Learners
Understanding what we can find
within our classrooms
Unit 1 of Harmer’s (2007) book, How to Teach English
By Melissa Cortés-Ramírez
Pre-Service Teacher, School of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Post 227
The
first chapter of Harmer’s (2007) book describes the big amount of different
learners that we, as future teachers, might encounter in the classrooms. We can
have EFL, ESL, or ESOL students. EFL students are the ones who learn the
language because they need it for travelling or because they want to
communicate with other people. ESL students, refers to the people who learn the
language because they are living in an English speaking country. And ESOL students are a combination of EFL
and ESOL students.
The main
idea of the chapter is to recognize the different types of learners and how teachers
can deal successfully with all of them at once. In a classroom, we can find
people of different ages, learning styles, levels of knowledge, different
backgrounds, personalities, and reasons to learn. As teachers, we need to take
into consideration all these details so that we can create a good learning
environment for all of our students. By doing this, we can assure that our
students are going to be able to learn and to feel motivated to do it.
The
advantages of taking into consideration the different types of learners we
might have before we create a lesson plan can make a huge difference in our
students. First, if we think in the age of the students; we can create
activities that are suitable for them because a child can enjoy and learn by
performing a game, while a teenager would prefer to listen to a song; and that
would increase the student’s interest in the topic. Second, we should create
activities and tasks that involve different learning styles, for example one
day we can use pictures, then audios, and then they can create something; in
that way students use their abilities and feel motivated by seeing the results.
And if we take into account their level, we can make activities that they would
understand and would not make them feel frustrated. So, if we have students’
interest, motivation, and encouragement, they are going to learn successfully
and would even want to learn more.
As a
result for all these differences among students, there can be consequences,
too. One can be that there are students who do not like to participate, even if
the activity is appropriate for all of them. Another one is that there are
students who do not have a reason for learning the language, so they are not attracted
to the topics. Also, having so many different types of students in such big
groups can be very challenging for the teacher when creating the activities for
the class. Besides, for the teacher can be very hard to know the different
characteristics of each student and fit the lesson to each of their necessities
when the groups are so numerous.
As a
conclusion, we can say that it is very important to consider all the different
aspects of our student’s personality or background before we create a lesson
plan. By doing this, we can be sure that our classes are going to be dynamic,
fun, interesting, and motivating for our students. This would lead our students
to be successful learners and that can even lead them to be autonomous and
learn for their own. It is our job as teachers to make the learning process
enjoyable for our students so we better do it right.
Reference
Harmer, J. (2007). “Learners.” How to teach English. Essex:
Pearson
Thursday, March 03, 2016
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