Wh at Every Teacher of Adult ESL Students Needs to Know

Teaching adults has its own set of challenges and rewards for the ESL teacher. Adults have more experience on which to draw, are usually less hindered by shyness, and often have a real need when it comes to language learning, but they do learn language differently than children do. These articles will help those ESL teachers whose classes are the above eighteen variety and will give you some hints on how to teach specifically to adults. Teaching Adults? Here's What You Need to Know

1 15 Secrets to Teaching Adults Do you ever wonder if you are giving your adult students the best English education that you can? When your students are the ones who sign the checks teachers may feel more pressured to make sure classes are perfect from start to finish. To help you move toward that goal, you should know these traits that adult learners have and how you can be a better teacher because of them.

2 15 Tricks to Get Your Adult Learners Talking The foundation of any successful English as a second language class is communication, and when your students are all adults you may have an easier time getting them involved in discussions. Try these tips to get your adult students talking and then enjoy hearing your students use the language they have worked so hard to develop!

3 Teaching Adult Learners: How to Handle Attendance Problems

When your students are responsible for getting themselves to class every day on time, you may find that attendance can easily become an issue. This article gives practical tips for handing adult students who may need to improve their attendance in class without offence.

4 Teaching Adult How-To: Advantages and Challenges Teaching adults has its own set of challenges and rewards for the ESL teacher. This article takes a real look at some of each for teachers of adult students.

5 Adult ESL Learners: Homework Assignments That Work Having adult students in the classroom is one thing, sending them out to do homework can be something entirely different. This article will give you practical tips on how to assign homework to your adult students that will engage and motivate them.

6 Adults and Children: Differences Every Teacher Should Know Teaching adults is not the same as teaching children. Each group has very different strengths and struggles. If you wish you were more familiar with the differences between adult and child learners, this article will get you started.

7 Teaching Adults: They Know More Than They Tell For those who teach adults in a language classroom, you know that your students needs and preferences are very different from those of a child. This article looks at the special needs that adult learners have and what measures the ESL teacher should take to meet those needs.

8 Classroom Conflicts: How to Smooth Over a Cultural Clash The older your students are, the more their home culture is likely to influence their beliefs and perspective on the world. Because of that ingrained culture, adult students are more likely to have struggles with cross-cultural conflicts.

These simple steps will help you and your students learn to appreciate each other for your differences rather than argue about who is right or wrong.

9 33 Controversial Topics and How to Teach Them Nothing is more useful in an ESL classroom than communication, and when you are teaching with controversial topics everyone in class will want to share his or her opinions. With adults, you have the freedom to use topics that may not be appropriate choices for children, and these topics are sure to get your class talking. Here are some ideas that you can use in class and how to use them so everyone gets a chance to express his or her opinion.

0 1 Expert Sharing: Making the Most Out of Your Students Knowledge Everyone is an expert at something, and that is never truer when your ESL class is composed of adults. Their life experience, whether it was in their home country or in their host country, has given them wisdom and a unique perspective. Make the most of what your students have to offer and help them feel like they have something to share with this unit on making the most of your students knowledge. You and your class may learn things you would never have expected from your students! Tips for Teaching ESL to Adults Education, employment, recreation, and leisure have all gone global. People of different nationalities, in an attempt to seek greener pastures, now seek employment overseas. Even students do the same as well. Students who can afford to be enrolled in a prestigious school often leave their home countries to study, as many believe that this would present greater opportunities for them in the future. Also, many people nowadays resort to overseas travels to be able to relax and have a good time. As a whole, these situations indicate that, in the past few decades, globalization has grown significantly. As a result, many people seek the help of English instructors to be able speak and understand English ?? the Universal Language. In addition, the majority of these non-native English speakers are adults, which is why more and more English instructors adapt to teaching methods that are suitable for adults who come from various countries and cultures. ESL instructors for adults must be aware of the fact that the learning patterns of an adult slightly differ from that of a child. An average adult, according to research, is expected to be self-directed and must have a set of goals ready for learning a particular subject. These two factors alone imply that the adult ESL teaching methods are slightly different from those methods that are intended for young learners. In addition, the learning environment and the

