Adults, at least mine, store words in their brains as opposed to storing preffixes, suffixes, roots and then playing with them to form new words, to help them understand "new" lexical terms. Much as I encourage and help them work out the meaning of derivates, they only get there if you help them break down the word into smaller bits of meaning. With help. They don't do it autonomously.
I have noticed too that their brains take the words the know of something they are familiar with but is not a cognate. Let me give you an example:
I was doing a listening to Susana and the man said " trusting staff to..." and my student said "she says something about confidence" as in trust in Spanish is confianza, a cognate but a false friend somehow. Another example is Carmen understood strange when the listening man said strain. The word strain is not part of their active, nor passive in her case, vocabulary so their brains searched for whateve was most similar to the sound of strain that she knew. So the more active vocabulary and their very correct pronunciation or at least familiarity of how the word sounds in English is important if they want to improve their listening skills. In one word, input input input. Repeated input, revision, revising, rereading, listening, etc.
Thursday 16 September 2010
Tuesday 14 September 2010
grammar grammar grammar
Three out three people i have asked, so far, agree on what helped them most in their learning in class was that they learn best when doing grammar classes dealing with one grammar area: ie present perfect and past simple. Pure grammar, comparing, talking, correcting, translating, contrasting... They need to understand and contrast. They want to understand the rules. This goes a bit against the sort of teaching some methods encourage: eliciting, integrating grammar in a given situation, etc. According to their feedback, I reckon they think they will be able to integrate this whereever it is needed if they know how to produce the sentece, if they know the equivalent: in Spanish we say xxx whereas in english to communicate this idea we say yyy or xxx. It's important to know when translating word by word can be done and when can not.
Monday 13 September 2010
How Adults Learn
What i am putting together here is a compilation of my ideas of how my adults learn. From my wide but at the same time limited experience I have come to realise a few things. But first let me explain the wide but limited adjectives here: wide because I've been in teaching English for many years now, six years teaching adults in companies and limited because this experience has been in this one organisation and mostly one-to-one or in pairs, so what is limited is the range of situations or groups I have dealt with.
These are just thoughts collected here so that i can develop them sometime.
Now what I've made myself aware is that some are quite free and
some want to really understand the theory, without really enjoying a class with a given LP. Many if not all want to be corrected on the spot, some with just the corrections others stopping their speech altogether to deal with whatever issue has come up (ie grammar or understanding a vocabulary term, however long it takes, leaving aside what the teacher has planned...is that bad class management? To a certain extend it may be but with adults you cannot leave them unsatisfied, feeling your explanation has not met their needs/demand just because you want to stick to your LP, so yes, with some you just use the whole class to explain meanings, uses, collocations, even origins of whatever may have come up).
Many want to self-direct and have a clear idea of what the want whereas few still rely on the teacher to assess their needs and don't get too involved in their teacher's job to set their objectives and plan their lessons and/or chose materials. Bear in mind it's adults we are speaking about here. They complain or show boredom or just simply stop coming to class if they don't like the classes! Keeping them motivated is essential and I think the key thing to do so is to prove they are making progress more than actually always present with new materials, which is also important. Yet as soon as they can see what you do is helpful in their day-to-day, they see the relevance of something they just something even if it's not super engaging. (am i a bad teacher cos i dont always use super engagin activities?)
It motivates many of them to have a project to work on. They question what you do or what you say and those more analytical or reasoning won't give up or just take your word for sth until they fully understand.
Critical but also praising if something is very good. Exceedingly enjoyable/engaging/useful.
Helping them to connect new info to old existing inforamtion and experiences they have, you can make use of their knowledge, by referring to their own experiences using examples which are relevant to them, use their kids names, situations they are familiar with, places they have seen. show them that xx applies to them.
Reassuring for them to be coached on what's normal or not in their learning process, to let pressure off them somehow ... help them accept mistakes / failed attempts to integrate sth new (not necessarily mistakes depending on the teaching/learning stage)
They have to be and encouraged to be involved intheir learning proces by encouraging them to choose relavant topics for them/for their objective to learn E... Many will but many others just go on by saying "you are the teacher, teach me everything"
when it comes to involvment outside the class. They set English a priority in their life, but often is not a real top priority so they'll do little homework and take revision not seriously enough, slowing down their learning process. Even if you try to make them understand that if they do hw they'll learn more quickly. (I feed them, they have to chew and digest) it doesnt seem to work. They are busy, they have family, commitments, or just tired after a hard day's work and much as they play along saying they will do hw, they won't.
they get bored easily. they need variation. The idea of repetition (of a topic, of the same content) does not appeal to them.
hard to change their ideas on how to learn (collocations), or get them to think about space and time in a different way from tehir mother tongues/culture, that's why some tenses prove difficult to acquire.
W
These are just thoughts collected here so that i can develop them sometime.
Now what I've made myself aware is that some are quite free and
some want to really understand the theory, without really enjoying a class with a given LP. Many if not all want to be corrected on the spot, some with just the corrections others stopping their speech altogether to deal with whatever issue has come up (ie grammar or understanding a vocabulary term, however long it takes, leaving aside what the teacher has planned...is that bad class management? To a certain extend it may be but with adults you cannot leave them unsatisfied, feeling your explanation has not met their needs/demand just because you want to stick to your LP, so yes, with some you just use the whole class to explain meanings, uses, collocations, even origins of whatever may have come up).
Many want to self-direct and have a clear idea of what the want whereas few still rely on the teacher to assess their needs and don't get too involved in their teacher's job to set their objectives and plan their lessons and/or chose materials. Bear in mind it's adults we are speaking about here. They complain or show boredom or just simply stop coming to class if they don't like the classes! Keeping them motivated is essential and I think the key thing to do so is to prove they are making progress more than actually always present with new materials, which is also important. Yet as soon as they can see what you do is helpful in their day-to-day, they see the relevance of something they just something even if it's not super engaging. (am i a bad teacher cos i dont always use super engagin activities?)
It motivates many of them to have a project to work on. They question what you do or what you say and those more analytical or reasoning won't give up or just take your word for sth until they fully understand.
Critical but also praising if something is very good. Exceedingly enjoyable/engaging/useful.
Helping them to connect new info to old existing inforamtion and experiences they have, you can make use of their knowledge, by referring to their own experiences using examples which are relevant to them, use their kids names, situations they are familiar with, places they have seen. show them that xx applies to them.
Reassuring for them to be coached on what's normal or not in their learning process, to let pressure off them somehow ... help them accept mistakes / failed attempts to integrate sth new (not necessarily mistakes depending on the teaching/learning stage)
They have to be and encouraged to be involved intheir learning proces by encouraging them to choose relavant topics for them/for their objective to learn E... Many will but many others just go on by saying "you are the teacher, teach me everything"
when it comes to involvment outside the class. They set English a priority in their life, but often is not a real top priority so they'll do little homework and take revision not seriously enough, slowing down their learning process. Even if you try to make them understand that if they do hw they'll learn more quickly. (I feed them, they have to chew and digest) it doesnt seem to work. They are busy, they have family, commitments, or just tired after a hard day's work and much as they play along saying they will do hw, they won't.
they get bored easily. they need variation. The idea of repetition (of a topic, of the same content) does not appeal to them.
hard to change their ideas on how to learn (collocations), or get them to think about space and time in a different way from tehir mother tongues/culture, that's why some tenses prove difficult to acquire.
W
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