Language Learner Profile

Written by:
Jos Garca Mario Vera

Professor:
Mrs. Roxanna Correa Prez

SUBJECT
ADQUISICION Y APRENDIZAJE DEL INGLES ED1110C1 Sec.1

Concepcin, June, 2017

1. Introduction

A Language Learners Profile is a research work which attempts to clarify the kind
of mistakes a student of English as a second language can commit. It is done by
interviewing the person chosen in order to make him speak, so that later it is
possible to analyze the data and spot the mistakes committed. After that comes a
complete analysis of those mistakes, classifying them in a criteria preciously set by
the researchers. Consequently, it is explained why the student made such
mistakes, as well as ways to avoid them. Moreover, the objective of this research is
to propose different ways the student can improve his or her language proficiency
by strengthening his or her flaws presented in his speech.

This Language Learner Profile will focus on phonetical and lexical mistakes. This
means that, on one hand, its approach will rely on the learners flaws in Commented [csg1]: On the one hand

pronunciation, stressing and speech rhythm. On the other hand, it will take its focus
to vocabulary and word usage mistakes, which refer to the wrong use of words in a
sentence, the speakers lack of knowledge of the meaning of words or the incorrect
spelling of them.

Finally, it will be presented a proposal which, from our point of view, would help the
student reinforce his English language skills and, as a result, allow him or her to
correct the mistakes committed in his or her speech. This proposal will consist of Commented [csg2]: prep

several activities and practicing strategies the student can use, in an attempt of
developing his language proficiency further, with focus on solving the issues he or
she presented to have according to his responses from the interview.
2. Learners Background

This Language Learning Profile is based on an interview applied to an English

learner, whose knowledge of the language is still in development. This student is
currently studying at the university, at which he is in his second year. The learner
has studied English since he was at 4th year primary school, the year in which
English as a subject started being taught at his school. As of now at the university,
in his second year he has been scheduled English classes as part of his career
program. The interviewee also stated that he practices his English skills outside
from his normal classes, whether it is by watching movies in English or listening to
music in English as well. Unfortunately, no member of his family neither anyone of
his friends have any competence in English, meaning that he does not receive any
input in the language from his social environment or his close relationships.
Nevertheless, the student commented that knowledge of English as a second
language can be very helpful, especially for his career.

3. Interview Transcription

1 I: What is your full name?

2 L: My full name is My full name is XXXXXXX
3 I: Tell me about your hometown.
4 L: Emmm, my hometown is my hometown is in emm, San Bicente de Tagua Tagua.
5 Emmm that place is near of Rancagua, de de main city Mmm San Bicente de
6 Tagua Tagua emmm i-is a very small place emmm with not bery much to do, umm but
7 emm de organisation of de small town is bery nice, bery emm bery, bery nice to sieh.
8 I: And what do you like the most about that town?
9 L: De doggies Ha-ha, de doggies, umm de trees that that full the small town
10 emm Dat, (o sea), haha, de center of de town is not emm a bery crowd place emm
11 so it is-it is nice to me. Mmm
12 I: OK, nice.
13 L: (Eso), hehe.
14 I: What do you do in your free time?
15 L: I like to read umm, novels, of crime, or investigation. I like to watch movies, with
16 my girlfriend I like to go out, and eat a lot of fod, food.
17 I: What do you think of videogames?
18 L: Sigh Eh, I like bideogames, but I try to emm aboid it, emm, cos eh emm,
19 bideogames emm, takes a lot of my time, and emm for me its bery hard to to wiwish,
20 so I try to aboid it.
21 I: What are your hopes for the future life?
22 L: Emm, finish my my univers haha, university career hahaha, emm Emm, live in
23 peace, with my girlfriend Ummm, wind a win a haha, a decent, haha, emm,
24 (cantidad, como era?) A decent amount of money, ha
25 I: And what else?
26 Ummm, I like to have childs. Emm, be in a, (cmo se llama?) secure job, mmm, haha.
27 Be a, mmm, a complete person, in alls, all ospects, aspects.

4. Phonetics Transcription

[5 mmm at ples is n f rankawa de de men siti mmm san bisente de tawa

tawa mmm - 6 s bri sml ples mmm wi mmm nt bri m t d mm bt
mmm de rgnisen 7 f de sml tan s bri nas bri mmm bri bri nas t
s ]

5. Analysis

5.1 General Analysis Commented [U3]: First group that comments positive things
about the learner, well done!!

After a thorough analysis of the recorded interview, we have come to the

conclusion our interviewee had a more than acceptable performance. Despite the
little English teaching he has received throughout his life, he was capable of
expressing his ideas in a comprehensible way. Noticeably, though, he committed
many mistakes due to his lack of experience and English knowledge. While
producing his answers, he hesitated in several occasions, creating long pauses
that made his message difficult to follow. Additionally, his incorrect pronunciation of
a variety of words, while most of the time did not impede our understanding, left us
in confusion and forced us to guess the word he was trying to say by the context in
his speech. Another type of mistake in his answers was the inappropriate use of
certain words, which in some cases did not allow us to understand what he was
trying to say. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that his level of English gave
us a pleasant surprise, since he has not studied the language in a deeper and
more advanced way, neither at school nor at his university.

