Unit 13 · Learner characteristics

Learner characteristics are the qualities learners bring to the classroom — their motivation, learning style, learning strategies, maturity and past language learning experience. These factors influence learners’ attitude to learning a language, how they learn it, how they respond to different teaching styles and how successful they are.

◆What are learner characteristics?

Learner characteristicsThe typical things about a learner or learners that influence their learning, e.g. age, L1, past learning experience, learning style. click to keep open · see glossary include a learner’s motivationMotivation is the thoughts and feelings which make us want to and continue to want to do something and which turn our wishes into action. click to keep open · see glossary, learning styleThe way a learner prefers to learn, e.g. by listening (auditory), seeing (visual) or moving (kinesthetic). click to keep open · see glossary, learning strategiesThe techniques which learners consciously use to help them when learning or using language, e.g. deducing the meaning of words from context; predicting content before reading. click to keep open · see glossary, maturityFully grown or developed. If a learner is mature in attitude, they behave in an adult way. A learner’s maturity (physical, emotional and mental) influences a teacher’s approaches and/or decisions. click to keep open · see glossary and past language learning experience. They are factorsSomething which has an effect on the result of a situation or event; e.g. motivation is one of many factors which have an effect on whether someone learns a language successfully or not. click to keep open · see glossary which influence learners’ attitude to learning a language, how they learn it, how they respond to different teaching styles and approaches in the classroom, and how successful they are at learning a language.

◆Key concepts — learning styles

How might your motivation, past learning experience and age influence how you learn a new language?

Learning stylesThe different ways in which learners prefer to learn, e.g. visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, group or individual styles. click to keep open · see glossary are the ways in which a learner naturally prefers to take in, processThe process of adding affixes is called affixation. click to keep open · see glossary and remember information and skillsThe four language skills are listening, speaking, reading and writing. See develop skills, subskills, receptive skills, productive skills. click to keep open · see glossary. Our learning style influences how we like to learn and how we learn best. Experts have suggested several different ways of classifying learning styles. They relate to the physical sense we prefer to use to learn, our way of interacting with other people and our style of thinking. Here are some commonly mentioned learning styles:

You can see from these descriptions how learners with different learning styles learn in different ways, and need to be taught in different ways. We must remember, though, that learners may not fall exactly into any one category of learning style as they may have several styles. It’s also true that different cultures may use some learning styles more than others and that learners may change or develop their learning styles.

◆Key concepts — learning strategies

Learning strategiesThe techniques which learners consciously use to help them when learning or using language, e.g. deducing the meaning of words from context; predicting content before reading. click to keep open · see glossary are the ways that learners choose and use to learn language. They include ways to help themselves identifyTo recognise somebody or something and be able to say who it is or what it is. For example, a teacher can find out what fruit vocabulary learners know by giving them pictures of different fruit and asking them to identify the fruit by matching words to the pic… click to keep open · see glossary what they need to learn, process, remember, and use new language. Using the right strategy at the right time can help us learn the language better, and help to make us more able to learn without depending on the teacher, i.e. to become more independent or autonomous learners. Some examples of learning strategies are:

• repeating new words in your head until you remember them
• experimenting / taking risks by using just-learnt language in conversations
• asking the teacher or others to give you feedback1. To tell someone how well they are doing. After a test, or at a certain point in the course, teachers might give learners feedback on how well they are doing. 2. Teachers also give feedback after an exercise that learners have just completed; e.g. after lear… click to keep open · see glossary on your language use
• deciding to use the foreign language as much as possible, e.g. by talking to tourists
• recording yourself speaking, then judging and correcting your pronunciation
• asking a speaker to repeat what he/she has said
• deciding what area of vocabulary you need to learn and then learning it
• thinking about how to memoriseTo learn something so that you can remember it later; something which is easy to remember is memorable. Learners often try to memorise new vocabulary they have learned by repeating it to themselves. See learn by heart. click to keep open · see glossary (remember) all the new words you meet in each lesson
• deciding to write each new vocabulary item on a separate card and display it on your fridge
• paraphrasingSaying or writing something again in different words, e.g. to explain meaning or to avoid a word you do not know. click to keep open · see glossary.

Different learners use different strategies. Experts think that the strategies that learners use most successfully depend on their character and learning style. This means there are no best strategies. But research shows that using strategies definitely makes learning more successful and that learners can be trained to use strategies.

