You are teaching a group of older beginner students who complain that you are treating then like children. What methods can you use that respect their age and experience?

This means that you may find certain teaching strategies more effective than others with your adult learners. Adult Learner Characteristics Teaching Strategies

Adults have years of experience and a wealth of knowledge Use your adult students as resources for yourself and for other students; use open-ended questions to draw out students' knowledge and experiences; provide many opportunities for dialogue among students

Adults have established values, beliefs, and opinions Take time to clarify student expecatations of the course; permit debate and the challenge of ideas; be careful to protect minority opinions within the class

Adults expect to be treated as adults

Treat questions and comments with respect; acknowledge contributions students make to the class; do not expect students to necessarily agree with your plan for the course

Adults need to feel self-directed

Engage students in designing the learning process; expect students to want more than one medium for learning and to want control over the learning pace and start/stop times

Adults often have a problem centered approach to learning

Show immediately how new knowledge or skills can be applied to current problems or situations; use participatory techniques such as case studies and problem-solving groups

Adults tend to be less interested in survey types of courses and more interested in straightforward how-to

Focus on theories and concepts within the context of their applications to relevant problems; orient the course content toward direct applications rather than toward theory

Adults have increased variation in learning styles (individual differences among people increase with age)

Use a variety of teaching materials and methods to take into account differences in style, time, types, and pace of learning

44.

47 Speak about the term “Design” in Foreign Languages Teaching and Learning and the notions that are attributed to it.

Design

In order for an approach to lead to a method, it is necessary to develop a design for an instructional system. Design is the level of method anal­ysis in which we consider (a) what the objectives of a method are; (b) how language content is selected and organized within the method, that is, the syllabus model the method incorporates; (c) the types of learning tasks and teaching activities the method advocates; (d) the roles of learn­ers; (e) the roles of teachers; (f) the role of instructional materials.

Objectives Different theories of language and language learning influence the focus of a method; that is, they determine what a method sets out to achieve. The specification of particular learning objectives, however, is a product of design, not of approach. Some methods focus primarily on oral skills and say that reading and writing skills are secondary and derive from transfer of oral skills. Some methods set out to teach general commu­nication skills and give greater priority to the ability to express oneself meaningfully and to make oneself understood than to grammatical ac­curacy or perfect pronunciation. Others place a greater emphasis on accurate grammar and pronunciation from the very beginning. Some methods set out to teach the basic grammar and vocabulary of a lan­guage. Others may define their objectives less in linguistic terms than in terms of learning behaviors, that is, in terms of the processes or abilities the learner is expected to acquire as a result of instruction. Gattegno writes, for example, "Learning is not seen as the means of accumulating knowledge but as the means of becoming a more proficient learner in whatever one is engaged in" (1972:89). This process-oriented objective may be offered in contrast to the linguistically oriented or product-oriented objectives of more traditional methods. The degree to which a method has process-oriented or product-oriented objectives may be re­vealed in how much emphasis is placed on vocabulary acquisition and grammatical proficiency and in how grammatical or pronunciation er­rors are treated in the method. Many methods that claim to be primarily process oriented in fact show overriding concerns with grammatical and lexical attainment and with accurate grammar and pronunciation.

48 Give definition of the term “Procedure” in Foreign Languages Teaching and Learning. Give examples of procedures in different methods.