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There are lots of factors that distinguish adult from child education such as the motivation to learn, readiness, experience, and even the manner/orientation to learning. Unlike children learners who are very much dependent on the trainer throughout the learning process, adults are self-directed and they are responsible for their own learning. Apart from this, adult learners do not only learn from the trainer but from their classmates as well, as adult learners bring quality of experience in the classroom that can benefit the discussions happening during lessons.
I have personally spent most of my teaching career with adult leaners, and it has definitely provided me with some challenges. Adult learners want to be respected, and they also expect a professional level of education for what they are paying for. This, in turn, has influenced me to have a more professional approach to some of my classes. However, as a previous commenter said, it is important for us as trainers to show adult learners that learning a language is a vulnerable and challenging experience, but one that should ultimately be fun and exciting. Many adult learners forget the fun and exciting advantages that come with learning a language, especially when they feel the pressure of work or career.
During my teaching career, I have taught all age levels (primary school to adult learners). In each case, the training approach is different.
With children, a lesson is filled with many activities that change every 10 minutes. Creativity is key. A trainer can lose the learners’ attention very quickly and the trainer’s focus may change from teaching to maintaining order in class. Through games and activities, learners will have fun and not realize they are learning a new language. This is similar to a child learning their first language. They are learning so they can interact with each other and have fun, participate in the class, and perhaps to win at a certain game or activity.
Adult learners are self-motivated and either want to learn or have to learn a language. Either way, they have chosen to be in class. It is now up to the teacher to provide an environment that keeps them interested and engaged. Adult learners have experiences the trainer can draw upon and are able to participate in more complex conversations. The trainer needs to know their adult students (why are they learning English, what are their interests, where do they come from, what do they do for a living, etc.). With this knowledge, the trainer can come to the lesson with topics and lessons that trigger conversation and learning, and help the learners meet their language goals. Lessons need to be interesting, real-world and practical.The learner must be respected and treated as an adult. The trainer needs to be motivating and enthusiastic, but the activities should not appear to be contrived.
I have found if you truly get to know your students and build the class around their needs and interests, the lesson will be a success and the trainer will learn as something as well.
For many years I have been keen to get involved in adult education. Although up until now I have taught mainly young children and teenagers, I have had the opportunity to teach some adults. I have found this one of the most full fulling experiences of my life. While I have enjoyed teaching young children, there is something wholly different in teaching adults. While young children, for the most part, have a desire to learn, this is nothing compared to adult education. It is my experience that adults have a real desire to learn the subject they are studying. In addition, there is a greater ability to interact with them on a social level, which indeed enhances their education experience. While in the long run I cannot rule out working with children, it is my desire to move into the adult education sector.
Andragogy and Pedagogy differ in many ways, just as the quiz indicates. They have different motivations, responsibilities, and learning styles. There must be a reason why an adult goes after learning something, they have a motivation and therefore are easier to convince and teach. While children lack this motivation and they have to be persuaded into learning something with different elements, and are often harder to convince. Adults do not need to be convinced to learn. Therefore, in this sense, a language trainer would have an easier job teaching adults. They feel responsibility for their learning, whether if they have a goal to move towards or feel like they have to make the most of what they have paid for their lessons. Also, adults can tackle learning by themselves. A lot of the time, a lot of things can be elicited from adults because of their experience and their ability to process and make connections, therefore, I think that eliciting could be more relevant in an adult learning environment. The experience that adults have can also help them in making connections between their learning to their own personal lives. For example, after learning different languages or different skills, they are able to recognize which method or strategy they respond to the most and can skip the the phase of experiencing with different learning strategies. They know what works best for them and they can go after that. For example, I know that I learn well when I have visuals, therefore, I try to visualize my learnings by watching videos or performing experiments. Another benefit that teaching adult learners has, is that they can self-reflect. They can recognize their strengths and weaknesses which not only helps them but can also help a trainer. By being able to recognize their own weak points, they can spend more time practicing them, and also asking for their trainer’s help in turning their weakness intro strength. And while children need to be told what to do and often need specific directions to follow, adults can be self-paced most of the time. However, while adults don’t need specific directions to follow, they need a “why”. They need to know why they are doing what they’ve been told, they need to know how their learning will assist them in their future, and whether it is relevant to their goal or motive. There is a reason why each adult learner has taken a course, and they need to constantly be reassured that they are on the correct path and are moving closer to their end goal.
