Teach English in Dujiaoqu Zhen - Taiyuan Shi

Learning is a process that every human being is involuntarily exposed to. It happens through conscious or unconscious learning or gaining new experiences in life. Often, one may hear "There’s no point in starting learning new language. Children’s brain is like a sponge – absorbing any new information automatically and instantly, and I’m just too old for this." Since learning is something that occurs to everybody regardless of age, there is a question if a young person accumulates knowledge in the same way as adults do, or if there are different techniques to teach older and younger students. These problems have been investigated by scientists for many years. While it has not been proved that the brain of a child and an adult acquires knowledge in different ways, there have been drawn some distinctions in terms of other factors that may highly influence learning process, such as motivation, role of a teacher, self-esteem, atmosphere in a classroom, learning purpose, etc. It turns out that teaching adults and youngsters is so different that scholars created to separate disciplines: Pedagogy (teaching young people) and Andragogy (teaching adults). People often believe that older people, due to their age, are incapable of learning new things, or at least learning not as quickly as when they were younger. The problem, however, lays not in the capacity of the brain but in the attitude towards learning. People, after having grown up, often view learning the same way as they were taught in school. Teachers themselves often teach adults by the same methods as they teach young students. Learning process, however changes with the age of a student, therefore teachers should apply different techniques and activities to different age-groups. Below, there are described basic characteristics of an adult and a young learner, which teachers need to be acquainted with in order to increase their teaching effectiveness. Adult learners face a number of difficulties, such as worsened hearing, vision, or sharpness of thinking (if one has not trained the brain for many years). In terms of learning new language, they have for many years built strong pronunciation in L1. Any deviation from their native language in terms of utterance, they will regard as something unnatural or even wrong, therefore they will most likely say new words in a way as if they were words in their language (like Polish or Russian people uttering ‘r’ that is strong rather than soft or silent). Additionally, adults already have greater knowledge than children do, therefore, as opposed to young pupils, who just accept all the new information, they are resistant to change and have tendency to think, ask questions ‘why,’ ‘how,’ etc. They, also, want to be correct because making a mistake would be a shame for a serious and respected adult. Also, due to their ego, adults often have difficulty in accepting being assessed, or having teacher as a leader. Classroom with rows of chairs might give a feeling that they are passive listeners of a lecture rather than active, equal participants, therefore it is better to arrange adult-classrooms in such a way that students may sit in small groups in circles around the table, where the teacher is more of an animator rather than a lecturer. Despite these hindrances, there are many factors that make teaching adults easier than children. To name only a few, mature people learn out of their own will, they are goal-oriented and self-motivated. Also, it is important to remember that adults are practical, they want to have a clear view of why they are being taught the new concept and how they will be able to apply it in real-life situation they find themselves at the moment. On the other hand, children are forced to go to school and learn things they did not choose to learn. They often resist learning what they are being taught because, due to lack of life-experience, they do not see how this knowledge might come in handy in ten or twenty years. Contrarily to adults, who are internally motivated, children learn because of external factors, such as pressure from their parents, peers or teachers. Also, their span of attention in the classroom is shorter, which leads to misbehaving. Therefore, teachers ought to implement strict rules, prize and punishment methods, or taking on the role of an instructor and assessor rather than a friend. Additionally, teachers need to remember that, because of poor knowledge about life, they should visualise different concepts that may, otherwise, appear abstract to young pupils. Despite greater challenge for teachers, learning process itself is more efficient and quicker for young people than for adults. That is because children do not have that much experience and general knowledge, therefore they see their teachers as authorities and absorb everything what they hear without thinking and comparing it with already existing knowledge. They are, also, more open-minded and flexible, which facilitates learning new languages with new pronunciation or utterance that is different from their L1. Teachers, when planning curriculum for both age-groups, need to consider the fact that adults are problem-oriented, meaning that they expect instant results (such as ‘How to order a cup of tea in a restaurant in English?’), whereas young students do not, usually, know what they want, they are forced to learn, and the knowledge will not be used until they have finished their schools and entered adult life. Therefore, children’s lessons will be structured differently, i.e. more generally and thematically (f. ex. ‘The grammar used in third conditional sentences.’) Taking into consideration all the above-mentioned information, it becomes clear that teaching youngsters and adults are two different things that require two different approaches and sets of skills from teachers. It is, also, worth noticing that activities during a lesson might be the same. However, this is the way of conducting them that is different in different age-groups. Therefore, it is crucial for a teacher to have thorough understanding of the psychology of these two groups, and be able to properly adjust their teaching methods.