University Case Study: Teacher Language Awareness for English Learners

This case study examines teacher language awareness through the analysis of an English as a Second Language (ESL) learner. The study focuses on a student from Madagascar who has been learning English and identifies challenges in phonology and orthography. Data was collected through written assignments and oral conversations, revealing issues with pronunciation, grammatical constructions, and spelling. The analysis highlights the impact of the learner's native language and the importance of real-world communicative experience. The case study provides detailed examples of the learner's errors and offers recommendations for improvement, including increased practice and exposure to the language. The study emphasizes the significance of understanding a learner's linguistic competence and psychological factors in the language acquisition process.

Running head: TEACHER LANGUAGE AWARENESS
TEACHER LANGUAGE AWARENESS:
A case of English language learner as a second language
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Case study- Data collection........................................................................................................2
Analysis and interpretation........................................................................................................3
Conclusion and teacher recommendations...............................................................................11
Reference..................................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
English is referred to the most commonly used world language and making it the
international language have emphasized on its significance. Being an international language,
the medium of communication has got a gateway of interacting popularity. English learned as
a second language countries are mostly the Asian region (Tannen, Hamilton & Schiffrin,
2015). Learning and acquisition have no substantial difference and therefore, they are
interchangeable. With reference to the case study presented here, the language learning
analysis and written and spoken dialects will be analysed from data collected in form of five
features of language known as phonology, lexicography, syntax, orthography and text or
discourse (Pennycook, 2017). The written and oral forms will be analysed.
Case study- Data collection
Gaethon Rakotomalala is student who immigrated to Australia and studying in
University, seeking his education in research work. He belongs to Madagascar and had been
learning English as a second language in the home country. Gaethon have moved in Australia
last year and had started taking up an English language speaking learning classes. After six
months of learning, his capability to render acute English speaking skill in Australia have
been analysed. As he started learning English as a second language from his school days, he
is aware of the writing styles and grammar syntax. However, speaking is an aspect to be
learned that he faces problem with due to his first language to be Malagasy.
The learning assessment was done on him after taking spoken English classes for six
months and the following are the ways to detect the parameters.
1. Written: Writing on a current issue of Australia to check his writing style,
dominance on the language and Grammar skills (Bauer, 2016).

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2. Oral: An hour conversation was done with him to understand the five features of
speaking parameters (Cox & Fletcher, 2017).
Analysis and interpretation
The learner is a non-native English language learner from Madagascar. From the
observation we can justify certain key points regarding the learner’s issues. The issues the
learner is having during his English language learning can be justified under the following
heads: Discourse analysis, lexical analysis, Syntactic Analysis, Phonological analysis,
orthographic analysis (Trudgill & Chambers, 2017). We will be focusing on the learners
phonological and orthographical issues because that is where he had the most trouble. We
will also be looking at certain aspects of his orthographic analysis issues as, even though they
are not significantly high, there are certain identifiable issues which can affect his language
learning experience (Fuhr, 2014).
Phonological performance analysis
The first thing that the learner admitted to was his inability to hold proper
conversations in English because he finds understanding and speaking with proper
pronunciation troublesome (Murphy & Baker, 2015). He has also displayed that he has issues
with grammatical constructions while he is speaking.
L: Hello. I want purchase two chip packets. (Spoken)
Hello. I want to purchase two packets of chips. (Written)
It was also noticed that in articulation of the sentence above the learner pronounced
the word ‘chip’ (instead of ‘chips’) as / tʃ i: p / (cheap). In several other cases the learner was
identified having issue pronouncing rhyming words. In two different cases, he was identified
pronouncing ‘cat’ and ‘bat’ differently.

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L: I have a cat back home. (/kæt/)
L: I bought my brother a baseball bat (spoken as bet) (/bɛt/)
During conversation with the learner, it was identified that the learner’s grammatical
issues in speech were more prominent in the beginning of conversation. As the conversation
progressed, his speech accuracy increased (Ramamuruthy & Rao, 2015). However his
fluency in speech remained halting. The following are a few sentences taken from the
transcript of the conversation, the first three are from two minutes into the conversation and
the last three are from towards the end of the conversation.
L: I come class to learn speak English
L: I want learn English for job
L: I not able to speak very well because I cannot find words
L: So my school teacher actually helped me with mathematics.
L: I was really good at basketball but after the knee injury I stopped.
L: I would like to play again but maybe try a different sport this time.
The above example sentences provide insight into the fact that the learner’s primary
hindrance in language and discourse comes from the level of comfort he feels with the
speaker. Once the comfort level goes up and the speaker feels at home in with the speaker,
his grammatical accuracy goes up (Yeung & Ganotice, 2014). Even with high accuracy the
speaker still is unable to speak fluently and hold conversation without long pauses and
phonemic repetitions. The following example is a full verbatim transcript of one of his speech
segments that inform us of his issues with fluent speech (Yeh, 2014).

