The advantages and disadvantages in teaching English to Adult Learners

The advantages and disadvantages in teaching English to Adult Learners in the Current Situation in Vietnam

A brief look at the current English language teaching and learning context in Vietnam will show that the demand for English learning is very great. This is clearly seen in the multitude of institutions and centers that offer English courses as well as in the great number of learners who go to English classes. Among these learners adult learners form a big special group. Due to some of their characteristics the teaching of English to this group of adult learners has some advantages and disadvantages as follows.

The first advantage is that adult learners have some degree of extrinsic motivation. They may study English for a variety of reasons but they all do so because they want to or need to. For some students, the motivation may be in the form of integrative motivation because they wish to integrate themselves into the culture of an English-speaking country like Britain, America, Canada or Australia. For others, the motivation is instrumental in the sense that the mastery of the English language is seen as an instrument that can bring them a better job or position. When these adult students go to class with some motivation they are easier to teach than those who bring no motivation to the classroom.

The second advantage is that adult students can transfer those study skills and learning strategies they have acquired in their first language to their study of English. Unlike children and adolescents, adults are autonomous in some way. They have finished their studies or have undertaken at least some in their own language, so they must have gained some basic skills like reading, summarizing, identifying and applying formulae and information and such critical thinking skills as analyzing, synthesizing, hypothesizing, speculating, etc. Moreover, they may also have some well-established strategies for learning. Therefore, the English language teacher can make his job easier by creating conditions for adult students to reactivate these study skills and learning strategies and apply them to their study of a new language.

One more advantage is that adult learners can make use of whatever kind of knowledge they have accumulated in their own language. Again this advantage cannot be seen in other groups of learners like children and adolescents. First, adult learners have extensive experience of using a language, which is their mother tongue. Now that they start learning English, they can remember the new langue system better by making use of what they know about their own language. It is not uncommon to see learners comparing and contrasting their first language with the foreign language they are learning to find out areas in which the two languages are different or similar so that they can learn the new language more quickly. Second, adult students’ life experience, world knowledge and specialist knowledge can contribute much to their learning a foreign language. It can help them a lot when they have to read about or discuss complex or controversial topics in English. So the English teacher can engage adult learners more easily if he knows how to tap the knowledge they have gained over time.

On the contrary, there are some disadvantages to the teaching of English to adult students as well. The first disadvantage is that English learning makes a strong demand on adult learners in terms of time. As a matter of fact, it is really difficult for adult students to make time to learn English. As most institutions and centers teach English in the evening adult students have to study after work. Three one-hour-and-a-half sessions or three three-hour sessions a week seem not to add up to a lot of time but not all adult students can manage to set aside that much time for study purposes. The simple reason is that they all have their own lives to live outside the classroom or they all have other commitments in life than learning English. As a result, some students fail to invest as much time and effort in learning as they should. Of course, teachers will have difficulty in monitoring the performance and progress of those students who cannot attend class regularly.

Another factor that can interfere with or even impede adult students’ learning English is their fear of failure and frustration with lack of progress. As can be seen, some adult students are very successful professionals or have a high status at their work place. And now, at school they are just normal students coping with tasks, assignments, examinations, etc. as they have been successful in their career, they do not want to fail to achieve their desired goal of mastering English. They may therefore put themselves under unnecessary stress if they do not give themselves enough time to achieve their goals or if they set themselves unrealistic goals. Other students may be hard on themselves in a different way. For example, adult intermediate and advanced students, those who already know a lot, may find progress difficult to perceive. In this case, the teacher has more work to do: they must help these students get the level of challenge right or view success in a broader sense.

In addition, the lack of well-qualified teachers and the poor physical conditions of the classrooms at some English language schools and centers can be damaging to student motivation. Currently, in Vietnam a great number of institutions and centers provide English courses and they range form universities and their satellite centers, joint-venture centers, privately-owned centers to privately-run home-based classes. Such proliferation of schools and centers is useful in the sense that it offers students a wide variety of programs to choose from. However, because of a lack of quality control, the reality of some schools and centers may fall short of student expectations. Some teachers are untrained or inexperienced, delivering boring or uninteresting lessons; the physical classroom conditions and resources for learning are just basic. All this cannot of course supply students in general and adult students in particular with any intrinsic motivation, a crucial factor for successful language learning.

In general, this analysis of the current teaching context for adult learners of English in Vietnam in general and of the characteristics of this group of learners in particular partly reflects the increasing need for English language learning and mainly shows the advantages and disadvantages that adult students have in their English study. Both teachers and students need to be aware of these findings of the analysis so that they can find ways to maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages. Only in this way can teachers deliver quality English language programs for students to benefit from.

Read related posts:
Why I want to learn English
One who is good at English grammar can write well in English?
The reasons for your study of English and the ways you have been learning it
Writing is the most difficult skills
The beneficial effects of games on language learning
Sucessful in learning a foreign language
How can you help your students enlarge their vocabulary?
The difficulties in learning English and how to overcome them
Advantages and disadvantages of money
Advantages and disadvantages of cinema
Advantages and disadvantages of television
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Attending Evening Classes
The advantages and disadvantages of a good memory
Talk about your teacher of English
What career would you like to choose after leaving school? (Teacher)
Should teachers give pupils much homework? Discuss.
The teachers’ contributions to the progress of a country
Why are good books good teachers and friends?
Describe a teachers’ day.
The advantages and disadvantages in teaching English to Adult Learners
Are parents best teachers?
How can you help your students enlarge their vocabulary?
Should all errors made by foreign language learners be corrected at any cost?
How can I become the person I want to be?
My teacher
What makes an ideal teacher
Talk about your favorite teacher
“After our parents, it is to our teacher that we owe the most”
Qualities of a good teacher

language123.blogspot.com
An Imaginary Encounter
The Subject I Enjoy Learning
An Accident At Home
Why We Should Study Science
My Mother
My First Day At School
Talk About Mothers’ Day.
Fire Is A Good Servant, But A Bad Master
Describe The House You Are Living In
A Street Quarrel I Have Seen

One who is good at English grammar can write well in English?

