Irene Zabiela

Learner Profile TESOL 2

Needs Analysis
Background Information. Vanessa is 29 years old and last year she became a Nutritionist. At this very moment, she is looking for a job in the private hospitals area. She is also studying English and is getting a Masters degree in Nutrition and Dietetics. Regarding her English studies she stated that it was really important to her to improve her level of English, for that reason she is doing her FCE level course. When I asked her if she liked her English lessons she replied they were really enjoyable and also useful not only for improving her job opportunities, but also for communicating with people from foreign countries. Therefore, as we can see Vanessa shows a clear intrinsic motivation which encourages her to study English at this time of her life. Moreover, last April she travelled to the USA during her honey moon and had her first opportunity to meet native speakers, a fact that helped Vanessa test her knowledge of English by herself in a really authentic way. As we can deduce, this is another intrinsic motivation that has encouraged Vanessa to continue studying English. However, she expresses that having an advanced level of English increases the chances of getting a better job as todays market demands inevitably are increasingly higher. Thus, she realised that having a good level of English has become a need. As a result, it is hard to define what type of motivation Vanessa has, as there are both external and internal factors that drive her to keep on studying English. To conclude, our learner exhibits a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations mainly due to a matter of age, personal likes and needs.

Interests. When I asked Vanessa about her hobbies and free time activities apart from showing a clear interest in dancing Flamenco and Salsa she immediately pointed out that during the last years most of her weekends she found herself devoted to studying hard in order to get her Masters degree in Nutrition.However, she expressed her studies gave her the chance to encounter the incredible world of science in which she could found a great source of entertainment, either by reading articles on the internet about the latest breakthroughs in nutrition or by attending conferences regarding food and dieting issues. Despite her lack of time due to her studies, she was able to maintain a healthy social life and tries to meet with her friends at least three times a month. However, she mentioned her passion to music and confessed she could not leave it aside even while studying at university. With reference to her music preferences, Spanish traditional music, Folk and Rock were her favorite ones. Vanessa also shows a clear interest in getting to know different cultures and travelling all around the world. Thats why, she considers English such a valuable tool in order to follow her dreams and someday get a scholarship to study abroad. She made emphasis on meeting people who did not speak Spanish in order to create a need for speaking English. Additionally, she believes that living in a foreign country would broaden her mind and help her to truly stand on her own feet.

Irene Zabiela

Learner Profile TESOL 2

Vanessa feels that interacting with those with a background different from her own and seeing a different way of life would be uniquely eye-opening in terms of culture, personal growth and career development. Language. Her attitude towards learning languages is incredibly positive, primarily as she has personally experienced speaking to native speakers and being immersed in their culture, which she found fascinating. Whats more, she is willing to achieve a high level of English despite the fact that she will spend a considerable number of years studying the language in order to become a fluent speaker. Concerning her performance during the interview, I may say despite being a bit shy in the beginning progressively she started to gain confidence allowing her to express her thoughts freely. Nonetheless, her performance was not the one I expected as she committed several errors which were not in accordance to her level. In addition, she admitted Speaking was one her weakest areas and considered her personality an inevitable barrier when trying to communicate orally. From my point of my view, one of the reasons why she is not still able to naturally come up with words when speaking is because she is constantly overanalyzing the language trying to find the exact words or expressions all the times, this reaction prevents her from using the language in a more native-like way. I would add that some of the errors and mistakes she committed were caused by L1 interference, many words showed a clear resemblance to the ones in Spanish. Despite her difficulties, I should highlight her willingness and commitment to the process of learning as well as taking the risk of improving her English no matter how hard and stressful could it be for a student in her late twenties.