lessons should be formal and systematized. Since the demand for ESL lessons should be more focused on adult learning, here are some of the things to keep in mind while teaching: Try to know each student??s needs and preferences first, and do your best to motivate the student by giving him/her challenging activities that he/she is capable of doing. An instructor should be able to determine the appropriate level of difficulty that a particular student can handle. Be creative when presenting lessons. Although adult ESL lessons should be formal and systematized, an instructor could still use videos, music and other forms of media related to the lessons. Keep in mind that instructors should be able to encourage good performance in class, as well as positive behavior so that the students could easily recall what they have learned in the previous lessons. This also means that, somehow, it is the instructor??s responsibility to help students by providing activities and exercises that would encourage them to think and recall what they have learned from class before. The lessons that the students learned should eventually be incorporated in a new setting other than the classroom. It is crucial for the instructor to keep this in mind as well. There are various barriers involved in learning ESL. Probably the most difficult barrier to handle is the language barrier, which is why many instructors still struggle to correct the pronunciation of some of the English words, the grammatical errors, etc. However, it is still the responsibility of the instructor to make an effort to break these barriers and create a good learning environment. By and large, still, being an ESL teacher is not easy because there are so many things to consider and there are just so many things that he/she needs to learn.

Do you have any effective method to teach typical Spanish mistakes when learning English? You can also leave comments in the discussion tab here or in: www.inthehuntforperfection.blogspot.com A few days ago I was searching the net for one-to-one material and I came across a photopiable sheet from a leading publishing house discussing problems one-to-one teachers often had to find a solution to. Some are: Finding motivating material for easily bored students. Students that expect the teacher to do the talking when they actually wanted "speaking" classes. Some people who want to understand every single word and be corrected every little slip/mistake. With some people setting objectives is hard because their interests keep constantly changing. You plan a lesson and they get distracted all the time and it gives the teacher a sense of no progress.

1. How adults learn English according to my experience. ( I want to extend this by comparing my experience as a teacher to me as an adult learner of french in a group.) 2. How I think students can improve their listening skills (in Spanish). 3. How to gain fluency (draft) 3. An example of how to distinguish Meet and know and their different translations into Spanish. 4. Job intervew preparation experience (being drafted) 5. Differences between English and Spanish (being drafted) that slow down the learning process. There are also pages being added which deal with: Conditionals, Meet and know and When to teach pronunciation to adults and others (see on the left).

How Adults Learn English as a Foreign Language What I am putting together here is a compilation of my ideas of how my adults learn English as a foreign language in plain English.

Profile: Many of my students are Spaniards(from Spain), a few Italians, two or three are French and all belong to the wide-ranging age group of mid-20s to early-60s. They are professionals in the public sector: accountants, managers, people in human resources, IT, people in communications departments, etc. They are all involved in training-giving and most have been studying English most of their lives. Levels I teach range from an equivalent of A2 to B2, however its hard to define levels as such since what I do is not exactly general English but work-oriented language training nor their command can be classified like that. A quick note to say that a colleague and I developed a handbook to describe their levels and degree of command according to the very reality of the organisation we work for (if necessary i'll elaborate on that some other time). Mistakes they all make or what needs to be addressed are the same. All of them have the same problems, mostly because of influence of their mother tongues, of Latin origin. Ill talk about this later in a bit more detail further down, as there's one girl from Poland and she has different needs. On very few occasions one mistake stands out for its low or inexistent frequency of appearence. I often find myself telling students "it's perfectly normal to make this mistake" and occasionally "i've never heard a student make this mistake, i wonder why it must be" and that sets me trying to make interlanguage connections. It would also be interesting to discuss difference between speakers of different languages and between those who speak two or more languages (in terms of number of languages and origin of the language) but this is not the objective of this piece of writing so Ill leave that for some other time. A little bit about me now. I have been teaching English to adults for 16 or 17 years now, started off with one-to-one teenagers at home and the odd adult, language school groups and then one-to-one adults in-company as a self-employed trainer, which is me nowadays. I love

what I do. Since I was a child Ive wanted my job to enrich, to contribute to peoples development as individuals and teaching is a great way of doing so. I love what I do! and since I realised I enjoy teaching one-to-one adults was a bit of an objective somehow.

