provide
collaborative work with classmates so they can complement their knowledge with
each other. After that, during the self-evaluation phase, students reflect on their
own performance and evaluate how well they did by assessing the strategy they
used. During this step, students will identify their main difficulties and obstacles
that made them not to achieve the goal previously proposed. Finally, expansion is
concurrent with students’ personal decisions about the strategies that they find

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more effective for them, so they can apply the same strategies to new areas or
other subjects by modelling them according to the new context.
Eventually, having some strategies into account to achieve students’ goals
during a task or activity seems to be vital to make students’ learning process
successful. Therefore, as teachers, it is indispensable the use of strategies in the
classroom to master both students’ self-reliance and their own pace of learning.
2. LEARNER’S BACKGROUND
Michelle Rodriguez is an 18-year-old girl, who is in her 4th grade in an elementary
school called “Colegio Amanecer” located in Coronel. Michelle explains she has
been exposed to English language since 5 th grade in primary school. She admitted
that the learning process was very weak until she got in elementary school, where

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the English level is higher. Throughout these four years she has been asked to do
many tasks such as dialogues, oral reports and brief research, which have been
very challenging for her.
When Michelle was 10 years old, she began to listen to English music, influenced
by her older siblings and demonstrating a special preference for Hip-Hop. At that
age, she continues learning when starts to look for some of the lyrics in order to
understand what the songs were about. In addition to this, Michelle declares that
she and her family tend to watch several movies during the week, most of them
with Spanish subtitles. She thinks that it is a good idea to do this, because the idea
to compare both languages makes it easier to understand their different structures.
3. TAPED INTERVIEW
Interviewer (I)
Student (S)
1) I: Hi Michelle, how are you?
S: Fine.

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2) I: Yeah, uhm… how old are you?
S: Uhm, I am eighteen years old.
3) I: Eighteen?
S: Yes…
4) I: Umm… When’s your birthday?
S: Ehm, my birthday is… mmm… December thirty.
5) I: Alright... what kind of music do you like?
S: I like emm… Hip-Hop music.
6) I: Michelle, what’s your favourite singer or band?
S: My favourite singer is Eminem, eh because is a great… emmm he is
ammm… he… he is a good… so… uhm... I like.
7) I: Do you like the way he sings?
S: Yes.
8) I: Ah ok... uhm what’s your favourite song of that artist?
S: My favorite song is a “The love the way you lie”, eeh... because… eeh…
singer with Rihanna and she is a beautiful and like eeh… his style.
9) I: Ah ok... Uhm Michelle… would you like to be a famous artist?
S: No, really no.
10)I: Why?
S: Ehh... because is a… ehh… have a normal… normal life... eh with my
parents and my sister.
11)I: Ah ok... what’s your favourite sport?

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S: My favourite spot… sport is a… basketball... and football.
12)I: Ah… Do you play basketball?
S: Yes.
13)I: And what’s your favourite basketball player?
S: Emmm my favourite team is a… Lakers.
14)I: Lakers? Ahh, ok. And your favourite basketball player? I don’t know, uhm…
Michael Jordan or… any other?
S: Mmm… emmm Cole Brian.
15)I: And where is he from? United States? Spain?
S: Mmm… United State.
I: Ah ok. Ok, that’s it. Thank you very much.
S: Thank you.
I: Bye.
S: Bye.
4. PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
Question #8
I: Ah ok... uhm what’s your favourite song of that artist?
S: My favorite song is a “The love the way you lie”, eeh... because… eeh…
singer with Rihanna and she is a beautiful and like eeh… his style.

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I: Ah ok... Uhm Michelle… would you like to be a famous artist?
S: No, really no.
I: Why?
S: Ehh... because is a… ehh… have a normal… normal life... eh with my
parents and sister.
I: /ɑː (ok) (uhm) wɒts jə ˈfeɪvərɪt sɒŋ əv ðæt ˈɑːtɪst/
S: /maɪ ˈfeɪvərɪ sɒn ɪz ə ðə lʌv ðə weɪ jʊ laɪ | (eeh) bɪˈkɔːz
(eeeh) ˈsɪnʤər wɪð (Rihanna) ænd ʃiː ɪz ə ˈbjuːrifəl ænd laɪk
(eeehh) hɪz staɪl/
I: /ɑː (ok)/ /(Uhm) (Michelle) wʊd jʊ laɪk tə biː ə ˈfeɪməs ˈɑːtɪst/
S: /noʊ ˈriːəliː noʊ/
I: /waɪ/
S: /(Ehh) bɪˈkɔːz ɪz ə (ehh) hʌv ə ˈnɔːrməl | ˈnɔːrməl laɪf eɪ wɪð
maɪ ˈperənts ænd ˈs ɪstər/
5. ANALYSIS AND EXAMPLES
a) Phonetics and Phonology
RP
Student