◆Key concepts — maturity

MaturityFully grown or developed. If a learner is mature in attitude, they behave in an adult way. A learner’s maturity (physical, emotional and mental) influences a teacher’s approaches and/or decisions. click to keep open · see glossary involves becoming grown up physically, mentally and emotionally. Children, teenagers and adults have different levels of maturity, which means they learn in different ways. Here are some of the main differences in maturity that influence language learning.

Of course, every learner is different, so any one learner may not fit exactly into these descriptions. The descriptions are generalisations that show likely, but not fixed, characteristics. But from looking at these differences we can see that each age group generally needs to be taught in different ways.

◆Key concepts — past language learning experience

Teenage and adult learners may have learnt English before. They may be used to learning in a particular way and have definite ideas about how to learn best. For example, an adult may have learnt English at school through learning lots of grammar and may have been successful in learning this way. If he then finds himself in a class where the teaching is done only through communicative activitiesI.e. activities where learners communicate with each other in speaking or writing click to keep open · see glossary (i.e. activities where learners communicate with each other in speaking or writing), he may feel he is not learning. But, he may, of course, prefer it. Another adult may have learnt by using translation at school and then come to a class in which translation is never used. He may or may not like this change. Teachers of adults (and sometimes teachers of teenagers) need to be aware of how their learners have learnt previously and how they want to learn now. The learners may welcome a change in method, but they may want to learn in the same way as they learnt before.

Other learner characteristics which can vary from learner to learner are their level of language, their motivation (see Unit 9), and their general personality. Are they, for example, shy, outgoing, patient, curious, sensitive, etc.? All these qualities will affect how and how much each learner engages in different kinds of activities in the classroom.

◆Key concepts and the language teaching classroom

Read these tips and tick the ones which are most important for you:

• It can be useful for teachers to become aware of their own learning styles, past learning experience and learning strategies, and to compare these with how they teach. Teachers sometimes teach in the same style in which they themselves like to learn. This is unlikely to be the same style as all their learners prefer.
• Some learner characteristics, such as past language learning experience and learning strategies, are more relevant to teaching teenagers and adults than to teaching children.
• We can find out what our learners’ characteristics are by e.g. asking them, observing them, giving them questionnaires, asking at the end of a lesson whether they liked the activities done in class and why, and in what different ways they might like to work.
• We can train learners to become aware of and use different learning strategies. This is part of learner trainingUsing activities which help learners understand how they learn and help them to become more autonomous, independent learners, e.g. doing an activity which teaches learners to use a dictionary quickly. click to keep open · see glossary. We can, for example, give learners a list of strategies for remembering words and ask them which they prefer and why; or we can ask them how they arrived at a solution to a problem to raise their awareness of useful learning strategies.
• Teachers may need to discuss their methods with learners who are unhappy with new methods. They may need to introduce the new methods gradually and explain the reasons for them. This is also part of learner training, i.e. helping learners adapt their own ways of learning. Teachers may also need to change their teaching to make the learners more comfortable and confident in their learning, if they see that learners can’t or won’t change their learning style.
• Teachers can build into their lessons activities which match different learning styles, e.g. a listening activity followed by a reading activity followed by group work followed by a mingleA mingle is an activity which involves learners walking round the classroom talking to other learners to complete a task. For example, learners could mingle to find out what the other learners in the class like doing in their free time. click to keep open · see glossary (an activity which involves learners walking round the class talking to other students), followed by an exercise.
• When teachers consider their learners’ maturity it will strongly influence their lesson planning and what they do in the classroom, e.g. how many activities they do in a lesson, the length of activities, how abstract the activities are, how much the activities involve experiencing and doing, how much to focus on meaning rather than formThe form of a grammatical structure is the way it is written or pronounced and the parts which combine to make it; e.g. the present perfect simple (grammatical structure) is made up of have + past participle (this is the form). click to keep open · see glossary, what features of motivation to work with, how much they ask students to talk in front of others.
• It is not possible for the teacher to match the learner characteristics of each learner all the time. Across a number of lessons teachers can try to vary how they teach so that they can match the learner characteristics of a range of learners.

✎Follow-up activity

💡Reflect

🔍Discovery activities

✎TKT practice tasks

These multiple-choice tasks are exactly as in the book, but interactive: pick your answers, check your score, and retry anytime. The scoring uses the official answer key from the back of the book.

📖Glossary terms in this unit

Key terms highlighted in this unit — study them on the flashcards page.