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L: So I… I was in school when my grand … mother… mother pass away. I remember ... I
remember very clearly… clearly… I felt sad. I love… loved the cookies she made.
Even though the sentence produced would be grammatically correct once structured
in clean verbatim, the lack of fluency indicates that the learner’s primary issue is not in the
syntax of the sentence but majorly in the production of fluent speech with correct
pronunciation (Paul, 2016).
Many more issues with his pronunciation were identified throughout the process.
Some of the major discrepancies in the phonological production committed by the learner
are:
Arctic: The learner speaks “ar – tik” / ɔː r t ɪ k /
Ask: The learner pronounces as “aks” / ʌ k s /
Athlete: The learner produces this word as “ath – uh – leet” / æ θ uh l iː t /
Clothes: The learner pronounces it as “Kloz” / k l ɔː z /
Library: The learner pronounces it as “Lai – berry” / l aɪ ˈb ɛ r i/
Vehicle: The learner pronounces it as “veh – ai – kel” /ˈv eh aɪ kl /
As identified above, the learner also has issues while identifying words that sound
similar (rhyme).
Orthographic performance analysis
Apart from the phonological issues, the learner also has issues with the orthographic
representation of the words. His pronunciation and grammatical constructions were identified
to be more or less correct (Cole, 2014). But in written expression, the learner was identified
as having major issues finding the correct spelling for a word. In many of the written cases,

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the learner had concepts of certain words that would be identified as difficult for a non –
native English language learner (Ranaivoarison, 2015). However, he made mistakes in those
spellings.
Adventure was spelled as adventer
Go-karting was spelled as gocarting
Preposition was spelled as priposition
Conjunction was spelled as Conjungtion
Island was spelled as ilend
Madagascar was spelled as Medagasker (on only one occasion) and Madagasker (on two
other occasions).
The learner being a non-native English language learner, there are bound to be certain
identifiable differences in his use of the language (Radimilahy & Crossland, 2015). While
scanning for problems in his use of the language we identified that the main sectors where he
has issues is orthography and speech. His grammatical constructions in written form were
more or less correct with minor issues when advanced level syntactic constructions like
compound passives were involved (Tomlin, 2014). In his speech we identified that the
primary issue he suffers from is when he is made to engage in a conversation in a situation
where he is not comfortable. However when his level of comfort goes up he makes less errors
in constructions. This shows us that his ability to construct sentences is dependent on how he
interprets the situation and how cognitively he engages with the task. If the situation is not in
his court, he has to actively engage his cognitive capabilities to make himself feel
comfortable with the situation and in that process he is unable to access the lexical and

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structural rule system that enables him to clearly implement the rules (Angelova & Zhao,
2016).
With the case of orthographic issues, the learner lacks ample practice because even
with the minor issues we identified his constructions with, there were several other instances
where he produced correct spellings for even certain complex words (Foley & Thompson,
2017).
The major issue that the learner faces is with pronunciation of words. That is the one
aspect where he has to focus on. The learner has trouble identifying and segregating the
allophones from the phonemes of the language and identifying minimal pairs (Baker, 2015).
He also finds using the proper pronunciation of several words complicated because of his
native language interference (Gilakjani & Sabouri, 2016). For instance, his experience with
French in his country Madagascar mixed with his native tongue Malagasy, influences his
English speech production where he mispronounces the phoneme ‘r’ as a velar fricative
instead of a glide. Moreover, his identification of syllable and word stress is also faulty in
many of the cases. He also fails to identify the proper intonation and use it correctly (Van
Lier, 2014). He has issues identifying the proper context for a sentence and ends up
producing stress on the wrong word.
I wanted the egg to be half boiled. – is what he intended to produce.
I wanted the egg to be half boiled – is what he produced.
This indicates that there is a major gap in his theoretical understanding of English
phonology and the practical use of it. In the case of word stress and intonation, there are
certain limited number of cases where the learner was identified to have used a proper
intonation the way he wanted to use it, but in other cases, he failed to produce the desired