5.2 Phonetics and Phonology

The first analysis to be made will focus on phonetics and phonology. To do this, we
will focus on the three lines taken from the interview that were transcribed into
phonemes. By doing this, we will be able to examine our interviewees
performance in terms of English pronunciation, specifically in vowels and
consonants. Moreover, it is going to be analyzed the interviewees stressing of
words and speech rhythm. As a result, this will show us the ability of our speaker to
produce English vowels and consonants in the correct way.

Here is the transcribed part of the interview:

[ mmm at ples is n f rankawa de de men siti mmm san bisente de tawa tawa
mmm -s bri sml ples mmm wi mmm nt bri m t d mm bt mmm de
rgnisen f de sml tan s bri nas bri mmm bri bri nas t s ]

a) Vowels and Consonants

In terms of pronunciation of vowels and consonants, we have noticed that our

interviewee had few mistakes in comparison to our estimations. Once again, this
happens to be unexpected due to the little English practice we have been told he
has done throughout his life. While he mispronounced some vowels and
consonants, these mistakes were not enough to hinder our understanding of his
message. According to what we have checked, the mistakes our interviewee
made, though few, are fossilized in his mind, since they are repeated throughout all
his speech.

Firstly, we would like to point out his wrong pronunciation of certain vowels. In
words that contained an /i:/ sound (long i sound), the speaker tended to produce
a shorter, more relaxed sound, resulting in him producing a // sound. For example,
in the last line of our transcription, the speaker says the phrase nas t s. In that
phrase, the word s in mispronounced by the speaker since he wanted to produce
the verb see. That verb has a long i vowel, equal to the phoneme /i:/. As a
result, his pronunciation of such phrase should have been nas t si:.

Another mistake in vowel sound production can be found in the third line of the
transcription. In that sentence, the interviewee used the word bt. We suspect he
wanted to say the word bt, a very common conjunction in the English language.
In this case, the speaker confused the vowel sound of //, which has a similar
sound to the Spanish a, with a sound similar to the Spanish o sound, which in
English the closest to it would be the vowel //. Both // and // in the English
language require the speaker to open the mouth in a wide manner, which would be
the reason as to why our interviewee produced the sound in a wrong way.

Secondly, we will take a look at the misconceived pronunciation of consonants. In

this aspect, the speaker had a clear difficulty in pronouncing consonants that can
have more than one type of pronunciation. For instance, in the first line of the
phonetic transcription he says de men siti. In this phrase, the word de is
notoriously meant to be the article the in the English language. This word
possesses a very peculiar consonant, the th. This consonant can have two
different sounds depending on the word in which it is in. As an example, the word
that has the consonant sound //; on the contrary, the word thing contains a
different phoneme for the th consonant: the // sound. The first sound // is a
voiced-interdental sound, meanwhile the // is a voiceless-interdental one.
Another mispronounced consonant sound from the interviewee is the consonant
/v/. In Chile, which is the country our interviewee is from, people barely make a
distinction between the consonant sounds of /b/ and /v/. However, in the English
language, it is mandatory to make this distinction. The consonant /v/ is a voiced
labial sound, meanwhile the consonant /b/ is a voiced bilabial one. As such,
throughout all the transcribed passage, we can see that our speaker used the word
bri, which clearly is a wrong pronunciation of the English word very. Therefore,
our speaker confounded the sound of the /v/ consonant for a /b/, just like in his
native language.

b) Stress and Rhythm

Regarding stress and rhythm, it was in these aspects of English language in which
we found out our interviewee had a moderately low level of English. We could
notice that the speaker was knowledgeable concerning syllable stress in words;
nevertheless, he did not demonstrate that he knew what words he should have
stressed in a sentence, a characteristic highly proficient English speakers would be
aware of. Additionally, his speech rhythm was unnatural for English, given his big
amount of pauses and hesitations throughout his responses.

