Simon's Personas

Persona 1

Name: Claudia Florez

Gender: Female

Age: 22

Lives in: Bogota, Colombia with a flatmate.

Likes: Painting, history, travelling and making friends from different countries.

Education and experience: Holds a first degree in Diplomacy and International Relations from Universidad de La Sabana, a highly reputed university in Bogota.

Studied English at the British Council for three years and has a good intermediate level of the language

Role and responsibilities: Currently studying English at a language school in Cambridge. She will be in the UK for 9 months.

Technical skills: Is proficient in using technological devices such as PCs, tablets etc

Subject domain skills and knowledge: Proficient in using the VLE of her old university. Also active on Facebook, Twitter, Instegram and Whatsapp.

Motivation and desires: She wishes to improve her English significantly as this will give her a major advantage in finding a good job when she returns to Colombia. Has an ambition to work for the United Nations.

Goals and expectations: To improve her English significantly through an enjoyable, practical and relevant English Course.

Obstacles to their success: Can be quite shy when meeting people for the first time.

She is a perfectionist and does not like using new grammatical structures/vocabulary until fully mastered.

Unique assets: Puts a lot of effort into things (projects, learning, friendships etc.) if she can perceive the usefulness and benefit of them.

Persona 2

Name: Ilyas Bassoy

Gender: Male

Age: 48

Lives in: Istanbul, Turkey

Likes: Watching action films, reading historical novels and eating good food.

Education and experience: Qualified as a history teacher from a teaching college in Istanbul. Has worked as a History teacher at a state school for the last 25 years.

Studied English for 18 months at a language school in Istanbul. Has a pre-intermediate level of English which is enough to get by in familiar situations. His vocabulary and grammar is not strong.

Role and responsibilities: Teaches history to secondary school students in a state school in Istanbul. The courses are very book based and very little technology is utilised. There are shared PCs in the staffroom but none for the student’s use.

Technical skills: Is proficient at surfing the web from both PC and mobile devices.

Subject domain skills and knowledge: Proficient at emailing but does not use any social media sites.

Motivation and desires: He hopes to improve his English and has signed up to a language course in Cambridge for six weeks over the summer.

Goals and expectations: He hopes to gain a promotion at work and become head of History at the school.

Obstacles to their success: He is not a user of social media. He also finds it difficult to learn languages and this is, in part, due to his lack of enjoyment when studying.

Unique assets: He is very outgoing and makes new friends very easily.