Is it true that one who is good at English grammar can write well in English?
(Acquisition of good writing skills requires more than Mastery of English Grammar)

In the English language teaching writing is called a productive skill because it is concerned with the production of the language. The teaching and learning of this specific skill has provoked much discussion about the question of how to write well in English. Some people may think that a good knowledge of English grammar is sufficient to enable them to achieve a high level of competence in written English. However, this is a somewhat simplistic view. As will be analyzed below, the acquisition of good writing skills requires not just a good command of the grammatical system of English but a wide lexical knowledge, a thorough understanding of the topic given and a repertoire of organizational skills.

Apart from a good knowledge of English grammar, one needs to demonstrate a broad lexical knowledge in a good piece of writing. There is an element of truth in the fact that grammar rules help to generate sentences. However, if the writer has no real understanding of the lexis of the English language and just applies the grammatical rules mechanically, he will run the risk of producing grammatically correct but semantically inappropriate or anomalous sentences. To use the English language with clarity and precision, he needs to know what words mean literally and figuratively, what words can collocate and how words, though synonymous, are different form each other in subtle ways. Therefore, the writer’s ability to manipulate structures and his word choice are both needed for the appropriate use of language. For example, while one can write ‘Sorry, I can’t make it’ in response to a friend’s invitation he must formulate his refusal to a business partner more formally ‘I apologize I will not be able to be there.’ In other words, structural accuracy is just as important as vocabulary selection in effective writing.

Next, one needs to rely on one’s general and/or specialist knowledge to develop the topic given in depth to produce an original piece of writing. If one’s mastery of English grammar can partly help shape the form of a piece of writing, it is the ideas presented that decide the content. A good writer does not write merely to reach the word limit (within the time limit); he must write to achieve his purpose, whether to narrate a story, to describe someone or something, to discuss a topic, to inform or to persuade the reader. The best way for him to do this is to ensure that the content of his paper is excellent. He is therefore expected to exploit whatever kind of knowledge he has acquired, be it his general knowledge, his knowledge of current affairs or his specialist knowledge to come up with brilliant ideas that can attract and maintain readers’ attention. As the writer is not in direct contact with readers and cannot therefore get direct feedback from them, he cannot afford to be vague. He has to elaborate his ideas or explanations to get his message across, leaving no scope for misunderstanding or interpretation of any type. This makes an enormous demand on the writer indeed. So in his treatment of the subject assigned, the writer has to draw on the above mentioned areas of his knowledge, which are by nature different from his knowledge of English grammar, to search for worthwhile ideas and arguments.

In addition, one needs to know a number of generally called organizational skills which are essential for the production of a fine piece of writing. Viewed as a process, writing involves the following major skills. The skill of much use during the first stage is that of planning. Before starting off, the writer has to envisage how he would like to go about his writing assignment. He has to take into consideration all the resources he has at his disposal (such as time, vocabulary, language, structures, his understanding of the topic) to make a detailed plan as to how to turn out the end product: a letter, a story, s description, a report, an essay, a term paper, etc. Next comes the skill of much importance here, the skill of paragraphing. After a brainstorming session in the planning stage, the writer may have hit on many ideas and now it is time for him to select and organize those that are really relevant to the topic under discussion. The organization of ideas requires a clear understanding of the discourse structure of the target language, which is English in this case. Here the non-native writer is expected to go beyond the realm of grammar to explore the realm of discourse. For example, he needs to acquaint himself with a variety of genres or styles produced by native writers so that he knows what is expected of him when he writes in English. Besides, the skill of structuring discourse is often coupled with the skill of using liking devices. It is because ideas must not only be grouped together but also developed in logical and coherent paragraphs. Then the skills of drafting, editing and proofreading come into play. The writer has to work on his draft to revise his ideas and check for spelling and punctuation. Only when all the necessary changes have been made can the writer be sure that his end product is ready for ‘publication’.

In general, writing is not an easy skill to get native speakers of English. As can be seen above, the mastery of the skill demands different areas of knowledge such as vocabulary, world knowledge and specialist knowledge and organizational skills in addition to that of grammar. Thus a wide knowledge of English grammar is a necessary condition, not the only necessary and sufficient condition for the acquisition of the writing skill. A high level of written English can only be achieved when one puts huge efforts in building up his knowledge of the areas mentioned above.

Read related essays:
Why I want to learn English
The reasons for your study of English and the ways you have been learning it
Writing is the most difficult skills
The advantages and disadvantages in teaching English to Adult Learners
The beneficial effects of games on language learning
Sucessful in learning a foreign language
How can you help your students enlarge their vocabulary?
The difficulties in learning English and how to overcome them

language123.blogspot.com
The Cause Of Obesity
A Good Book For Learning Writing
Interesting Story I Have Heard
A Frightening Experience
Your Father Advises You To Study Hard. Tell About What He Talks
Commerce As A Means Of Spreading Civilization
An Unusual Opportunity
Describe A Sports-Meeting
My Birthday I Celebrated
What Is A Human Resources Manage?