DESCRIBING LEARNERS

DESCRIBING LEARNERS

A Age

The age of our students is a major factor in our decisions about how and what to teach. People of different ages have different needs, competences, and cognitive skills; we might expect children of primary age to acquire much of a foreign language through play, for example, whereas for adults we can reasonably expect a greater use of abstract thought.

There are a number of commonly held beliefs about age. Some people say that children learn languages faster than adults do. They talk of children who appear to pick up new languages effortlessly. Perhaps this has something to do with the plasticity of a young brain. Something, after all, must account for the fact that with language, according to Steven Pinker, ‘acquisition ... is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter’ (Pinker 1994: 293), and that this applies not only to the acquisition of the first language, but also to second or foreign languages.

Another belief is that adolescents are unmotivated, surly, and uncooperative and that therefore they make poor language learners. And there are those who seem to think that adults have so many barrier’s to learning (both because of the slowing effects of ageing and because of their past experience], that they only rarely have any success.

There is some truth in many of these beliefs. But they can also be misleading since. Like all stereotypes, they suggest that everyone is the same. They also ignore evidence from individuals within these groups (adolescents and adults) which flatly contradicts such assumptions. We should also point out that many of the concerns in this section will have special relevance for the western world where, for example, it is stressed that children should ‘learn by doing’ and where some generalisations can be made about adolescent behaviour. But as we shall see in Chapter GB, different educational cultures have very different expectations about teacher and learner behaviour.

In what follows we will consider students at different ages as if all the members of each age group are the same. Yet each student is an individual with different experiences both in and outside the classroom. Comments here about young children, teenagers, and adults can only be generalisations. Much also depends upon individual learner differences and motivation (see B and C below).

A1 Young children

Young children, especially those up to the ages of nine or ten, learn differently from older children, adolescents, and adults in the following ways:

o They respond to meaning even if they do not understand individual words.

o They often learn indirectly rather than directly - that is they take in information from all sides, learning from everything around them rather than only focusing on the precise topic they are being taught.

o Their understanding comes not just from explanation, but also from what they see and hear and, crucially, have a chance to touch and interact with. They generally display an enthusiasm for learning and a curiosity about the world around them.

o They have a need for individual attention and approval from the teacher.

o They are keen to talk about themselves, and respond well to learning that uses themselves and their own lives as main topics in the classroom.

o They have a limited attention span; unless activities are extremely engaging they can easily get bored, losing interest after ten minutes or so.

In the light of these characteristics, it can be concluded that good teachers at this level need to provide a rich diet of learning experiences which encourages their students to get information from a variety of sources. They need to work with their students individually and in groups developing good relationships. They need to plan a range of activities for a given time period, and be flexible enough to move on to the next exercise when they see their students getting bored.

We can also draw some conclusions about what a classroom for young children should look like and what might be going on in it. First of all we will want the classroom to be bright and colourful, with windows the children can see out of, and with enough room for different activities to be taking place. We might expect them to be working in groups in different parts of the classroom, changing their activity every ten minutes or so. ‘We are obviously,’ Susan Halliwell writes, ‘not talking about classrooms where children spend all their time sitting still in rows or talking only to the teacher’ (1992: 18). Because children love discovering things, and because they respond well to being asked to use their imagination, they may well be involved in puzzle-like activities, in making things, in drawing things, in games, in physical movement or in songs.

A2 Adolescents

Anyone who has taught secondary school students has had lessons, even days and weeks, when the task seemed difficult, and on especially bad days hopeless. Yet if, as the methodologist Penny Ur suggests, teenage students are in fact overall the best language learners (Ur 1996: 286) this suggests that this is only part of the picture.

When Herbert Puchta and Michael Schratz started to design material for teenagers in Austria they, like many before them, wondered why teenagers seemed to be less lively and humorous than adults. Why were they so much less motivated, they asked, and why did they present outright discipline problems (Puchta and Schratz 1993: 1)?

It is widely accepted that one of the key issues in adolescence, especially perhaps in the west, is the search for individual identity, and that this search provides the key challenge for this age group. Identity has to be forged among classmates and friends; peer approval may be considerably more important for the student than the attention of the teacher which, for younger children, is so crucial.

As we shall see in Chapter 9a there are a number of reasons why students – and teenage students in particular - may be disruptive in class. Apart from the need for self-esteem and the peer approval they may provoke from being disruptive, there are other factors too, such as the boredom they feel - not to mention problems they bring into class from outside school. However, while it is true that adolescents can cause discipline problems, it is usually the case that they would be much happier if such problems did not exist. They may push teachers to the limit, but they are much happier if that challenge is met, if the teacher actually manages to control them, and if this is done in a supportive and constructive way so that he or she ‘helps rather than shouts’ (Harmer 1998: 2).

However, we should not become too preoccupied with the issue of disruptive behaviour, for while we will all remember unsatisfactory classes, we will also look back with pleasure on those groups and lessons which were successful. Teenagers, if they are engaged, have a great capacity to learn, a great potential for creativity, and a passionate commitment to things which interest them. There is almost nothing more exciting than a class of involved young people at this age pursuing a learning goal with enthusiasm. Our job, therefore, must be to provoke student engagement with material which is relevant and involving. At the same time we need to do what we can to bolster our students’ self-esteem, and be conscious, always, of their need for identity.

Herbert Puchta and Michael Schratz see problems with teenagers as resulting, in part, from ‘... the teacher’s failure to build bridges between what they want and have to teach and their students’ worlds of thought and experience’ (1993: 4), They advocate linking language teaching far more closely to the students’ everyday interests through, in particular, the use of ‘humanistic’ teaching (see Chapter 6, A7). Students must be encouraged to respond to texts and situations with their own thoughts and experience, rather than just by answering questions and doing abstract learning activities. We must give them tasks which they are able to do, rather than risk humiliating them.

We have come some way from the teaching of young children. We can ask teenagers to address learning issues directly in a way that younger learners might not appreciate. We are able to discuss abstract issues with them. Indeed part of our job is to provoke intellectual activity by helping them to be aware of contrasting ideas and concepts which they can resolve for themselves - though still with our guidance. As we shall see in Chapters 5 and 11, there are many ways of studying language, most of which are appropriate for teenagers.

A3 Adult learners

Adult language learners are notable for a number of special characteristics:

o They can engage with abstract thought. Those who succeed at language learning in later life, according to Steven Pinker, ‘. .. often depend on the conscious exercise of their considerable intellects, unlike children to whom language acquisition naturally happens’ (Pinker 1994: 29). This suggests that we do not have to rely exclusively on activities such as games and songs – though these may be appropriate for some students.

o They have a whole range of life experiences to draw on.

o They have expectations about the learning process, and may already have their own set patterns of learning.

o Adults tend, on the whole, to be more disciplined than some teenagers, and crucially, they are often prepared to struggle on despite boredom.

o They come into classrooms with a rich range of experiences

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