Again I will use an example taken from one of my classes this term. I cannot focus in only one learner difference because my classes are as heterogeneous as they can be. I teach English for school dropouts and adults of all ages. The institute I work at offers this public a chance to pick up high school and adds a technical course. I have one group of 30 students in junior year of high school integrated with tourism guide. In this group I have two special students who are able to copy but unable to read. One of them is 61 years old. I have four teenagers who have reasonable knowledge of English but are dropouts and have drug problems. Most of them are housewives and work with cleaning and my oldest student of the group is a 65-year-old lady who sews fantastically but reads and writes poorly.

To address such a group, I chose a promotional video of development bank of our state.

https://youtu.be/VZRTUe5T9eA

I transcribed the text and their first step was to recognize cognates. I told them it was a promotional video and asked them what they expected to see in such a video. Next, they watched the video and shared if what they saw matched their expectations. Even the special students could participate in the oral task which elevated their self-esteem.

Next, I picked 25 words from the text. I showed slides with the translation and a picture of the term. They had to learn the translation for homework and be able to explain the definition in Portuguese. For the special students the evaluation was done simply by matching the translations and they had to explain orally what the words meant. I chose simple words such as "beach, mountain, sea, typical dish". For the other students, they had to match the word in English with its definition in Portuguese. For them I expanded a little bit so they could learn more complex terms such as "sustainability, renewable, innovation".

The choice of the video is important because it is about their home state so they could relate to most things that were shown activating their previous knowledge. For the more advanced ones, working a text focusing on cognates was good because they felt they could understand an English text. During the oral part all students participated. I had, therefore, enough information to evaluate the meaning making of all students during the whole process.

As Carl Wieman said "It is harder to teach because we know more about the subject than we know about the students". In that sense I must agree that it is also more fun and we end up making each class a lab where the students are our subjects. Trying to reach each and every student as well as trying to evaluate their behavior and how much they´ve learned in such a heterogeneous group is defenitely very challenging.

http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-15/literacies-and-learner-differences