In order to proceed with our stress and rhythm analysis, we have modified the
phonetic transcription of the three selected lines, adding indicators of the speakers
stress and pauses. Pink apostrophes show which word the speaker stressed, while
teal vertical lines indicate in which part of the sentence he made a pause:

[ mmm at ples | is n f rankawa | de de men siti | mmm san bisente de

tawa tawa mmm -s bri sml ples | mmm wi mmm nt bri m t d |
mm bt | mmm de rgnisen f de sml tan s bri nas bri | mmm bri |
bri nas t s ]

Taking into consideration English stress, his incorrect word stressing in his
statements lead us to believe he has little knowledge about the main
characteristics of English language. Roach (2009) claims that English is a
stressed-timed language, which means that word stress is the most important
aspect to take into consideration when producing English speech. As such, there is
a distinction between what words are stressed and which ones are not. The words
that have to be stressed are called Content words, which are nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs; the words that do not are labeled Function words, in which Commented [U4]: ?????

case are pronouns, determiners, articles and auxiliary verbs. Analyzing the
transcribed part, we can note that the words our speaker stressed do not
correspond to content words. As an example, in the first line of the transcription, a
pink apostrophe is located at the word n (which translates to near), therefore
that is the word the interviewee stressed. However, the speaker did not stress the
word rankawa (Rancagua). According to English rules, this is a wrong way of
stressing because both near and Rancagua are content words, since the former
is an adjective and the latter a noun. Hence, the speaker should have stressed
both words.

Now, regarding rhythm, the interviewee once again shows his little understanding
of the rules of English speech. In English, sentences express a single idea, and
whenever you move from one sentence to another, you should make a pause. In
the case of our interviewee, we have noticed that he made several pauses during
his speech, often in moments when he should not have done them. For example,
in the first line of the transcription, we can see a teal line in the phrase at ples |
is n f rankawa. This indicates that the speaker made pause between ples
(place) and is (is). If the whole phrase is analyzed, it can be noted that it
expresses a single idea: that place is near Rancagua. Hence, it becomes a single
sentence, and thus, there should not be any pauses in between the sentence.

Basing ourselves in these facts, we ought to say that our interviewee has not
conceived very much the primordial rules of English speech production. Even
though he knows how to stress syllables, he clearly has little knowledge of word
stress in sentences, which makes his message messy for a listener, although not
completely incomprehensible. Nevertheless, his major flaw in speech production
lies in his rhythm. His constant pauses does not let him deliver a clear and well-
organized idea, and as a result, he loses fluency and capacity of maintaining a
conversation for a longer time.
5.3 Lexis and Vocabulary

In regards of lexis, our examination shows us that the person interviewed misused Commented [U5]: In regards to

plenty of words throughout his speech. We have highlighted in red every word that
was wrongly used by the interviewee in red. According to Nation (2013), there are
three categories in which a lexical mistake can be classified, being Form, Meaning
and Use; thus, in this following chart we have put each mistaken word in these
three categories. This way we can have a clearer understanding of the type of
mistake he committed related to his choice of words.

Word Form Meaning Use

IN X
OF X
MAIN X
SIEH X
FULL X X
CROWD X X X
FOD X
IT X
TAKES X
WIWISH X X X
WIND X X
WIN X
CHILDS X
SECURE X
OSPECTS X Commented [U6]: If there is no context I cant see if it is right
or wrong
Next in this lexical analysis is a brief explanation of the mistakes from the
interviewee, in the classification of Form, Meaning and Use:

a) Form: in this category, the learner demonstrated that he did not know the correct
spelling of the words he was trying to use. For example, in the case of childs, in
line N 26, the speaker wanted to express his wish of having more than one child.
Sadly, he did not know that the correct plural form of child is children, causing
him to follow the simple rule of adding an s at the end of the word to change the
word to plural. It is noteworthy, though, the fact that the interviewee actually had
knowledge of the Meaning of the word child and its Use as well.

b) Meaning: regarding this category, our interviewee did not have knowledge of the
actual meaning of the word he used, creating a messy message which was only
possible to be understood by its context in the possible cases. For instance, in line
N 10 from the transcription, he used the word crowd in order to qualify the center
of town as a place with little fluency of people. The word crowd in a noun, not an
adjective, and its meaning is a huge group of people gathered together. By this
definition, the sentence the learner said would mean that in the city downtown
people stay together without moving whatsoever, which is clearly not what he
meant to say. A correct use of the word crowd in such sentence would be its
adjective form, the word crowded, which means a place with enormous fluency of
people. This way, the sentence would be both grammatically and semantically
correct, with a proper use of the words meaning.

