UNIT 14

Learner needs

As future teachers we must really know what are learner needs? In order to use helpful and practical methods that can help our students in learning a foreign language since there are different kinds of learner needs might affect what teachers do in the classroom.

Let’s talk about kind of needs, personal needs involve praise, movement, goals, learning expectations and other psychological or physical needs and also in this part the reason needs include cultural or educational background, motivation and personality. On the other hand, learning needs take an important part in students’ learning process and progress since those refer to the use of specific target language, specific language subskills by taking into account the learning styles. Finally, professional needs teacher should pay attention in specific subskills, specific use of vocabulary and grammar but mainly specific use of functions since they help students to use a language for specific purpose.

As a final and significant point to mention is that adults or older teenagers with specific professional, general or academic goals for learning English need courses that meet their needs for instance we have a series of one to one lessons over eight weeks on business presentation skills.

In conclusion, teachers can address learners’ needs by taking into consideration such as; choose a suitable materials and topics, approach to teaching, pace of lessons but mainly they should integrate more interaction patterns which help students to develop their confidence in use the language.

Here you have some links which contain useful information:

http://www.itma.vt.edu/modules/spring11/efund/lesson3/learneranalysis.pdf

http://es.slideshare.net/hbeetham/learner-needs-v1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRKJFEtyKP0