How good are we at knowing what learners like?

Abstract

This paper reports on a comparison of learners' preferred activities with teachers' perceptions of what those preferences were. The study investigated what English language learning classroom activities learners liked, and then compared these preferences with the activity preferences that teachers thought the learners held. The study made use of questionnaires to survey 997 tertiary level learners and their 50 teachers on service English programmes at a university in Hong Kong. It enquired about 48 classroom activities. The results show that teachers were able to gauge their learners' preferences with accuracy for 54% of activities, and that there was no clear pattern indicating in what activity areas (e.g. speaking, writing, listening) or with what activity types (communicative or non-communicative) predictions might be more or less accurate. The results have implications for syllabus and materials design and also for classroom practice and studies of teachers' decision-making processes.