Teaching adults with

More and more I become aware of how teaching English is changing as we teachers become increasingly aware of how confusing English is for students. Ok, no news but  over the past few yearsI have found myself trying to help students gain an awareness of the fact that words in English (or any other language for that matter, i'd dare to say) don't necessarily have a one word equivalent or meaning but rather one or more translations into another language. The way I see it, looking at words as concepts or metaphors should be encouraged when possible.

It is true, however, that not all words lend themselves to this sort of interpretation but many do. Traditionally schools gave a  translation of a word, taken as its only meaning, to students and learners only to find themselves confronted to the word in another context and causing confusion. The last decade there's been an emphasis on collocations, great, that was an improvement, and a more real English as opposed to textbook English. Real English is not easy to acquire in places where English is a foreign language with no contribution from the "system" to actually learn it and use it but it's what should be taught.

I have noticed that just like i have been doing, teachers in online videos teach words and collocations and expressions. I think it's the way to go. It doesn't ensure they'll learn and remember all the translations but I hope this will contribute to a more open-minded approach to vocabulary and lexis learning little by little.
The example I often give them is the word meet translated into Spanish: quedar, encontrarse, ir a recojer, conocer (a alguien - primera vez), satisfacer, cumplir, entre otros. And the Catalan/Spanish word "deixar/dejar": leave, let, stop ing, lend, borrow.

There is also the fact that every single adult who studies English in Spain nowadays has studied English in the past, with little success in most cases. This means we don't have to go through teaching English as if they know nothing, our role is to tackle the very well-identified problem areas in their language if necessary and help them retain, activate and create new words. By creating I mean word formation, which luckily for them, just happens to be just like they do in Spanish. Adding prefixes and suffixes to roots. Most are unaware of the potential language they can understand and produce once they develop an understanding and an awareness of this fact.

Again, the example I usually provide in Spanish is acto, actuar, actuación, actor, actriz, activo/a, activamente, acción, accionar, etc. They all have the same root. We should aim at developing their intuition to learn to create adjectives, for examples with lots of input.

So let's all  teach the differences but also the similarities...their prejudices, their prior knowledge, often weak but there, force us to have to teach them a different way of looking at language, and teach them based on what they know, which makes teaching English in Spain different from teaching a new language from scratch.

Now me as an adult student of French

Now me as an adult student of French

I have writing about my students, about what I do to teach, giving some thought to how my adults learn. With this post I'll give this a different twist for a moment:

On how many occasions have I wanted to speak more languages! On how many occasions have I regretted not studying French and German when my mum was pushing me to! Yet, it's never too late! I envy those who speak three or four foreign languages and I have set out to learn French for once and for all!

Background:I am in my mid 30s and I took up French classes last September. I'd done French for one academic year when I was 15 at secondary school, with a really bad teacher. Nobody speaks highly of her, so it's not just my experience. Then, took a three-month course at uni as part of the Introduction to French and French literature, of which the language bit was an overall idea of how French works as a language and its phonemes as a means to distiguish sounds. Pronunciation is the hardest area of French learning for me, the switch between open a , e the neutral vowel, the nasal a, oe sounds etc is really hard! All of us who teach and learn and speak the gallic language know how important it is to get the sound right if you don't want to be ridiculised and laughed by Parisians.
After that in about 10 years ago I took a summer refresher course for a month. So i've never learned more than what would be level 1, if this at all.

Last summer, I armed myself with old exercise books and online grammars and exercises and reviewed as much as my time allowed me to in order to be placed at level 2 of the school I was going to register for the course. I must say that I like languages, I teach English as a foreign language after all, and I've tried every single opportunity life has put before me to practise French, which has now had its rewards. I am a risk taker and thanks to my travelling to French speaking countries and possibly aptitude i secured i place in the level I thought corresponded to my knowledge or degree of command. I was not going to start all over again after all, i feel i've done level one two or three times in my life before, none of them being a proper level 1, just complete and false beginner!After the level test: written and oral, the oral examiner would have assigned me level 3, which I was not prepared for, hardly having a good command of the two most basic tenses but I felt very flattered. The fact that I had studied French over 10 years ago, practised it only when booking hotel rooms and ordering at restaurants and having limited conversations with people when travelling the country, astonished the examiner. The command i seemed to have for that limited input and output apparently was fairly good. I think it's more the risk-taking nature of mine in this case.