I have experience teaching to students of different levels and ages. One thing that was consistently present with each group I ever taught was that there was the unaccountable moment in planning. What I mean by that is the fact that across all levels – both vertically and horizontally – there were instances that I did not predict when planning for the lesson. This unaccountable variable (which I now consider to be and defend here as a constant) is the fact that there will always be something that students may not know. Since it is not the case that we all have the same experiences in life, this is only natural.
This has led me to not assume the general knowledge nor proficiency of my students at all levels. Biggest challenge for me was trying to incorporate this unpredictable element into my classroom. Surprisingly, with younger learners this was something that easier to predict and account for. Often, this would be a great opportunity to let other classmates use language and explain to those who lack certain general knowledge about a topic that we are covering with either target vocabulary or just to exercise the use of language. With adult learners, this was more difficult to predict since we somewhat expect to have similar experiences after a certain point in our lives. From personal perspective, it is quite difficult to account for this element with adult learners without risking increasing TTT.
Something that can be used to overcome this difficulty with adult learners is their orientation to classes as well as their motivation to learn. Adult learners are more inclined to learn a language with the purpose of improving themselves or for the purpose of improving their living conditions. If a plenary unpredictable situation occurs, it is useful to play around the motivation of adult learners since their aims are more self-centered. A big difference between adults and children is that adults will be more motivated to do homework (even though they will not have enough time to do so), so if there was something which was unclear in the classes, the adult learner is more likely to be better prepared for that previous unknown, relate it to their current knowledge and memorize it and associate it with the target language.
Adults education is both an interesting and delicate topic. I started teaching adults when I was 25 (right after I had finished my degree in university) and I remember perfectly my boss’s advise. She said to me: “show yourself calm and confident” (Even if I was dying inside, which was the case). Therefore, I managed to look and seem professional. I’m a big believer of mutual respect so I display respecful manners and polite speech at all times. However, everytime I started a class with an adult or group of adults, they would always say something like: oh! you are really young while giggling… so, obviously that killed part of my confidence and there was a voice inside me who said: YOU HAVE TO PROVE THEM THAT YOU ARE SUITABLE FOR THIS JOB! which was a terrible mistake.
For a long time, I had to live with this pressure that I had to prove them that I was a real professional. The outcome was obviously terrible, I was stressed all the time and I wasn’t enjoying my time while I was teaching. So, after a few conversations among workers, I realized that I needed to calm down and believe with myself way more, because whatever I was doing was absolutely enough. As long as there are respect and preparation, there will be enough!
Differently from children and teens, adults rely on different factors that will make the learning effective. We can think of the learner’s experience, readiness to learn, orientation to learning and motivation to learn. Such specifics must be taken into account when teaching adults, because adults can rely on a great amount of experience that children and teens do not have and such experience can be used during lessons to improve and adapt one’s approach to learning. Adults bring life experience with them, and motivation to learn, and as a trainer it can be very useful to use this in order to adapt lessons to the learners needs and enrich the lessons so they relate to the adults own experiences. The trainer can create tasks and learning gimmicks from the students’ experiences, hence aid the leaner to relate to more scenarios and contexts. Furthermore, adults’ experiences allow diversity and versatility, making language learning more entertaining for oneself and others. At the same time however, the trainer needs to remind themselves of how different people can be, both in personality and in culture or approach to life. Having a good understanding to avoid any inappropriate or offensive situations is crucial. It’s important as a trainer to not treat adult learners in a condescending way, but to encourage them in a genuine way. Moreover, more often than not adults attend classes as a choice, differently from children or teens, and are ready to achieve their goal of learning, especially if it’s something related to work, moving/traveling internationally, wanting to communicate with people of different countries etc. However, despite adults being more motivated to learn, they still might not have enough time to actually learn, complete tasks and exercise outside of the classroom. The trainer needs to remember this and structure class time at its best to let adult students learn the most, to feel accomplished and satisfied at the end of each lesson. The learning orientation for adults needs to be accustomed to their needs. In addition to attending language lessons, adults can use other methods to aid the learning process and perhaps speed things up. Like watching movies and television series in the target language, listening to the radio, podcasts, and music. At the same time, these tasks need to be paired with the support of practising, especially speaking which is best archived by training with a native or bilingual speaker.
