I also encouraged them to approach me during the break or after class. I arrived at school half an hour before every class to answer students' individual questions. Of course, parallel to the higher expectations should be sufficient guidance and support. They had great motivation to improve their English, as they yearned for a better life in the U.S. I found most students were willing, or even happy, to be pushed to learn. I assigned homework for every class, and checked it at the beginning of next class. I announced during the second class that while I understood their busy schedules, I considered it was likely that everyone could squeeze in 15 minutes a day to study. I decided it was time to give them some pressure and help them to achieve some breakthrough. for over seven years, I assessed their English proficiency to be still at the basic level based on our oral interactions and their written responses to my questionnaire.
Although all the students had lived in the U.S.
However, I believe that language acquisition for adults does not happen naturally and effortlessly. Their previous teachers seldom assigned them any homework, due to the non-credit, voluntary nature of the course and the demanding lifestyle of the students. Set Higher Expectations with Individual Support These students all had families to support and were all holding blue-collar jobs such as waitress, cashier, and cook. During the first class, I administered the questionnaire to students and their answers provided good guideline for my plans for the course content and classroom pedagogy. For both parts, I left ample spaces for students to add more of their opinions. The second part was concerned with teaching approaches, which explored students' opinions on some traditional Chinese as well as contemporary Western teaching methods such as 1 of 5 10/28/11 11:20 AMĢ reading aloud after the teacher, detailed grammar analysis, using some Chinese in the classroom, pair work and group work, etc. The first part was about course content, where I asked the specific skills students wished to learn, for example, talking to a doctor, getting along with colleagues & supervisors, filling out job applications, etc. I designed a simple questionnaire consisting of two parts. Since I had never taught this type of students before, I deemed it necessary to learn about their needs and preferences. Listen to Students' Needs Educators have long acknowledged the power of learners' voices in improving teaching and learning (Fullan and Stiegelbauer, 1991). The following are some strategies that I found to be effective in teaching adult ESL learners. This course aimed to teach job-related skills as well as other essential everyday life skills. All had completed basic and intermediate ESL courses at a government-sponsored program. as adults and their highest educational attainment was high school. The Class All the students had immigrated into the U.S. Teaching them can be a significant challenge for the teacher and curriculum developer. In addition, they tend to face tremendous financial distress and family responsibilities that oftentimes prevent them from concentrating on their studies. Many of the adult ESL learners do not have much schooling in their home country, and therefore, lack appropriate study skills important for academic success.
Consequently, English as a Second Language (ESL) has become the fastest growing segment in federally funded adult education programs (Pugsley, 1998). Census data, of the 26.4 million immigrants in the U.S., almost 80 percent are adults (Starr, 2001). 1 The Internet TESL Journal Teaching Adult ESL Learners Yi Yang Massachusetts Department of Education (Massachusetts, USA) This is an article about the author's experience teaching a class of immigrants to the United States of America and a description of some of the techniques the author used.
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