I can see the theory behind the endlessly repeated idea that if you do homework and review regularly you make quicker progress.
I learn by associating words or grammar items to English or to Catalan. We can't help using our mental patterns to learn new things, we compare to what we know, to what we are used to, to what we experience and to our standards and ideas, and I am stretching and extending the idea to not only language learning here. (the idea that it is very xxx or not very xxx is measured to our own idea of xxxx)
I am pro-active, and participate as much as my common sense allows for if/when interested in the subject we are dealing with. Common sense? I'd be interacting with the teacher and other classmates a lot more if I could but the nature of the situation prevents me from doing so. Not only because I am very much aware that one learns to speak by speaking (and listening too, no need to say) but because I, as a teacher as well, simpathise with the teacher when she wants one of us to step forward and say something and I may be more fluency-oriented than accuracy! (I wonder what she's going to react to this if she ever gets to read this bit! :-). It's not a matter of the less shy students dominating the "mis en commun" or plenary debates as it has been the cases on a couple of occasions! You learn to speak by speaking. You overcome the fear by fully being aware that you will make mistakes, that you will get stuck for a word or a tense or a sound mispronounced at times and that it's part of the learning process, not a weakness and it's ok if others laugh with you at a mistake you make. It's fine. That's my approach and that's the attitude I promote among my students.
It's 25-30 of us in a class and I don't want to manipulate the plenary speaking times. That is the risk-taking. I think in my L1, hard not to. I am even more aware of that.

I wonder how or to what extent does me being a teacher helps me in my learning of French.

not finished, more shortly

I set up a wiki a month about teaching and a half ago as a way of familiarising myself with the tool as I don't use the blog too much. http://howadultslearn.wikispaces.com/ There I have developed a piece of text that i started a while ago here in blogger about how adults learn English according to my experience, then I went on putting info about what i think are good ways to improve the students listening skills as well as speaking and other ideas and experiences from my teaching.

està incompletoooo!

Hay que dejar de estudiar y hablar palabra a palabra. Es mucho más rapido y a la vez parecereis más naturales si os aprendéis el vocabulario junto a otra/s palabras:

ejemplo: cuando aprendais que make significa hacer, aprendedlo con todo lo que podéis "make", make a call, make coffee, make a mistake, make a change, make a difference, make me do sth, I can't make it, etc

Otro ejemplo muy interesante es con el verbo meet. Yo lo que recomiendo que no os miréis las palabras como "una palabra, un significado" para los que no podéis evitar traducir. Una palabra se puede traducir de muchas maneras.

I first met him at a party a while ago but i started to get to know him better when we happened to be in the same English class. Now I have known Micheal for a few years and I can say that he’s a great guy to meet up with!

(First) meet somebody – se usa para describir la situacion en la que hablas con alguien por primera vez.

Get to know somebody – Start to become friends with someone, by speding time or doing things together, more personally.

Know someone – conoces (des del momento que os conocisteis/ hablastéis por primera vez a menudo). Sabes bastantes cosas de él, quizás hablais a menudo (no necesariamente), quizás soys compañeros de trabajo, amigos, ...)

Meet somebody – quedar con

I am meeting my friends for a drink at 7pm

I meet my friends on the weekend cos i work till late during weekdays

I first met Peter a few years ago. Since then, we've met a few times but we've never had the chance to get to know each other.

When i went to Romania, my friend met me at the station.

Know se traduce:.. (incompleto)

Know somebody- conocer

Know something- saber

Ojo! Meet tiene muchas traducciones segun lo que lleve detrás!

Tambien tenemos el meet sth, as oposed to meet somebody, como veíamos arriba.
Meet your deadlines, meet the need for... , meet the demand, meet my objectives, meet the target, meet the expectactions, meet the standards, etc....
Cumplir o satisfacer ....

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.