Learners 45+ years old. Please help me!

[Hannah1985]

Hello. I am a young English teacher from Australia. I often have to teach people who are a lot older than me. I find that teaching learners who are 45 or over is different ot teaching younger learners. I sometimes find it hard to teach these people. I would like to hear from people who are older than 45 who are learning English. Please share you experiences with me. I would love to hear from you.

[Masoomeh]

hello hannah, once I had the experience to teach that age.

[Masoomeh]

hello hannah, once I had the experience to teach that age. First thing you should remember during teaching is that never make them have the feeling that you are younger than them, I mean ask about their advices during the topics.Second, start teaching from subjects they are in urgent need.Believe it or not, in my class was 20 years old girl who was younger than me and the old houswife who was 49 and this 49 years old woman at last became my TOP student. I am sure you will get succeed.

Masoomeh

[Torsten]

Hi Hannah,

To answer your question I would need to more why exactly you find it hard to teach people who are older than 45 years. And why 45 years, why not 40 or 50 -- I mean where do you draw the line? In addition to age there might be other factors that determine how "difficult" it is to "teach" somebody. For example, why does that person want to learn English and what is their education background? What is their professional and private situation? What is their native language and what other languages did they learn/are they learning?

Please let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Torsten
_________________
Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[Jamie (K)]

Torsten and Masoomeh bring up good points. I don't understand why you think there's something odd about teaching English to people over 45, because people at that age have not lost most of their ability to learn other languages. I routinely teach people who are 45 and older, and I don't find that they learn English worse than teenagers do. I'm currently teaching Czech to a woman in her 40s, and she's better than the people I've had to teach who were in their 20s. A man I know who is about 50 is learning German quite well, and I often have to teach English to Germans in the age group you mention, and most of them are just fine. In an Iraqi family I am friends with, the father is in his 80s and is learning quite a bit of English. Recently he has read John Steinbeck's novel "The Pearl", and enjoyed it, even though two or three years ago he knew no English at all. His wife, who is in her 60s, started to learn English only last year, and while she does not talk well yet, she understands me and even translates for me what her grandson says. Note that this lady is achieving this despite being totally illiterate. She's not only learning English for the first time now, but this is also the first time she has ever been taught to read and write!

If you find that some of these older people appear unable to learn English, there could be two main problems:

1. They don't feel they need it. Are some of them grandparents who are well taken care of by their families? Do any of them have Australian spouses who understand their poor English? If they can get by in their own little world, then they may lack motivation to improve. This is not peculiar to the middle aged and elderly, however. I've seen young people who are the same way. In my area, some are Arabs who live in isolation in one particular suburb, and others are Poles who stick to their Polish families, go to their Polish church, work at their Polish job, and dance at their Polish discotheque. I have met people from Poland who have been in the US for as long as 30 years and can't hold a conversation in English, because they have so successfully isolated themselves. There is a part of my city where it is very easy for Hmong people -- even children and teenagers -- to avoid learning English well. Once I had a girl in my class who I thought had just come from Laos maybe two years ago, but in fact she was born in the US and had lived here all her life.

2. Ego. Many adult students -- of all ages -- who do not learn English well are people who were important in their own countries and feel that learning English is somehow an affront to their dignity. In my classes these people were often professors or lawyers in their own countries, much of what you teach them just ricochets off their skulls, and they never seem to have a realistic concept of how bad their English is. I had a lawyer in her 20s who to this very day -- years later -- speaks terrible English, partly because she resists what she is taught, and often does not believe things are really said a certain way in English if they differ from the way she wants to say them. She feels that having to learn English is degrading. Meanwhile, a low-level supervisor in my local supermarket, who was formerly a government minister in a small Eastern European country, communicates quite well in English (which he couldn't speak before his arrival), evidently because he's much happier stocking shelves in a US supermarket than he was running a government ministry in his native country. His English is better than the 28-year-old lawyer's, even though he's in his 60s.

[Jamie (K)]

Hannah, another thing to watch out for is the tendency of instructors who are used to teaching ESL in primary or high schools to treat adult ESL learners as if they are children. You need to watch how you speak to them and the kinds of rules and assignments you give them, so that you know that you're dealing with them as respectable adults. Treating adults as if they were children or munchkins is a very common trap that some ESL teachers fall into, and the students will resent it, even if they don't say anything. Be careful!