In my opinion, adult education is frankly much easier than children education although it doesn’t mind me to teach the children.
Indeed, the huge advantage to have adult learners are:
– they have the capacity to be more focused and invested on what they learn,
– Much easier to make the lessons to keep them follow,
– after some lessons, we can give them more autonomy to practice speaking exercise,
– etc.That’s an excellent opportunity to teach adults because we can talk on any kind of topic as long as it’s on the targeted language and, in that way, the progress can be very fast.
Adults often bring a lot more experience to the classroom than children, as they obviously bring a lot more life experience to the table, meaning more time can be spent on vocabulary and acquiring new language rather than explaining subjects/concepts that the learner might not be familiar with in his/her mother tongue, as is often the case with children. Adult learners also tend to have a specific reason for deciding to learn a language (work, spouse, feelings of accomplishment etc.).
I think that teaching to adults is easier because they are more focused, they tend to have a specific reason to learn (work, family, interest in learning to accomplish something for themselves) they don’t want to waste time, they are willing to learn snd pay attention the entire time.
Being adults and having more experience in life means that more topics can be brought up so that the lessons will be much more interesting and interacting with other learners its more intense and stimulating.Adult Education has benefits and challenges. For example, when working with adults, usually they have the motivation and at least some of the skills needed for learning. Whereas children are in an academic setting because someone is requiring them to be there. There is rarely an internal motivation.
A positive aspect of teaching children is that they arrive with a more clear slate, open to everything and have less holes to find and fill in with missing information. Adult learners have a much more varied experience. So, the process to find missing pieces, clarify and correct bad habits and misunderstandings and have the time set apart to learn can be more difficult.MOTIVATION
Motivation for learning a language can vary considerably according to an adult’s goals and needs. They could be learning a foreign language for personal and/or work purposes, for specific situations (presentations, interviews, meetings, negotiation rounds), for improving listening and speaking skills and becoming better at different kinds of conversation including small talk or for tourism purposes, for example. Learners can also wish to prepare for an exchange program, to improve overall skills and knowledge about the language’s use or to get an international accredited language certificate (TOEFL, IELTS etc.). Adults are usually self motivated and can be quite hard on themselves at times throughout the learning process. Some learners require themselves to learn everything they consider to be sufficient in the one lesson they have once a week, never getting any practice of any kind by themselves. When this is the case, the person slowly realizes that they are unlikely to achieve a successful result. Moreover, some learners are capable of maintaining a reasonably balanced pace while learning the language, whereas others may regard themselves to be too far behind already in the whole scenario and want to learn a lot and all at once. This results in anxiety and frustration for the person especially when it comes to an adult who works full time, although teenagers who are forced to do too many activities can also suffer with this kind of high productivity situation. Of course, this is not the case for everyone. There are learners who manage to achieve a realistic understanding of the learning process resulting in a more balanced approach.NEEDS ANALYSIS
It is important to find out the person’s reasons for learning a foreign language in order to understand what their needs are going to be throughout the learning process. I would add that it’s also useful to check in on those reasons every once in a while to verify if everything is on the right track because these reasons can sometimes change. Speaking to the learner about their learning process from time to time is also useful so as to provide, when possible, tips and suggestions of things they can try doing to improve their language development.HOW LEARNERS LEARN
There are various ways people can learn a new language. A few examples are having conversations with native speakers, using different kinds of dictionary (bi-lingual, thesaurus, regular dictionary), song lyrics, flashcards for memorizing words, different kinds of games, online international games, chat apps, other artificial intelligence apps & websites, reading books (fiction & nonfiction), films, series, podcasts, short videos with or without subtitles, the news in various formats, through the study of a particular area of interest through various media, leisure travel, exchange programs and books for learning General English.
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