Lets stop the waffle and get down to it. This is just a collection of thoughts and maybe unfounded conclusions. Let me start by saying that some of my students were highly encouraged to take up English classes because of the changing nature of their jobs about 6 years back in time now. Learning, to me, is measured by what they are now able to do, our more outstanding objectives range from a humble being more fluent and confident to more challenging ones like giving presentations, attending international meetings, and actively participating in workshops and constant, unambiguous, with-few-mistakes email corresponding with colleagues at overseas offices. That's my job. And a for you to get a picture of how or what I teach here is a quick line about it, my classes are not the typical "let's go through the textbook" sort. I work on the students' specific needs, I will still go over the present simple and present continuous but in a way that they will truly understand the difference and that they will be able to use them correctly. I will coach them in their learning process, which is an important bit of what adult learners need. It was not until I read the Learning One-to-One from CUP that I have stopped blaming my skills for some people's lack of apparent progress at early stages of the course. One-to-one classes a very very student-oriented and their learning styles, aptitude and above all motivations are key to their progress, among a number of other factors: like their past experience, their sense of progress, finding the right way to get to them, etc. Some have been with me for 5 years, I wouldnt be surprised if that was a wee bit of a almostbreaking record among adult population learning a foreign language one-to-one but I am sure older generation teachers would definitely beat me here. Keeping them coming and motivated is hard work and entails an effort to build a rapport with them and vary their activities, and give constant feedback on their progress in a constructive, encouraging way, speaking from a teacher's point of view. Some have a one hour class a week, others two, if they can make it, sometimes their schedule and workload prevents them from attending the class. Motivations: they all start off their classes with a very strong work focus in mind seeing English as something they have to do at work and for work to perform better and soon most of them overcome the fear, the dislike some feel towards the language, probably because of their previous experience in primary and secondary schools, and start enjoying it. English was just a school subject. Now, communicating in English is a very real need, so English has to be taught with a different approach and focus. Besides, we teachers and trainers should provide students with enough tools to be autonomous outside the class: the more relevant input they have, the higher the success possibilities. Some want to really understand the theory, the hard and fast rules, 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, which always makes me wonder if this is that bad class management from my side! Possibly not, but to a certain extend it may be. Wwith adults you cannot leave them unsatisfied, feeling your explanation has not met their needs/expectations just because you want to stick to your LP, so yes, with some you just use the whole hour to explain meanings, uses, collocations, even origins of whatever may have come up). You have to be very flexible and adaptable with them, and know the ins and outs of it. Many want to self-direct and have a clear idea of what they want and need 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 choose 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 you enough to keep them coming! 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 in fact helpful in their day-to-day, they see the relevance of something even if it's not super engaging. (am I a bad teacher because I dont always use super engaging activities?) It motivates many of them to have a project to work on. Whatever method we teachers use awareness has to be raised that learning and making progress is their responsibility. But it's our responsibility to ensure they have enough tools to enhance their learning process by using a multiple-intelligences-approach to our teaching: integrating visual, audio and hands-on stuff in our teaching will definetely contribute more to making something a bit more memorable to them. 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 something until they fully understand. They can be critical or have this sceptical look on them if not fully satisfied with the input but also praising if something is very good/enjoyable/engaging/useful. Helping them to connect new information to old information 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. Nothing new but I fully support the idea from first hand experience. 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 something new (not necessarily mistakes depending on the teaching/learning stage). Raising their awareness that if they've never been taught something and they fail to use it properly is not a mistake, let alone an error. Encouraging, acknowledging attempts at using new language, saying how common a mistake they've made is (if it is common, it's part of the influence their language makes on the learning process, not that they are thick). They have to be and encouraged to be involved in their learning process by encouraging them to choose relevant 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" Acknowledge that they don't speak better English because language schools and the school

