Probably all of the readers of this article have adult learners in their regular language classrooms, and if they have taught courses in foreign language they have had only adult learners. The young adults who have for many years been our typical undergraduate students have begun to see their ranks invaded by older adults who have decided to enter or to return to college. In 1973-74, for example, the college going population over the age of 21 increased by 81% over the previous year; in 1975, at least 1 of 3 students pursuing a college degree was over 25; in 1977, 40% of college students were over 21. This trend will probably continue as the number of 18-year-olds bottoms out in the 90's when there will be 26% fewer than in the late 70's (Joiner 2-3). Therefore, we foreign language teachers are facing more and more often differently constituted classes that may call for new strategies, different emphases, and even different methodologies. My experience with older learners goes back to the late 50's when I supplemented my meager high school salary by teaching adult evening courses (the term continuing education had not yet been invented, or at least I was not aware of it) called conversational to a group of students different from the ones I faced all day long. One of my best students was over 90 years old. It was a rewarding experience, and in spite of the fact I knew very little about FL learning and acquisition among adults I thought I did a fine job, and the classes did, too, because I always had groups who wanted to continue their conversational classes beyond the offerings of the program. Later, when I began to teach on the college level, I always had a smattering of older students. In the summers of 1979 and 1980, I taught in an Elderhostel program a very short (one week) course called Survival Spanish to retired persons. Elderhostel is a network of over 600 colleges, universities, independent schools, folk schools and other educational institutions in 50 states, Canada, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Holland, Bermuda and Mexico, which offer special low-cost short term residential academic programs for older students. I designed Survival Spanish using my own experience and pirating materials from various sources, and again I felt I did a good job. All this experience, however, took place without any theoretical underpinnings, simply because there wasn't much available at the time. Research into the older learner is fairly recent, and much research yet remains to be done. What I plan to do in this article is discuss briefly the content of the course I taught. I will also present some of the research findings which supported, fortunately, some of the things I did in class, and other research findings which have caused me to plan to modify my course content and strategies the next time I have older learners. I should also like to draw from my experiences in teaching older learners in short courses designed for communication in order to suggest making modifications and making choices from an overly large corpus of material in basic language skill courses for younger learners. Let me first present an overview of the course. Survival Spanish is a five hour course, meeting one hour a day for one week. It, of necessity, must have a skeletal framework. No text was used; materials were pirated from a number of sources and distributed in ditto form. Older people are very book-oriented, and although the whole hour was devoted to oral work and communicative activities, the students always had dittoed materials to refer to and to study before the next class met. In addition to supplying the students with dittoed materials, the first time I taught the course I had prepared many transparencies, highly recommended visual stimuli, of course, for almost any other level, but they were a dismal failure for Elderhostel students. Many of my students could not see that well at a distance! I learned very quickly to flash up a transparency and to provide a ditto at the same time in order to introduce new material. I also used large sheets of paper
Read full abstract
Dec 31, 2016
Hye-Suk Whangbo + 2
Open Access