Assignment 1 : FOCUS ON THE LEARNER

Learner Profile

Juan Carlos is a 50 year old native Colombian student, currently residing in Switzerland. He has an intermediate level of English. He works as an Information Technology (IT) engineer and has acquired the necessary English vocabulary to function effectively within this sector. He would like to improve his everyday English fluency in order to interact more effectively with the Lausanne immigrant community, which uses English as the primary language for communication.

Juan Carlos studied English at school, but found it unsatisfying because he only did text book tasks and dialogue memorization. At University, he studied technical English required for the IT industry. After some time,
Then the teacher would teach “January”, “joy in January”, “jumps for joy in January” with the entire class repeating each chunk. Finally the teacher would say the entire tongue twister and then the class would repeat it. The teacher might then nominate students to attempt the phrase individually.

After this teaching phase, the class would be divided into pairs of different native language learners where possible. Students would then be given the list of tongue twisters (Appendix 2) and told to practice them using the backchaining technique. During this task, students would be encouraged to change partners to allow less accomplished learners to practice with stronger ones.

Rationale

Tongue twisters are a fun way to practice proper pronunciation. By providing tongue twisters that focus on several different but related phonemes, learners may more readily identify the differences between them. The inclusion of tongue twisters focusing on / j / and / dʒ /will force Juan Carlos to practice these particular phonemes. Doing the tongue twisters with multiple partners makes this a social activity that should appeal to Juan Carlos.

Bibliography

Better English Pronunciation, J.D. O’Connor, Cambridge University Press 1980
Definite Article use in the il of Spanish Speakers: A multi-dimensional problem, Laura Torrado Mariñas, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 43 (2011): pp. 87-105
Explaining English Grammar, George