Foreign language teaching. Part 2: planning courses for adults

The intellectual and emotional capabilities of adult students (19+) are so well-developed that teachers usually claim that they have no problems teaching them. But this is also the group of students most frequently “migrating” in terms of changing language schools, the most unstable one and also the one whose needs must be addressed best when we plan the marketing of a language school and course management.

Many schools make a mistake by designing courses for adults that fail to take into account the customers’ communication needs and interests and cram them into a framework of well-established course schedules, which has been used for years and are allegedly effective.

Not infrequently, even if the school promises a specific learning effect to be achieved at the course’s end, this may prove to be an inadequate argument if basic expectations of the students are not met during the course. Such expectations may be related to their plans for the future, hobbies or occupational needs. It will be extremely valuable to collect such data before starting to design a course for a given person or group.

Also slightly problematic can be a situation when a school performs a language course for an institution or a company, and such organisation puts forward its expectations which prove to be divergent from expectations of course participants. Very frequently students try to use the courses financed by their place of employment to satisfy their personal linguistic ambitions. There is nothing wrong with that and it is worthwhile to incorporate the elements that students might expect into the entire course plan. Let’s remember that the students will later disseminate information about your school among their friends. And they will also provide their opinions about the entire course to their superiors.

If the group includes people whose expectations differ a lot, it is worthwhile to list each need and create a plan that would more or less meet those expectations. Both travellers and businessmen should find something of interest for themselves. Still the course plan must be so clever as to demonstrate to all group participants the potential to apply a given linguistic issue in their individual cases. What we don’t want to do is ignore anyone when delivering their linguistic needs; each skill must be useful also for them.

Teaching adults is not as simple as it might seem. Here are a few examples of difficulties that your teachers may be struggling with day in, day out:

  1.  adults don’t have the time or don’t want to do homework,
  2. adults don’t have the time or don’t want to review at home the materials covered during a recent class,
  3. adults are afraid of being ridiculed or criticised,
  4. adults have their own habits shaped in school times or during self-learning and it is not always possible to persuade them to participate in other methods; of which they are mistrustful.

We will soon tell you in the Manager’s Zone how to cope with such situations in a modern language school.