My students are middle-aged and old people, so they are very slow and not very active. As a result, they hardly make progress in learning English. They can't remember the new words and can't pronounce the words correctly though I have tried a lot. Have you ever been in such a situation? Can you tell me some ways to solve it? Thank you!
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The question is from Thanh Huyen, Vietnam
Comments
rebecca1
I taught classes with people from all ages, including students who expressed doubts that they were too old to learn. I always encouraged everyone to contribute and asked lots of questions, as well as asking students to ask each other questions. I have had very positive feedback from my older students. While you have to be careful about lowering expectations, I think sometimes we have to remember that students have lives outside the classroom. Pronunciation will always be a problem but if your students have the confidence to keep trying because of the supportive environment in your classes, then you know you are doing something right. Again, regarding grammar, your students will make good progress, even if it isn't as fast as your teenagers, as long as they feel motivated to speak and that their opinions and answers count for something.
As regards actual activities, getting people to bring in pictures of their families and talking about them, giving them fictional probems and asking for other students' solutions as well as their feelings on headlines from newspapers have always worked quite well in my classes.
Mei, China
I understand the frustrating experience you have had!
If you have the chance to learn a second language as an adult, you may understand the problems the adult learners have. Second language acquisition (L2) follows a different route from first language acquisition (L1). From my own similar experience, I think to correct pronunciation problems, it may be better to teach phonetics in L1. Then the students know the theoretical differences in pronunciations so that they can slowly comprehend the differences and to make sense of it before they can remember them and use English well. A comparative approach is useful as the adults do need to use their previous L1 experience to help learning. In this aspect, adult learners can have the real advantage over the younger people as they can remember better a new language system by using their L1 system they are familiar with. That is partly why adult learners are usually better at comprehension and reading; while the younger ones are better at memorising and imitation. Lastly, the fatal mistake is that adult learners as well as their teachers usually tend to lose confidence when they run into difficulties. It is not that they cannot learn better. Most probably they may give up before they have spent half of the class hours as the younger ones do because they have too many other commitments in life to concentrate on learning English alone! As I have never seen such students to identify their problems, I can only offer these suggestions. Hope things will improve for you all. Keep on working!
Martha Valenzuela, Honduras
Everybody has a different learning style. What you have to do is use several techniques to cover the different ways each person learns. Do songs, flash cards, dictation, repetition, writing and give them homework. Start with something simple. And be playful, because adults have a child's soul, and a teacher that is optimistic can get results if s/he thinks s/he can do it.
M H. Jabalameli, Iran
I had this problem with many people including, young and old. I encourage my students to make sentences and declare them in class, and later I change their classroom to a different one and ask them to use the same sentences. Remember every detail of their class is a reminder of a subject they learned, so you have to change their study-environment to get the best results. I am a psychologist and English teacher. Good wishes.
Cas Sonnenberg, Switzerland
Some of my students are senior citizens. Yes, they are slow and they sometimes are desperate about their lack of progress, but they are such a lively, active group of people that their success lies in recognizing the small steps forward that they are making, for which I always praise them.
We do work with a book, but what we work on most is 'events'. Everybody prepares a written report about an event that happened during the week. It needn't be a long story, sometimes one sentence does the work already. The subjects can be an outing, the purchase of a household item, the illness of a pet, a concert, or even the fact that nothing had happened at all that week. Anything. It fills the first three quarters of our session, sometimes even (much!) longer when the topic is of great interest to the group. Afterwards they hand in the written version to me, and I correct it so that they are reminded of the grammatical issues they need to study on more. Like word order (mostly), verb forms, idiom, false friends etc. If I find something of (grammatical) interest to the whole group, I use it as a teaching point in the next lesson. Since it is all about their own experiences, it is very lively, varied, sometimes emotional and always joyful. It also glues the group as they really get to know each other.
We alternate the 'events' with reading an 'easy reader' with the help of an audio-cassette. Each participant prepares one page at home. Which means: intonation (singing like the English sing their language), pronunciation and vocabulary. They read their pages to the class and should be able to answer questions the others ask them when something in the text is not clear.
I love this group and am very grateful for the work I may do with them.
Lucy Hughes, Italy
I have come across the same problem with older students making extremely slow progress, forgetting things from one lesson to another. I usually find that using a lot of pictures and flashcards helps. Older people tend to want to write everything down to learn at home, which usually leads to poor pronunciation. I do lots of drills to combat this problem. I've also used the idea of writing a short conversation on the board and drilling it while gradually erasing words here and there. This seems to give the students more confidence as they usually manage to remember more than they expect to.
Sandra Moser, Brazil
Teaching old people is not easy but what we have done here (in Maringá/Paraná /Brazil) to help them remember or keep the new words is : domino games - Do you know how to make one? You cut slips of paper and divide each in two parts. On the first slip of paper you write a word in English and leave the left-hand side empty For example, ________ / come in . On another slip, on the left, you write the translation in the mother tongue - in this example, 'entrar' (the Portuguese translation of 'come in') and, on the right, another word in English. On the third slip, on the right put the translation of the second word and on the left another English word. And so on... You then play a game similar to dominoes, with students matching words in English with their translations.
Another thing is giving them time in class to make their own vocabulary list. It helps a lot because they prepare the list and look up the new words.
Another game is some times you put the new English words on the blackboard and give them papers with the translation of the words and they have to find the pairs.
Claudio Leopoldino de Mattos, Brazil
I am a teacher in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. I have been teaching since 1989, so I have had a lot of experience in private courses. I have already had this kind of experience and I suggest you 1) use flash cards with your students related to the previous grammar topics 2) use older music, especially Frank Sinatra, Tonny Bennet etc. 3) visual explanations help a lot.
For example, you have taught simple past...
You can use all this activities as an ice-breaker or at the end of the
class, or even during the class...
Keane Wang, China
I have the same problem teaching older students, especially when they are at lower levels. Vocabulary and pronunciation are always the problem. Here's what I have done. I can't say it was incredibly successful but at least I saw some improvement. For vocabulary, I did CHAIN SPELL which is a spelling game that you have students spell out a word in a chain, each student just reads one letter. To help them, I wrote the words on the board at first; erase one letter every time until there's nothing on the board. I found it to be active when there was a competition. It takes some time for students to get used to though. I made it one of my routines so when my students are home, they may do some review. Another vocabulary game I do is FORCE TO FINISH. It works like this: one student says a letter as the first letter of a word, then next student continues one more letter, it can be another different word, it goes on like this until one student who has to finish a word loses. Competition works in my class as well. Those are the two games I do for vocabulary. Also you can have them write each word one hundred times.
Ahmed Said, Egypt
Fabiana, ArgentinaFor the problem of old learners in acquiring the words I can advise you to try to create motivation for your students. Show them the importance of the language they are learning
Hani, Iran
I think if she uses photo and music in her teaching ,she can solve her problem, because music and photos are good tools for learning ,and she can write new words on pieces of paper and get her students to reply using that word everyday.
Kukoba Olesya, Russia
I think role plays may stand you in good stead. Adults are not willing to talk about themselves but being someone else can be recognized as positive and pleasant.
Take it easy because there's not much you can do about old students' performance once they have reached their "linguistic roof", which means that their production ,written or oral, won't go much further. I've had people in their fifties (among my first year students at a language school in Santa Fe) who managed to "survive" their first year course because they were clearly false beginners but then dropped out the following year when English became too complex for them to be able to carry on. Sorry for my pessimistic comment but this is what normally happens when dealing with this kind of student. Good luck.