FRAMING A TYPICAL STUDENT PROFILE AT A UNIVERSITY BEGINNER ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE COURSE

With the purpose of getting to know our university EFL (English Foreign Language) beginner students better within a specific context, framing a typical student profile was necessary as part of the needs analysis stage. This would assist us in understanding who our students are, their reasons to take the course, their approaches to language learning, and their language learning background. In the long run, a student profile would serve as grounds to guide students’ learning in a more informed way. This paper describes the study we undertook to generate a general profile of the university student attending a winter EFL 1 course at a Language Center of the UV (University of Veracruz). A questionnaire was designed and administered in order to gather data that would lead us to frame a general profile of the student. The questionnaire included features such as demographic and background information, motivational aspects, and learning approaches. After that, data was categorized and analyzed so as to write up the student’s profile. The findings suggested guidelines for both academic and motivational student support, teacher strategic interventions, adequacy of activities and materials, and future research.