itself has a syllabus to work through in a limited amount of time so there's no material time to teach tenses properly to analyse the different "meanings" of words, that's why they always start a new academic year with the same units, the same grammar areas, They never been properly assimilated? because they there's no way you can learn to speak a language well if you just see the theory in a couple of classes. It's not exactly the teacher's fault. It's not that they are unable to learn a foreign language it's just that to learn a language you need lots of meaningful input and exposure which in our times, that they didn't have, and to speak speak speak and according to Stephen Krashen (search done 2005 and 2011,http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/krashenbk.htm ): The best methods are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production." Fully agree and thats what I do. When it comes to homework or involvement outside the class, learning English is one of their new year resolution, some kind of objective. Yet, they'll do little homework and take revision not seriously enough, slowing down their learning process. Even if you stress how helpful doing homework is in their learning process, (I feed them, they have to chew and digest, that's the metaphor I tell constantly them) it doesn't seem to work, they dont get it. They are busy, they have a family, commitments, or just tired after a hard day's work and much as they play along saying they will do homework, they won't, they dont. That has to help the teacher overcome her/his frustrations, there's more to their lives than your English classes. I wonder to what an extend it is my fault. Personally, that is something which has proven a difficult task! If only we could manage to get the idea that if they do a bit of homework thered be so much quicker! But their learning is team work teacher/trainer and student - but its mostly their responsibility. But then again, emailing them some interesting video, article or website might somehow establish a dialogue with them and it's not literally homework but they are using the language! Not until they realise the relevance of something, do they want to learn it. How many times have I heard...now I see what you have been saying all this time through like pronunciation, doing homework, looking at words in a different way (long to explain now), the almost mathematical relationship of words and how being familiar with this can help them, they have to do/realise it for themselves, no matter how many times I have told them. They get bored easily. They need variation. The idea of repetition (of a topic, of the same content) does not appeal to them. Its hard to change their ideas on how to learn (collocations), or get them to think about space and time in a different way from their mother tongues/culture, that's why some tenses prove difficult to acquire. Moving on to some specific and recurrent areas of the learning, Spaniards have a very strong difficulty with syntax as word order and tense concept is different from their L1 much as at

first sight English may look at lot simpler than Spanish, they are used to their way of expressing time or completion of an action etc. Present perfect is A difficult one to acquire and understand, so is something as "simple" as the present tenses: the distinction between present simple and present continuous is just a never-ending struggle as is the past simple with the above said present perfect, and after come the four different ways of expression the future! That is indeed too much for the -ar of the Spaniards supported by the possibility adverbs quizas, probablemente and the Spanish subjunctive, often expressed by modal verbs, another no-go area for them! You are fighting against very strong mental and linguistic structures and it takes a very long while and a huge dose of patience from the teacher for them to acknowledge say modals. Conditionals would also top the list of areas they all agree need seeing. Ive got this method of explaining the conditionals and tenses in general that really works, emphasising how the idea they convey changes depending on their choice of conditional or tense. Giving grammar-only lessons is something that is a bit frowned upon in certain teaching contexts. However, three out three people I have asked, so far, agree that 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 wherever it is needed if they know how to produce the sentence, 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 it can not. Even if it may take them a while before they start producing an accurate output. As for pronunciation, the h in hellos, the -ure, the -ed and the vowel sounds in coat or the initial sound of chocolate or now that i see it here the -able suffixes prove a challenge to them. The vowel sound woke and go as opposed to the vowel sounds in how or wok or walk or work. It's like flogging a dead horse sometimes but some degree of success is achieved when using the games provided in the bbc website. I think mispronunciation comes down to the lack of familiarity with phonetic symbols and the familiarisation with ALL the sounds of the English language. Starting with quizzes and two sound discrimination games and listing and compiling homophonous words and often finding and equivalent sound to their language: to me issue is like mixu in Catalan, meaning cat and measure is like gentica and usual is like Joan. That does work very well. With the quizzes from the bbc learning English page those who were reluctant to do phonetics, you just trick them into it! It works wonders.