Irene Zabiela

Learner Profile TESOL 2

GENERAL ASSESSMENT.
Introduction. In order to assess Vanessas performance I proposed her some diagnostic activities which included a reading and a listening test. We must not lose sight that her speaking skills were evaluated throughout the interview. In her first year of English studies her English teacher recommended her to first make sure she had reached a B1 level and afterwards to progressively start doing more advanced exercises so she could finally achieve a B2 level. Thats why this year she started to prepare for the FCE exam. However, Vanessa stated she didnt feel confident enough about reaching an FCE level at this very moment. Consequently, I found it would be ideal to use a PET reading and listening test as to determine her level of mastery of the English language as well as to compare it with her view of her own performance. In the next paragraphs I will analyse my findings on each of the language skills previously mentioned. I will try to provide a logical explanation about the learners needs. Reading skills. First of all, we did the a three-option multiple choice activity (first part of the PET Reading test), which includes five short discrete texts such as messages, notes ,labels, etc .In this phase of the test she had to read the texts in order to understand the main message. Although apparently Vanessa was used to performing in exam- like situations (avoid asking for unknown vocabulary, finishing the test on time, asking for instructions before starting the test and not during it), she behaved surprisingly in the opposite way.She asked for help and instructions several times while the test was taking place. I guess this might have happened due to the fact that she felt quite under pressure and nervous. Regarding her performance, she made some mistakes that according to my point of view were probably result of a lack of comprehension, only 2 of 5 answers were correct. This evidenced that she showed some difficulty dealing with skimming activities as she wasnt able to grasp the main idea of most of the texts. Moreover, when we checked her answers, she could not support them probably because she could not find the evidence in the text. Therefore, not only she was unable to understand the main message but also she could not back up her ideas.This was not the performance expected from the learner as the level of difficulty of the activity in general was not that high. In the second task, she was asked to match five items in the form of descriptions of people to eight short adapted texts. This activity is aimed to assess the learners ability to find specific information. Although Vanessa took a little more time to do this task than expected she could fulfill the task successfully (she correctly matched all the options). This shows that her scanning strategies concerning reading comprehension are far more developed in comparison with her skimming ones. In my opinion, she has become a more competent and confident reader when scanning rather than skimming because of her excessively perfectionist personality making her to overly focus on irrelevant information. Most of the times when she tried to provide evidence for her answers she mentioned details that despite not holding connection to what was asked they were correct and appropriately backed up.

Irene Zabiela

Learner Profile TESOL 2

Therefore I conclude Vanessa is good at gathering specific information but presents an unexpectedly serious difficulty to grasp the general ideas from a text. Listening Skills. I proposed Vanessa two different tasks, both of them were multiple-choice activities but they aimed at assessing two different listening skills: skimming (1st activity) and scanning (2nd activity) of spoken texts. In the first activity, she had to tick from 3-option multiple choice items with visuals the one which best summarises the key information provided by a short neutral or informal monologue or dialogue. She successfully completed the activity in only one listening and additionally she was able to support her answers correctly. It seems that she has a well developed listening skimming strategy, which means that she is able to identify the basic setting and where the relevant information is in a spoken text. Moreover, after the listening test finished she pointed out that finds much easier to get a global understanding from spoken texts than written texts. Another positive aspect is that as she expressed she could notice which words were more stressed and clearly pronounced them. She also was able to spot the speakers mood in the cases that it was relevant. According to Vanessa, these features of spoken language worked as a clear guidance for her to get the general understanding of the spoken text. In the second multiple choice activity, she was asked to choose from 3-option items which one provides some piece of information which is mentioned in each of the interviews or monologues( there are seven of them).These are quite longer than the ones presented in the first task. When it came to listening scanning strategies, she could perform with excellence as she identified specific information at much more ease than in reading in terms of accuracy and speed. All the answers provided were correct as well as her supporting ideas, in this case she was able to justify each of her answers as she strategically took notes of selectively extracted specific information. In addition, she was able to rephrase those supporting ideas with her own words which evidences she could thoroughly understand what she was listening to. I think it is also worth mentioning that she could guess the meaning of new vocabulary which she could immediately incorporate in her spoken discourse. To sum up, Vanessa was able to successfully accomplish the task integrating scanning and skimming strategies as well as distinguishing suprasegmental features which helped her to better understand the texts. I would like to clarify that when the learner is asked to support her answers in both reading and listening stages this was not stated in the rubrics. This was planned by the teacher as a way if checking understanding.

Irene Zabiela

Learner Profile TESOL 2

Conclusion. All in all, I believe Vanessas greatest strengths lie in her listening language skills, while it is in her reading and speaking skills where we find she shows more difficulty. Regarding her reading comprehension, she is not able to get the main ideas of the text something that will pose a threat when accomplishing the skimming activities specially the ones from the FCE or even PET examination. However, I believe she could become a good language learner thanks to her responsible and committed attitude towards learning English. With regard to her weakest areas, I would suggest that her reading and speaking strategies need improvement, thats why it is vital to foster intensive training on reading and speaking activities in accordance with her level.