Senior service 2

Mark McKinnon and Sophie Acomat give practical guidance for accommodating older learners.

In Issue 66 of ETp, we considered the characteristics that senior learners bring to the classroom. With this information in mind, we feel that it is necessary to adapt our teaching and teaching materials in order to provide the conditions in which they can learn effectively.

1 Timing

In the senior learner classroom, progress cannot be measured by the number of language points covered during a course. Seniors need time to work on the language. Therefore, timing needs careful planning and it makes sense to be flexible. Good monitoring of activities is necessary to give you an idea of how the learners are progressing with an activity. If you feel they need more time, or if they ask for more, then it is reasonable to give them the time they need. This will help provide more effective learning conditions. Be prepared to cover your material in two lessons rather than one. You may even consider covering a coursebook over two courses rather than one.Within a lesson, senior learners do not normally respond well to time limits. This puts them under pressure.

2 Memorisation

As the ability to call on the short-term memory declines as people get older, it is important to exercise the learners’ memories constantly and recycle language regularly in the classroom. You should incorporate memorisation training into your lessons, providing a variety of memorisation techniques and encouraging the learners to use their favoured strategies at home. This is essential to allow them to make the best use of their memory. More generally, we need to promote learning outside the classroom and help our senior learners become more autonomous.

3 Recycling

Senior learners need constant recycling of language, especially vocabulary. Incorporate recycling into each lesson and make sure you have a variety of different ways to recycle the same language. With older learners, we can’t simply cover a topic in one or two lessons and move on. Once a topic has been covered, we should look at the course calendar and plan when it is going to be recycled. Over a nine-month course it is not unusual to recycle a topic five times or more. Variety of activities is the key to effective recycling.

4 L1 to L2

Many of our senior learners studied languages at school using the Grammar Translation method; this may also be the case in your teaching context. If so, then incorporate L1 to L2 translation activities into your lessons on a regular basis. Translation can be used creatively in class. It gives the students a chance to observe the target language and compare it to their own. Adult learners come to the classroom with a complete grammar system already learnt, so we can use this to help them learn English. Translation is also a way to give them more time with the language; it could aid recycling and add the variety thatyou are looking for.

New groups of seniors are normally unsure of their ability to learn a new language and L1 to L2 translation work can give them confidence. In a monolingual group, you can provide your senior learners with much needed assurance at the beginning of their course, by giving clarification using their L1. This technique obviously can’t easily be used in multilingual groups.

5 Instructions

Instructions should always be clear and to the point. However, remember that when they begin an English course for the first time, your senior learners could be coming back to the classroom after a 30- to 40-year break and may be easily disconcerted by unfamiliarity, such as by new activity types. Be aware of this when planning your activities. Do not hesitate to resort to simple written explanations on the board, visuals, demonstrations or use of the learners’ L1 for clarification (if possible) and always divide the instructions into different steps.

6 Reaction time

We have discovered that senior learners’ reaction time is much slower than that of younger adult learners. We need, therefore, to plan smooth transitions and well-connected stages. It makes sense to prepare a self-contained lesson with the same grammatical, lexical or thematical content.

7 No pressure

Generally, stress and pressure have counter-productive effects on senior learners. Stress-related cognitive interference diminishes their ability to concentrate and has a negative effect on their performance. Ageing may deteriorate the systems in the brain that respond to stress so that they become less efficient. What you perceive as challenging activities may prove more distressing than stimulating to your learners. Avoid time limits and that ‘teacher urge’ to push on with the lesson.

8 Groupwork/pairwork  

Incorporate a lot of pairwork and small-groupwork into your lessons. This will allow your senior learners to support each other and discuss language points. It can also give them more time to think about the language and thus allow acquisition to take place more effectively.

9 Adapting and rejecting

The material that we use has rarely been created specifically for senior learners and may not always be suitable for them both in terms of format (for example, gist/specific information listening activities and overly challenging speaking activities) and content (for example, discussing the distant future, present simple activities on work routines, etc).

Do not take it for granted that any lesson plan provided in the teacher’s book will be suitable for senior learners; have a thorough look at it with a view to adapting it for your class. We have found ourselves in rather awkward situations when realising halfwaythrough the lesson that an activity was not suited to our students. And if the material is not adaptable, do not hesitate to reject it altogether.