When it comes to listening, apart from panicking the idea of listening and not understanding if/when they are addressed, its proven that first they are blocked to any kind of listening, I usually start the process of opening their minds saying its perfectly normal not to understand things they dont know, and help them focus on just catching the odd word. Then, its a matter of doing a second listening and focus on specific questions, and maybe pausing when the

answer is said. Play it as many times as necessary, its a matter of training the ear to listen out for certain things. The process is that they first pick out some words, then they work out the meaning, not actually getting it quite right because of the weak form which so much information they provide (a mere preposition can give the text a whole different meaning, and that is exactly what they have difficulty identifying). So I guess I dont look at the text as a whole. It works though, with time and patience and practice, and emphasising that learning/listening/understanding, connected with grammar, pronunciation and having vocabulary in chunks, learning collocations, understanding that certain words or numbers require or always appear with certain other words or prepositions, all of this will contribute to better understanding of any oral production they are faced with. It works. Lots of my students I have used this method and have gradually improved their skills. Id like to emphasise that with the two students who are over the age of 60, who I have taught for 6 years now, their listening skills remain very poor despite fairly noticeable improvement in the rest of skills. Then there is also word formation and derivation and meaning and pattern: adults, at least mine, On the onset, they store words in their brains as opposed to storing prefixes, suffixes, roots and then playing with them to form new words, and consequently to help them understand "new" lexical terms. Much as I encourage and help them work out the meaning of derivates by trying to break down the word into smaller pieces when possible, and thats what may be difficult, knowing when, they only get there if you help them. That would make them a certain degree more autonomous. With help. but now I can see evidence of years of insisting on learning to distinguish suffixes (things come at the stage when they are ready for it). I was aware that it'd be a slow process to change their way to tackle English.

Similar sort of thing goes for word or verb patterns, suggest, want, and a long list of verbs prove to be a bit of a challenge for them at first (and not so at first). Words like say tell explain contact confirm call can also prove difficult because they think in their language and they translate word by word. Its when they insert to where the verb pattern does require this particle. And I think its all down to being given misleading, wrong translations when they first started learning English. Nowadays the idea of teaching in chunks is great if we succeed in making them learn this way. Its hard not to judge and learn from our mental structures so its hard not to translate from your language, whatever it is. To me this is a fact, you know what you want to say in your language, the sticky situation is when you want to say this in a foreign language. I think you can not help thinking in one language and then translating, word by word because this is your way of get this message across , unless you can speak other foreign languages you are not aware that other languages may have different often longer or shorter ways of expressing a word, an idea, a whole concept. I always say that more than meanings words are concepts and there for they have translations.

XYZ is translated as into language. So its important to stop thinking about translations and start learning collocations, in context. But then again, I see that you cant push them certain ideas on their learning needs until they are ready for them, until they kind of see it by themselves, it isnt until then when they are at their most receptive of something, be it the importance of clear, understandable pronunciation or the relevance of using the tenses right, otherwise they give mistakable messages! I think it was last year that during the introduction of a presentation given by some reputed speaker from OUP, the attendees were asked if we had any metaphor for learning a foreign language. I certainly do, and have had one for years. To me, learning a language is like learning to drive. You are the driver, the car is the language. At first you have to think about every move you make: ignition key, the rear-view mirror, fastening the seatbelt, the clutch and the accelerator pedal, the break, gears and all. It feels as though youll never be able to handle it all. Its all too much to remember. But you do learn to do it without thinking about what goes first. Learning English is the same: lots of things to think about : SVO, is it present or past, finished or unfinished action, general or specific moment in time, pronouns and articles and their position, certainly or possibility and a long list of things, thats only syntax-wise but the more you practise the better you get at it until thinking is no longer needed! Then we can talk about acquisition. Hope you find learning English easier than my mistakes I have never encountered myself with my students but other than these, I can vouch that what he says is true! Good buy for all thostudents! I must say that I am happy about my success rate, though. Most of my students, now speak in public, give presentations and attend international meetings. Personally, it may all sound superficial, not really tested or unfounded but this is how I have experience teaching these adults for this number of years. I can vouch that the moment their minds open up and unconsciously they change their attitude towards learning (maybe becoming more humble) the change starts. It is indeed very rewarding to see them conduct meetings in English, give presentations, write e-mails more stylistically correct and see how thankful and pleased they are for and with it. I think that what most adults with a pre-intermediate level of English and above need is some hard analysing their specific needs, some coaching about the typical mistakes and a lot of motivation and positive feedback. Helping them understand how languages work, comparing and contrasting, using their L1 if necessary. I have very positive experience about my switching to Spanish when I deemed suitable. I for example study French in a class of 2530 students, all in our mid-20 to late 40s. My most rewarding moment is seeing good marks in our exams, that proves I am making progress. In a one-to-one environment, exams may not be the thing to go with so constant or regular feedback is very important. there is also the fact students must be made aware that a learning process is never linear. sometimes your sense of advancement goes down to go back up again. I tell them that if "today they have been able to speak as well as they have, progress is there, the language is there. even if it doesn't show every time they attempt to speak" Learning a foreign language is a slow and time-demanding thing but it can be done, anyone can do it if they need it or really want to it you put enough in to make it happen. (putting: motivation,

