Chilean students struggle most with developing their English speaking skills. Many English teachers avoid focusing on speaking due to its complexity and instead prioritize grammar lessons, neglecting students' comprehension and pronunciation abilities. Interviewing an English language learner face-to-face for an assignment was more engaging and meaningful than other work. It revealed that schools have significant work to do improving students' speaking skills, as deficiencies are apparent today. Exposure to students' reality makes one more aware of challenges and better able to consider how to address shortcomings moving forward.

1. LANGUAGE LEARNER PROFILE
Nowadays, the most common problem in Chilean students of English is the
development of the speaking skill. For the majority of English teachers it is better to
avoid that aspect of the language due to its complexity and tend to ignore the essential
part of the teaching of the target language. I remember that most of my English teachers
were more focused in grammar than listening or speaking for instance, putting aside our
comprehension and pronunciation, which were very poor.
Personally, I enjoyed this assignment. It is more attractive to be exposed face to
face with our subject to study, the student in this case. I strongly believe that to be with
a student in front made this work more entertaining and meaningful, even though it took
several days to do it. At the same time, together with my classmate found that in relation
to the speaking ability, there is a lot of work to do at schools and results are clear in the
present days. For this reason, I consider that is good to be exposed to ‘reality’ because
we are more aware of the main problems that students face with the English language;
therefore, we can start thinking how are we going to overcome those failures from now
on.
Angel Sandoval Villarroel