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.