Teaching Adults

We are Ezequiel and Jonathan, we are teacher trainees at Instituo Cultural de Mendoza. The aim of this blog is to show the different characteristics of adult learners and aspects we should take into consideration when teaching adult learners.

General Characteristics of Adult Learners

         Adult learners show many characteristics which set them apart from other learners and as teachers we need to take them into consideration when planning our class. To begin with, adult learners are diverse which means that they bring a lot of their life experience to the class.  In a group of adult learners we can find variety of abilities and different ages, job experiences, cultural backgrounds and goals. Also we can see a range in educational background and personal life experiences, which can be learning resources.

          Another characteristic is that adult learners want to be able to relate the content to specific context in their lives. They tend to be pragmatic learners which means they are practical, logical, and systematic. They choose to study so they can improve their performance in other social roles, for example, work, travel, etc. On the other hand, adult learners tend to put their school work aside to focus on other responsibilities such as jobs and families. Keeping these in mind, they expect the time in class to be spent well and hope that these courses will help them solve problems in their daily lives.

Other characteristics are:

• They want an active involvement in their learning process. This means they should have as much choice as possible in the availability and organization of learning programs.
• They want to work in an environment where they feel safe and supported, where their life achievements are respected.
• Adults have a need to know why they should learn something.
• Adults enter into the learning process with a task centered orientation to learning. For example if they think that English is going to be useful for their lives they will study it.
• Adults learn languages more quickly than children in the early stages (They learn differently from children), especially in the area of vocabulary and structure language.

                                               (This is a video explaining the characteristics of adult 

                                                learners.)

Source: 

Seven characteristics of highly effective adult learning programs BY Dorothy D. BillingtonThe older language learner BY Mary SchleppergrellWhat are the principles of adult learning BY Gerard O´Brien

How to teach adult learners

         When teaching adult learners we have to take into consideration all their characteristics. Once we know these characteristics we can start planning our class. Some of the things we have to do is when we start teaching are:

· explain to their students what are the goals. They need to keep their students well informed about their progress and how they can improve their progress;

·  establish how the different students in the class learn best by doing a diagnostic asking the students how they prefer to learn.

· provide a balance and varied programme for the group,  so as to not focus lessons only on grammar or listening or vocabulary, but integrate all of these together;

·   to pair or group students carefully taking into consideration the level of English each student has;

·  choose topics and materials that will engage the students.

Source:
pearsonlongman.com/teachingadults

Communicative Language Ability

When teaching adults we have to also take into consideration the communicative language ability of each individual. This can help us see on what ability we have to focus.

  When we speak about Communicative Competence we are speaking about the capacity to communicate effectively in a language.

    Communicative Competence is a term in Linguistics which refers to a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately.

    In Pragmatics this concept is used to described illocutionary competence (functions of language), Socio-linguistic Competence (appropriateness, register and style).

   Canale, refined the above model, adding discourse competence, that is to say, cohesion and coherence, how to maintain a conversation , how to develop a topic and how to perform turns in discourse

     We can also use Communication strategies like, rephrasing, paraphrasing, similar words, words in other language, mime and gesture.

      And finally we have Fluency, which is related to language production and reserved for speech. It is the ability to link units of speech with ease and without inappropriate slowness or hesitation.

Source: 

Hedge, T. Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. UK, Oxford University Press.

Conclusion

        As future teachers and students we can say that being a student is not easy and when you are an adult student you have a lot more responsibilities than young learners, for example, adults need to manage their time differently than children and they have to think in what you choose to study has any use in your life. We as teacher have to take all of these into consideration at the time of planning our class so we can fulfill the necessities of our students.  And to conclude we can say that we as adult learners face all of these characteristics in our experiences as teacher training.