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Birthday
/ˈbɜːθdeɪ/
/ˈbɪrddeɪ/
Thirtieth
/ˈθɜːtɪɪθ/
/ˈθɪrtɪː/
Great
/greɪt/
/greət/
Sport
/spɔːt/
/espɔːrt/
Michelle is quite fluent at the moment of answering questions, and it is very easy to
understand her due to her good intonation and word stress. Nevertheless, she
makes some minor mistakes when pronouncing some words that represent a
challenge even in the written form. The /θ/ phoneme seems to be difficult for her
since there is not such sound in Spanish which explains why she could not
articulate it properly.
b) Lexis
Michelle’s vocabulary storage presents some faults and lack of some function
words as seen in question 4; she did not use the preposition in before the month
and in question 6 Michelle forgot the noun ‘singer’ when trying to give a complete
characteristic to her favourite artist. Another problem is presented at the moment of
using words either as a verb or as a noun. In question 8, firstly the student forgot to
mention the personal pronoun ‘he’ to refer to the singer (line 2), secondly, used to
word singer instead ‘sings’ (line 2), and thirdly, she made a mistake using the
wrong possessive pronoun his instead ‘her’ when referring to a woman’s style (line
2). Then, in question 10, the interviewee seemed not to remember the form ‘I like
to…’ and after a long hesitation she finished the sentence with the reason why she
did not want to be famous. Finally, in question 13 it can be observed that the
student misunderstood the question by mentioning her favourite basketball team,
but not her favourite basketball player.
c) Grammar

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Generally speaking, Michelle presents several grammatical mistakes; however, her
answers are clearly understood and related to what she was asked. Now, there are
some sentences that need to be more complete in order to achieve a good
understanding.
During the interview, we focused mainly in the way she linked her ideas,
notwithstanding, the lack of vocabulary made her speech sounds quite slow
producing a lot of hesitation in her answers. In question 6, the student was not able
to express her whole idea, but at the end of the sentence she did not mention the
object pronoun ‘him’:
“He is a good… so… I like (him).”
In question 8, at the moment of giving the reason why she likes that song, Michelle
shows a problem with the use of determiners as well as in question 11 and the use
of personal pronouns:
“(…) she is a beautiful and (I) like eeehh… his style.” (question 8)
“My favourite spot… sport is a… basketball…” (question 11)
Then, in question 9, two mistakes are noticeable. The first mistake is the wrong
expression of negation: “No, really no.” instead ‘No, not really’. The second mistake
is when she gave the reason of her answer by omitting the form ‘I like to…’
In the following table Michelle’s mistakes are shown and contrasted with their
correct use:
What the student said
What the student wanted to say

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He is a good… so… I like. (Q6)
He is a good singer, so I like him.
… because… eeeh… singer with
Rihanna and she is a beautiful and
like eeehh… his style. (Q8)
… because he sings together with
Rihanna and she is beautiful and I like
her style.
No, really no. (Q9)
No, not really.
Because is a… ehh… have a
normal… normal life with my parents
and my sister. (Q10)
Because I like to have a normal life
with my parents and my sister.
My favourite spot… sport is a…
basketball and football. (Q11)
My favourite sport is basketball and
football.
WRITING TASK
Instruction: Write a short story including the following five words: Mother –
house – cat – city – run
“My mother went out house in the car. When she was in the car for city,
appeared a cat running and she killed it. When she arrived work she felt
guilty all day”.
WRITING TASK ANALYSIS
During this task, Michelle worked with a dictionary to find the meanings of the
words she did not know. Despite that, she made the two typical mistakes when

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students use a dictionary, one is the use of incorrect words in different contexts,
and the other is the word-by-word translation.
In the first sentence, Michelle does not make use of the prepositions that would
create a more specific description of her story; the lack of prepositions can be seen
in the sentence:
“My mother went out house in the car”.
This is explained she should have used: ‘My mother went out the house and got
into the car’.
Moving on to the second sentence, we can identify two main problems; firstly, there
is a wrong use of the preposition ‘for’ (“for city”) which is why we consider Michelle
should have used ‘across the city’ instead.
“When she was in the car for city, appeared a cat running and she killed it”.
Secondly, we can see a problem with syntax, “appeared a cat running…” (verb +
subject), so our student has a difficulty when following English grammatical
structures with Spanish grammatical structures at the moment of translating.
Finally, in the last sentence, the only problem we identified is the wrong use of the
verb ‘arrive’ referring to ‘get’ to a certain place or activity, ‘work’ in this case.
6. LESSON PLAN