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intonation because he got confused (Minutella, 2018). In the other cases where the word
stress was an issue, he incorrectly pronounced the words with wrong word stress like
Hotel with a stress on the second syllable instead of the first.
Hospital with a stress on the third syllable instead of the first.
Education with a stress on the first syllable instead of the third.
These indicate that the theoretical knowledge of the student in phonology is lacking in
a lot of practice and understanding which has created a major divide in his articulation and
his theoretical background. Moreover, the gap was widened by non-exposure to a non –
native English speaking community for a long time which rendered his ability to implement
the theories redundant. This also explains why the learner was also unable to carry out a
proper fluent conversation with the speakers he encountered.
In order to overcome these issues, the learner would require a lot of practice, learning
but most importantly, he needs real world communicative experience. In case of his written
expressions, the learner would have to undergo thorough practice writing everything he
encounters in order to learn his mistakes and internalize the proper concepts (Calhoun, 2017).
Learning a second language is not an easy task to accomplish and no two learners
learn at the same rate. Between beginning to learn a language and final acquisition of
accuracy and fluency in that language, there are multiple areas dedicated to learning styles
and strategies, roles of teachers and learners, methodologies and materials and learners
internal factors. multiple internal factors that influence a learner’s abilities to pick up a
language ranging from linguistic competence of the learner, all the way to the very basic and
individual psychological aspects and personality traits like introversion/extroversion,
motivational aspects etc. In the case of this particular learner, linguistic competence of the
learner played a very important role in determining his ability to learn. From the data that has

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been gathered, there are four aspects that we can look at in order to understand in depth, what
the factors are that influence an ESL learner (Hymes, 1976) and how those factors can be
utilised for implementing a teaching strategy:
1. Linguistic competence - Communicative competence and interlanguage.
2. Cognitive factors – Automaticity, Meaningful learning.
3. Affective factors – Motivation, intelligence, anxiety (or inhibition), risk taking
ability, self-esteem, attitude
4. Personality – Introverted v Extroverted.
1. Linguistic competence
Internal linguistic factors are probably the first things to consider when it comes to
language learning. No two persons in this world have the exact linguistic competence
thereby delimiting their abilities to learn a new language to the distinction that makes
someone pick up faster or the other one, with better accuracy.
a. Communicative Competence - The term competence refers to the ability to do
something well. Here, in this particular context, competence would refer to the L2
learner’s ability to learn the target language. The term communicative competence,
coined by Dell Hymes in 1966, refers to the user’s grammatical knowledge of
phonology, morphology and syntax of the language as well as the social cognition of
when, how and where to use them properly. In the current case, communicative
competence is found to be lacking.
b. Interlanguage (Selinker 1972) - it is an idiolect that is devised by the learners of an L2
which preserves some features of their L1 and can also modify and generalize some of
their acquired L2 rules. Interlanguage is based on the theory that there is a dormant

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psychological framework in the human brain that is activated when one attempts to
learn a second language. In the case of the current learner, we can notice the influence
of his native language (and French) in his production of his English.
2. Cognitive factors
Automaticity and meaningful learning (Segalowitz & Hulstijn, 2005) - Automaticity
is basically reflexive behaviour. In Language learning, automaticity refers to the effortless
production of the language without active conscious thinking. It can be achieved by practice
and repetition. Meaningful learning refers to the concept that the learned knowledge is fully
understood by the learner and that the learner knows how that specific fact relates to other
stored facts. It is evident in the case of the learner that because of English not being his
native language he is unable to produce near native speech or even conversational speech
without conscious thinking, nor is he able to identify the proper syntactic structure in his
speech at the beginning stages of conversation.
3. Affective factors
Affective factors in Second Language Learning (Schumann, 1974) include motivation
(where learning happens based on the expectation of a particular outcome), Intelligence (the
brain’s capacity to internalise and gather knowledge of a particular concept, theory or rules of
a particular language), Anxiety and self-esteem (How the learner’s environment directly
influences his level of comfort and how he engages himself with the learning that he is
supposed to acquire), Attitude and risk taking ability (this explains the learner’s attitude
towards learning and whether or not he is able to engage in risky scenarios to acquire specific

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knowledge). The particular learner has been identified to possess all the affective factors that
he needs in order to experience a successful ESL learning.
4. Personality
This minor aspect of internal factors plays a major role by connecting a learner to the
multiple sectors of affective factors. An introverted learner would not be able to speak and
express him/herself, thereby delimiting the chances of acquiring knowledge by a significant
amount, lowering the self-esteem and boosting anxiety because in the end, the learner will
have to write an exam anyway. Thus, that learner would slowly start growing a negative
attitude towards the language and his/her L2 acquisition would be tremendously hampered.
Oppositely an extroverted learner would benefit more, since he/she is exploiting every
chance to hold a conversation, correct him/herself, learning new things and using them,
thereby lowering anxiety and boosting self-esteem, and developing a positive language
attitude as well.
The current learner is extroverted and enthusiastic about learning as was identified
from his engagement with the assessment tasks.
Conclusion and teacher recommendations
In conclusion, we can safely assert that the particular learner with his six months of
ESL training has seen some significant development in his ESL capacity. However there are
still some aspects of his language learning that needs to be rectified. His phonological and
orthographic issues are the prime targets that need to be assessed and addressed. Fortunately,
the level of learning that he has shown in six months is significant and the style shows that he
is capable of acquiring more with proper intervention.