time, input, hours, homework, and having clear objectives: what do i want to be able to do?) I would like to mention the book Great English Mistakes made by Spanish Speakers by Peter Harvey from Lavengro Books, which I discovered a few days ago.I find the book very appropiate for the above. I must say that there a few examples of se Spanish from Spain speakers!You'll never regret it. http://www.lavengrobooks.com/

Another thing i have notice these days that i have begun teaching a false beginer, which i really dont like, is that it's really very hard to teach them the different meanings of a word or the different uses a verb/verb tense may have. I can very very clearly now, see why tenses and and grammar and vocabulary is taught gradually. Ok, it looks commonsense and obvious and it is and has been for me as well all this long time i have been teaching but nowhere as clear as it is today with this learner. The puzzled look in her face when i tried to explain "being" in "rather than being" in a sentence in an email she had received was beyond anything i've seen before! For her -ing is for on-going actions happening at the moment of speaking. I think i got out of this sticky situation by refering to examples of syntactical forms in her language and said that she just had to accept it, after a what would have been a successful explanation for an intermediate level student. It's super interesting to see how they learn. I am going to concentrate on her learning process a lot these days. I haven't done low levels for many years now and I'll make it my challenge to monitor very closely their progress. I have recently noticed and worded other things i've identified they do ... Me as an adult student of French 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 needs. I was not going to start all over again after all!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 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. not finished, more shortly

2. How to improve your listening skills (and oral production). A lot of students see themselves to be familiar with grammar but they feel stuck with listening, understanding skils. It's a very tricky area. Understanding oral production can be very hard, it's not easy. After a certain age, our phonological system stops being able to produce new sounds (new to our existing sounds). That makes the listening and the production of certain sounds hard, which also has an impact on our listening understanding skills. It's not quick. Yet, it's not only that. The way I see it, if you lack a good grasp of grammar, clearly understanding the difference between tenses so as to get the right idea (ie finished or unfinished), a wide range of vocabulary of the topic you are spoken about and an awareness of connected speech, weak forms, etc it's going to be hard to truely achieve this level of understanding students aim to. I am not saying it's impossible to achieve, I am a non-native speaker myself. Improving your listening, as students says, is achieveable but often slow and it requires training and help in most cases. On top of that there's the primary or secondary school background, a lot of students in Spain have a not nice aftertaste of their school year as far as English goes and they

are a bit stuck, blocked more than unable to understand. So get reading, get listening, get someone to help you polish up and listen out for little sounds that make a world of a difference in the sentence, learn the connectors and conjuctions, not just the key words that help you interpret the general idea but they show you the flow of the utterance. You won't understand if you dont know the language or the grammar, you'll think you understand cos you make two and two together out of the key words you do catch. Make a bigger effort and analyse the whole sentence without being obssessed with it as probably there's no need for it!

