IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING HOW OUR STUDENTS LEARN

Throughout the centuries linguistic, educators and researchers in the field of teaching English as a second language (TESL) have created different methods and approaches in order to try to solve students performance in the foreign language. Jack C Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers(1986). For that reason, there have existed meaningful changes and improvements in the way English is taught and learnt. Even though the new trends in teaching the English have helped increasingly, a variety of difficulties or much better students need are still found. These needs could be either linguistic or skillful. According to this for teachers to be successful in their labor should reflect and research everyday upon the teaching practicum they conduct. We as teachers should firstly know our students very well so we can apply a strategy or use a specific teaching method that fits our students needs so we can face one of the students difficulties that is the social need. Students are not used to working cooperatively, and if we apply this way of working in class, learning could be more interactive because social interaction plays a very valuable role in it.

Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.(Vygotsky,1978, p 57)

By doing this, the time of the class will be used more productively and the teacher talking time (T.T.T) will disincrease. And we could conduct more students centered activities.

Other need students have is the affective one, it means students are meant to be treat like people, like human being, they have the right to be recognized and respect by the teacher. The problem is that They barely like English and thats depends mostly on the teacher. Sometimes the teacher does not engage the students in learning; actually he imposes them to do what he wants. But if the teacher makes use of different strategies in order to involve students in the lesson and next in learning English because they just like it. Krashen (1982) claims that students who are willing to learn, who trust themselves and are not anxious, fearful, worried or scared are more likely to be successful in second language acquisition and subsequently, their attitude toward learning a second or foreign language will increase. This is a great reason why teachers must try to raise students likes and appealing toward English by identifying students difficulties and try to solve them. That is why, teachers have to reflect and research about the job they are doing every day . Teachers also have to identify students linguistic needs which are basically the ability the students have to perceive, receive and produce information in the target language.so, they have to be interested in their students performance during the lesson and have some ways of starting a research project, beginning with some data collection techniques in order to give a possible solution to the problems the students present. McKeachie & Sviniki, (2006) state that teachers could ask the students to write what they think about a specific course, how they would like the classes to be conducted, what are their problems in understanding English . In this way the teacher could start applying some new strategies in order to solve some problems inside the class such as lack of grammatical and phonetic similarities between the two languages, lack of spoken and written comprehension of the target language and so forth. On the other hand, it can be useful to construct a survey to explore students learning preferences such as learning style, their prior experience, and their motivation to learn the subject matter (Davis, 2001).

Information from students is very trustful and reliable for teachers to bear in mind at the moment of identifying students needs and try to solve them.

Identifying learners linguistic and skill needs is an ongoing process which consists of observing and taking notes of the students performance during the lessons, reflecting and revising about the work that is done in class, asking and wondering how good or bad it is for the learning of the students, planning what to do by organizing the information and having clear what the problems are and then acting using a set of strategies toward finding a solution for the difficulties presented, and then see how it went. In this way, the teacher becomes a researcher of his/her own practicum and improves not only his/her practicum, but also students linguistic and skill need day by day.

Stephen krashen (University of Southern California.) specialized in theories of language acquisition and development of the Affective Filter hypothesis. Lev Semionovich Vigotsky, cooperative learning theory (1978). Jack C Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching second edition. Cambridge university press