c) Use: in relation to this category, the interviewee showed his lack of vocabulary
as he used words in a way that was not their correct function in a statement. Let us
take a look at line N 26. There is a highlighted word secure, which the learner
used in a wrong manner. In that statement, the speaker wanted to express his
hope of having a job in which he could stay for a very long time, or a job he would
not lose easily. However, the word secure is mostly related to places, or rather
the feeling or state of protection against physical damage. Therefore, a more
proper adjective the speaker could have used is stable, which means stability of
something in time, no matter the consequences.
To wrap it up, we conclude that most of his mistakes fell in the categories of Form
and Use, yet he had few mistakes in Meaning. This can possibly be caused due to
his lack of English practice and knowledge. We hold the view that if he had a
higher level of English, he would know the proper spelling, as well as the
grammatical function of the words he would use. However, his comparatively lower
quantity of Meaning-based mistakes in word usage allows us to conclude that he
knew what kind of message he was trying to share, meaning that in his brain he is
capable of processing the English language and preparing responses and ideas in
the language. Despite this, his lack of vocabulary and language expertise decrease
his ability of choosing the right words in conveying a high-level English message.

6. Proposal

With the previous analysis, we come to the conclusion that the problems of the
interviewee are all linked to the lack of experience he has in English. This lack of
experience is directly related to his school time, an educative period we are sure
he was not given enough English teaching judging by his performance in the
interview. However, this very performance is what makes us believe that the
student has a very solid base of English knowledge. Therefore, if the student
further develops his English language skills from that base of knowledge he has,
we are certain that he would be able to reach a very high level in English
proficiency. As a consequence, our proposals aim for encouraging the student to
practice the language and study it, whether he does it at home or at any academic
context.

Our first proposal is related to his English self-practicing. Even though the student
has claimed that he does certain everyday activities in English, such as watching
movies in English or listening to music in English, we think the time he spends in
those activities is not enough to warranty English acquisition. We recommend and
encourage the student to integrate the English language into more of his hobbies,
or even start doing other ones in English. For example, the student manifested his
enjoyment of reading and videogame playing. These are hobbies that he could
perfectly start doing in English, increasing the instances in which he can expose
himself to the language. This will help him acquire new vocabulary, and improve
his reading and listening skills.

Another strategy that we recommend the student uses is to expose himself to

English input that is one step above from his current level. Thus, according to
Krashen (1985), he could feel challenged and would try acquiring the language in a
more passionate way. We hold the view that he needs to be in an appropriate
environment with speaking, writing and listening activities that he can understand
and where he can get a little more than the level that he got. This way he could
increment greatly his speaking and writing skills.

Regarding academic contexts, the student can practicing with exercise such as
reading tasks, listening activities, and other activities related to acquire new
vocabulary and how to use it correctly. The student must be exposed to the second
language for a longer time so that he can get a little more than the level he already
has, step by step. Moreover, the student is familiarized with several words, but
does not know how to use them properly. One of the objectives of learning a
second language is to know how to use a word in context (Brown 1994). In order to
develop his proficiency in this area, he could do role playing activities or other
tasks that put him on daily life situations. In brief, the competence is achieved
through the use of the second language in real-life communicative situations.

Finally, our proposals are all centred in the constant practice of the English
language by the student, as well as exposure to the language. Additionally, input
reception and output production are also part of our proposal, since there cannot
be communication without them, and as a result, English practice and exposure.
Therefore, the persistent and steady practice and use of the English language the
student can make will surely prove beneficial for his learning and skill development
in English.

7. Conclusions

Throughout this analysis process of the second language profile of this specific
student, we were able to detect some of the main problems faced by people who
have had few hours of study and exposure to the acquisition and learning of a
second language. Therefore, this language learner profile has proven to be an
excellent tool for study and focus on the problems of the learner.

We could observe that there is a huge interference between the first language and
the second language that often inhibits the correct pronunciation of some words,
the form, the meaning and the correct use of these are also affected (Lexis).
However, we are impressed by the amount of vocabulary and phrases that the
student expressed grammatically correct, despite the few hours of English that he
has had during his basic education until today as a university student.

In addition, this language learner profile would help us in thinking about the kind of
classes that we will do with our future students. This is because there could
possibly be students who may have the same problems as this pupil, or others who
have different levels of English. We can use these tools and strategies to teach
and facilitate student learning; furthermore, we can face deficiencies in different
areas of language.

To finish, we would like to mention that this language learner profile has been very
insightful for us in terms of the different range of mistakes an English learner can
make. In the case of our learner, his phonetical and lexical mistakes can be
perfectly found in many other students. As teachers, then it is important to know
different strategies to deal with these problems. Thankfully, this language learner
profile has allowed us to elaborate those strategies so that we can be ready for
when the time of being a teacher comes. Commented [U7]: Interference from L1
8. References

Brown, H. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. New Jersey: Prentice

Hall Regent, 1994
Krashen, S. (1985) The Input Hyphotesis. London: Longman
Nation, P. (2013). Learning vocabulary in another language (2nd Ed.). Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.

Roach, P. (2009). English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course (4th Ed.).
Cambridge University Press.