Techniques for Working With Adults Knowles and other educators maintain that adult education is most effective when it is "experience centered, related to learners' real needs, and directed by learners themselves" (Auerbach, 1992, p. 14). Bell and Burnaby (1984), Holt (1988), Holt and Gaer (1993), and Wrigley and Guth (1992) list techniques that involve beginning level learners as active participants in selecting topics, language, and materials. 1. Build on the experiences and language of learners. Invite them to discuss their experiences and provide activities that will allow them to generate language they have already developed. 2. Use learners as resources. Ask them to share their knowledge and expertise with others in the class. 3. Sequence activities in an order that moves from less challenging to more challenging, such as progressing from listening to speaking, reading, and writing skills. Move from language experience activities to picture-word connections to all-print exercises. 4. Build redundancy into curriculum content, providing repetition of topics. This will help overcome problems related to irregular attendance common in adult classes. 5. Combine enabling skills (visual discrimination of letters and words, auditory discrimination of sounds and words, spacing between letters and words, letter-sound correspondences, blending letters to sound out words, sight vocabulary) with language experience and whole language approaches. 6. Combine life-skill reading competencies (reading medicine labels, writing notes to the children's teachers, filling out forms) with phonics, word recognition, word order, spacing words in a sentence, reading words in context, and reading comprehension. 7. Use cooperative learning activities that encourage interaction by providing learners with situations in which they must negotiate language with partners or group members to complete a task (See Bell, 1988). 8. Include a variety of techniques to appeal to diverse learning styles. For example, merge holistic reading approaches such as language experience with discrete approaches such as phonics. An Integrated Approach to Literacy Instruction The language experience approach (LEA)which uses learner experiences as lesson contentis a way to introduce multiple activities that appeal to learners' diverse backgrounds and preferred learning styles while offering instruction in language that is both comprehensible and interesting (Taylor, 1992). The following is an example of a modified LEA lesson that could be used with low-level learners.

1. A shared experience, such as a field trip, a common situation, or a mean- ingful picture is a stimulus for class discussion. 2. Learners volunteer sentences about the experience and the teacher writes the sentences on the chalkboard. 3. The teacher reads each sentence aloud, running her finger under words as each is pronounced, verifying that she has written what the student has said. 4. When the story is completed, the teacher reads it aloud. 5. Learners are encouraged to join in a second and third reading of the story. 6. A number of activities can follow at this point:

Learners copy the story; Learners underline all the parts they can read; Learners circle specific words (e.g., words that begin with a designated sound, common sight words such as the); Choral cloze: The teacher erases some words, reads the story, and asks learners to supply the missing words; Writing cloze: The teacher types the story, leaving out every fifth word. During the next class the teacher passes out the cloze and asks learners to fill in the missing words; Scrambled sentences: The teacher types the story. During the next class the teacher distributes copies of the story to the class. Each learner cuts the story into strips so that there is one sentence on each strip of paper. Learn-ers scramble the sentences and rearrange them in the proper sequence; Scrambled words: More advanced learners can cut sentences into words, scramble the words, and rearrange them in order.

Selecting Appropriate Classroom Materials Using concrete but age-appropriate materials with adult learners enhances instruction by providing a context for language and literacy development. A basic kit of materials might consist of the following objects, games, and materials. 1. Realia: clocks, food items, calendars, plastic fruits and vegetables, maps, household objects, real and play money, food containers, abacus, manual for learning to drive, and classroom objects; 2. Flash cards: pictures, words, and signs; 3. Pictures or photographs: personal, magazine, and others; 4. Tape recorder and cassette tapes, including music for imagery and relaxation;

5. Overhead projector, transparencies, and pens; video player and videos; 6. Pocket chart for numbers, letters, and pictures; 7. Alphabet sets; 8. Camera for language experience storiesto create biographies and autobiographies; 9. Games such as bingo and concentration: commercial or teacher-made; 10. Colored index cards to teach word order in sentences, to show when speakers change in dialogue, to illustrate question/answer format, and to use as cues for a concentration game; 11. Cuisenaire rods to teach word order in sentences, to use as manipulatives in dyad activities, and to teach adjectives; 12. Colored chalk to teach word order, to differentiate between speakers in a dialogue, and to illustrate question and answer format; 13. Poster, butcher, and construction paper; 14. Felt-tipped pens, colored pencils, and crayons; 15. Scissors, glue, and masking tape; and 16. Children's literature: for learning techniques for reading or telling stories to children (See Smallwood, 1992, for ideas on using children's literature with adults.). Conclusion Providing instruction to adults acquiring ESL literacy is a challenge. When approaches, techniques, and materials are suitable for adults, are related to their real needs, and promote involvement in their own learning, there is a greater chance of success.