Teaching English to Adults Blog

This blog is very useful for teacher. As the author states, English teacher often don't get paid for the time spent for the preparation of lessons. Junior teacher (who jsut started teaching) can spend 2~3 hours per day, preparing for the followign day's lesson. It starts from lesson planning, what to teach, how to teach, and they need to know well about what they are teaching. If you are a native English speaker, who wants to teach English language, it might be challenging to understand the grammar as you probably never thought about the ggrammar of English, because you grew up speaking it. This site will help you to get an idea. You can also use Corpus to find collocations that occur together frequently in natural English. If you are going to follow textbooks, you really need to think about the benefits that students will gain from the activities or lessons and make sure the language used in them are natural.

Critique of the teaching method, P-P-P

If you have ever been trained to teach English language, you probably heard of the teaching methodology called P-P-P (Present-Practice-Produce approach). This approach has been inplemented in the classrooms for a long time as it aws believed to be an effective methodology.

When using this approach, the lesson begins with presenting new language (e.g. new words) to students. At this stage, students are less active and the teacher does the most of the talking. Then, students start practicing by completing activities and tasks provided. This stage provide less guidelines to students but they do recieve feedback on pronunciation etc. At last, students are given a task where they are expected to produce the language fluently.

I tried this method myself in real classrooms and this didn't work. This was because it was unrealistic to expect students to learn so much and master it at the end of a single lesson. If you imagine learning a new language, do you think you would be able to master the use of new workds or functions of grammar associated with those words in only one lesson?

Injecting newly formed neurons into brain = babylike learning!!

>> Adnan
Thanks for your comment. I looked in and Edwards states that human needs to create a new neurons and they need to be connected to other neurons for us to connect new knowledge to old knowledge. This successful finding has lead to doctors being able to inject it to a certain part of the brain (where neurons are missing) of people with diseases such as Parkinson's disease.

Both Edwards and Swaminathan agree that by injecting it to the brains of older people, it will make them learn as fast as babies. So I guess there is a way out of it for us in the future.... haha

Teaching figurative language to adults

Many people like Scrivener and Henry introduce ways of teaching figurative language or idioms on the internet. On the other hand, I find many academics suggest language teachers not to encourage students to use figurative language as simply it is difficult to use. Even a small mistake in the phrase or choosing unappropriate context to use figurative language can make students look stupid. BuI personally value the lessons on figurative language because they are simply useful things to know about. I don't think students should be forced to practice using them by creating a fake context. It will be too unnatural. But knowing their meaning will help to understand what others are trying to get through to them. Comments welcome.

What can teachers do?

This site tells you the list of things that students and teachers can do to increase their learning speed and depth. It says that make students laugh helps as it relaxes them and they become more receptive to new ideas. Maybe I should be joking a lot or saying funny things in the classroom in frong ot a bunch of Chinese students aged between 40 and 60. hmmm.... Anyway, other tips were:
Students- Set a goal, Motivate themselves, Give themselves some credit and Think positive.

Appranately, teachers can help this by engaging ideas, appluing role plays and telling stories. I know for hte fact telling stories are very good as long as it's well constructed and prepared. It's also good to make students to write a story as thei can show their creativity, which is nice and different.

Adult like to be lead?

The opposite theory is argued by Smith and E-Diva who states that adults prefer to learn in a traditional teacher-lead way. I personally feels that this is an old fashion way of teaching adults and it fails to motivate learners. I have observed a few language school tutors and the one makes sure that students achieve their outcomes is very flexible and negotiate with students well. Often students in what I call "passive classroom" are less focused and interested in the lesson it self. And sometimes, falling into a sleep.

I also disagree with the theory that believes in how adults learners prefer to do their exercises individually. Maybe in the beginners level but students in the upper-intermediate and advanced level at my language school are happy to be creative and discuss with the whole class. THey often like to work in pairs or small groups to produce a story that relates to what they learnt. e.g. after reading a story of a crime, they learnt collocations that often seen in the story-telling genre and tries to produce stories that reports a crime. I do notice that students at the intermediate level are more talkative than the advanced level. This could be because students at the advanced level are affraid of making a silly mistakes. But don't we all make silly mistakes all the time?? Maybe it has go to do with being polite, the cultural things.

Satisfying adult students

Lieb suggests that adults are "autonomous and self-directed", meaning that instead of constructing the lesson on tight schedules, they prefer to be actively involved in the learning process. This is seen in how my tutor at the language school is always flexible with the lessons. She shows that she does not mind getting side-tracked for a while as the topics are students' interest and it is important to keep them motivated. The tutor also negotiate with students what to do for the homework. Like today, students were confused with the use of "even though" and the tutor photocopied a two-pages long grammar exercise. As Speck suggests:

1. "Adult learners need to see that the professional development learning and their day-to-day activities are related and relevant."
2. "Adult learners need direct, concrete experiences in which they apply the learning in real work."

So it seems like maintaining motivation by allowing them to apply or link what they have learnt in the classroom to outside the classroom is a key to the success of teaching adults.

How adults prefer to learn passively.

According to Conner, adults tend to think that they cannot learn new things, but in fact, this is wrong and the capability of adult brains to "build and strengthen neutral pathways" is proved. I met so many adult learners who would tell me that they cannot remember what they have learnt in past because they are old. And they often take an English course that are not too challenging so that they learn a small amount of new knowledge at a time. It seems like many students are happy to go over what they have learnt over and over. They assume they forgot things, but their test results would reflect excellent understanding of what they were required to acquire. Most of students, especialy those who are unaware of their capability would get over 90%. Speck points out an interesting theory that adult learners prefer to be the origin of their own learning, some learning activities can be an attack on their competence. This possibly means that they prefer to complete exercises individually rather than in groups as they are afraid of making mistakes in front of other students or being compared to the others. Perhaps, it is fair to say that their perfectionism decreased their level of confidence and therefore, become less challenging. The students in a migrant class at my language school get taught English in Chinese as all students are from China. The tutor avoids to use interactive exercises and let students to do more individual works such as reading and writing tasks. This is what they prefer, bot the question is, "is this method appropriate?".

The first post!

Welcome to my new blog! Comments welcome!!