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Learning Strategies Lesson Planning Form
Content Area
: Grammar
Topic: Giving directions
Grade
: 4 grade highschool
Objectives
Content knowledge/Skills: At the end of the class the S will be able to learn how
to use the imagery strategy to learn prepositions through a speaking activity.
Procedures
Preparation
In the first place, the student is asked to answer a learning strategies survey in
order to find out what her own personal strategy is and at the same time know how
she likes learning grammar.
“Today class we are going to learn how to give directions, but first, we are going to
concentrate on the different ways to learn grammar. I’m going to give you a survey
that you have to complete according to your preferences. Read each sentence
carefully, and if it matches with your characteristics mark with a tick (✓) in the
corresponding box. Once you have finished the survey, we will discover which is
your personal strategy and I will give you some advices on how to work with them
when you study at home”.
Presentation

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Present the strategy using imagery and tell the student why it is useful and why it is
appropriate for the lesson.
“Today we are going to learn how to use imagery. This strategy will help you
remember the prepositions that we will learn today because you will create a
mental image for both words and images. Imagery can be used for remembering
facts, for example when you study history, and when you need to memorize the
address of one of your friends. Let me give you an example of how I use imagery.
When I go to the supermarket, I always remember the prices of the food I usually
buy, because the price label is written in big and bright colours. You know that
every supermarket has its own particular colour, and that makes it easy to
remember. So, what I actually do is to read the information (look at the images and
texts) and afterwards, make a picture of that information in my head. That’s how I
remember prices”.
Practice
Give the student a worksheet with a list of verbs and prepositions she needs to
complete before doing the actual activity so she can have a guide when giving
directions. Discuss and correct her answers and tell her to use the strategy
discussed to try to both remember the correct use of the prepositions and also
reinforce her memory capacity. After that, give the student a map of the city she
lives in and ask her to choose one place to start from there (for example, the
square). Now ask her to help you get to different places in the city (bank, church,
school, etc.) because you need to do some paperwork so she has to give you
directions (turn to the left, at the corner, in front of, etc.). Tell her she can use the
worksheet to help herself.
Evaluation

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Once the student has finished, give her the corresponding feedback on her
performance and then ask her to evaluate herself. Right down the mistakes she
made while giving the directions and explain why she made them. Lead a
discussion in which the imagery strategy is analyzed and discuss how much it
helped her.
In order to finish this part, give her some time to memorize the use of the
prepositions using the imagery strategy. Give her another worksheet with a
different map and repeat the activity. Once it is finished, ask her if she would use
the imagery strategy again to help her memorize things.
Expansion
Ask the student to show you her geography or history textbook and ask her to read
and memorize the information using her memory and imagination.
7. LESSON PLAN EVALUATION
To start with, our lesson has several advantages. The development of our strategy
involves many cognitive areas that will be helpful for our student in her learning
process, due to it improves mental imagination through imagery of words
(prepositions in this case) and increase memorizing development in the student’s
brain. In addition, the strategy we selected is expandable, in other words, it can be
applied on other subjects or different contexts that our interviewee could be
complicated. On the contrary, our strategy presents an important disadvantage,
because memorizing using imagery requires a lot of practice by part of the student,
so the more exposure to this learning strategy the more effective will be the
acquisition of the target language.

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8. CONCLUSIONS
Throughout this assignment, we discovered that the main problem of our
interviewee is related to prepositions. For this reason, we decided to reinforce her
lack of prepositions when producing the target language through a lesson using a
strategy, which will help her to memorize many of them. Another problem that we
identified was the incorrect use of determiners such as ‘the’, ‘a’ or ‘an’ and the
instance when to use them or not. We will try to cover them together with
prepositions as a whole in order to model her language production in a better way.
During this process of interaction with an authentic student and after assessing all
the aspects of her language production, we could realize what the main problems
are when students learn a second language. This extensive review has been very
helpful for us, because it is related to what we will have to do in the future with our
own students in school, so we are more aware of the typical mistakes students
commit and we can deal with them by thinking of a solution from now on.

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9. REFERENCES
Chamot, A. U. (1999). “Prediction with Story Telling” “The Learning Strategies
Handbook.
Addison Wesley Longman.
Chamot, A. U. (2004). Issues in language learning strategy research and
teaching. Electronic journal of foreign language teaching, 1(1), 14-26.
Chamot, A. U., & Robbins, J. (2005). The CALLA Model: Strategies for ELL student
success.