10 Expectations

Older adults have learning strategies that they have been using for many, many years. For this reason, teachers should expect them to use their own strategies (such as translating or trying to understand everything), which may differ from modern language-learning techniques. Rather than fighting your learners in an attempt to eradicate these strategies, be flexible in your teaching approach, and allow them to draw on their life experiences.

11 Physical considerations

Because of a decline in visual and hearing abilities in some learners, it is important to create a comfortable learning environment that compensates for any physical impairments. This may involve using educational materials with large print, making sure the classroom is well lit, using listening material with high sound quality and eliminating background noise.

12 Listening considerations

Our own research shows that listening practice is the greatest obstacle and problem for our senior learners. We suggested in Issue 66 that gist/specific information models are more often than not unsuccessful with these types of learners. We would like to suggest some alternatives:

• Work on the content first rather than the gist. Giving the learners access to some of the content of the listening text in advance may not be popular with many teachers, and we can see why that may be the case, ie it defeats the purpose of a listening activity which was designed to give the student access to the language through the listening process. However, if we consider the slowing down of the auditory processes and possible hearing impairments among our seniors, that very access may not be completely possible through a gist question.
• Do some grammar work based on the content of the listening. If there is particular grammar exemplified in the listening text, do some specific grammar practice on that language point before they listen.
• Read through the listening script before the lesson to find potential pronunciation problems that could impede understanding. Then do some specific pronunciation work on these before listening. This might be the -ed endings of regular verbs in the past simple or weak pronunciation of Did you.
• Look for lexical groups in the text and practise them beforehand; or, in the case of unknown vocabulary, preteach new items.
• Give your seniors visual support by providing your own photos or diagrams if there are none in your coursebook.

We are by no means suggesting that you never use gist questions with your senior learners. They might work very well but, by considering the listening text as a language resource before listening, you may be able to remove some of the obstacles to a successful listening activity. You could consider making the listening practice last for an entire lesson. With senior learners the listening may not always have to be the stimulus for production – the production may come in the next lesson.

Speaking considerations

Like listening, speaking can cause senior learners some difficulties and stress and requires more time and preparation beforehand. Many of our seniors lack the confidence to speak in class. Here are some ways to build their self-confidence and ease them into the speaking practice:

• Even if you have recently covered the necessary vocabulary that will be used for the speaking activity, it won’t hurt to review it as a ‘pre-speaking’ activity. That way it will be fresh in the learners’ memories, ready to be used.
• Incorporate pronunciation work on any potentially problematic words that may arise during the activity.
• Senior learners can easily become ‘blocked’ when speaking if they cannot recall a word or a structure, so do some ‘pre-speaking’ reparation and allow them to write full sentences before the activity. Once again, this may go against established ELT classroom practice and may be seen as lacking in spontaneity, but it will give them time to think carefully about what they want to say and how to express it and will make them more comfortable and confident when speaking. Discourage them from looking at what they have written during the activity. If there are individuals who prefer to prepare orally, then consider grouping them together to do this: the most important consideration here is that they have more time to prepare.

All these considerations will take up more time. So, as with a listening activity, a speaking activity may well take up a whole lesson rather than simplyoccupying the last stage of a lesson.

We are aware that a lot of teachers may already use some of the techniques that we have described with their younger learners, and we are not arguing that these should only be used with senior learners. However, we have found this learning group to have specific needs that should be addressed and our aim in this article was to share our experience of ways of doing this. During our whole teaching experience with this learner group we have found ourselves naturally moving away from some of the more established ELT techniques. Looking back now, rather than being a no-no, it most certainly proved to be beneficial.

Mark McKinnon has 17 years’ experience in EFL teaching. He currently works at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has been a tutor on the LTCL Diploma in TESOL since 2003. He has written supplementary materials for Macmillan’s Straightforward and Global coursebooks.

Sophie Acomat has an MA in Applied Linguistics and ELT and the RSA DELTA. She has been working since 2001 as a teacher and teacher trainer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She also tutors on LTCL TESOL Certificate courses.

This article first appeared in issue 67 of English Teaching professional, March 2010.