MATERIALS FOR ADULT

BEGINNERS FROM AN L2

USER PERSPECTIVE.

Italian French English

3 ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE TEACHING MATERIALS FOR ADULTS:

1. Adult students have adult mind and interests:

The adult coursebook is catering for people who do not think, speak, learn or behave in the same way as children.

ADULT STUDENTS HAVE ADULT MINDS AND INTERESTS

The adultness of the students has consequences for the coursebook which has to maintain the interest of people who often have particular reasons for studying a new language, adult interests, social relationships and level of intelligence.

THE TYPES OF STUDENTS AIMED AT

To visualize the types of students the coursebooks are intended for one needs to look at the characters they feature and the topics they are about.

THE TOPICS DISCUSSED

The topics that students have to talk about during the course should be interesting and also should enable them to use the second language for their goals.

POPULAR TOPICS: Introducing people Making plans and arrangements Tourisim Identifying and describing people Parties Discussion Food

SUGGESTION 1: MATERIALS AIMED SHOULD BE ADULT IN THEME, TEACHING METHOD AND LANGUAGE

Adultness has consequences for coursebooks.

Talking about Adult Topics. The topics have to be explorable to an

adult level of conversation. Soap operas, gardening and house

design, sports.

ENGAGING IN THE ADULT ACTIVITIES Willis describes 6

main types of tasks:

o Listingo Ordering and sortingo Comparing o Problem solvingo Sharing personal

experienceo Creative

Atlas: • Matching • Clasifying • Conversational

patterns• Cooperating Changes:• Giving directions

Panorama:• Body parts

Libre Echange:• Comparing individuals

Learning a second language infantilizes people.

To justify infantilization we can use the scaffolding from Vigotsky.

2. Second language users are people in their own right:

L2 users are not just monolingual native speakers with an additional language but people with new strenghts and abilities.

SECOND LANGUAGE USERS ARE PEOPLE IN THEIR OWN RIGHT

Adoption of the Native Speaker Goal

Succes is measure by how close the students get to a native speaker norm.

Native speakers speak differently when a non-native speaker is around.

SUGGESTION 2: MATERIALS BASED ON THE L2 USER PERSPECTIVE AIMED AT ADULTS SHOULD REFLECT THE SITUATIONS, ROLES AND LANGUAGE OF L2 USERS, NOT JUST NATIVE SPEAKERS.

User Roles

A good motivation factor for the L2 learners are famous people who has learn another language for their own purposes.

USER SITUATIONSWe need to see every day situation in which L2 users are successfully dealing with each other or with native speakers.

USER TARGET LANGUAGE Klein and Perdue (1997) have indeed

established a basic variety of grammar that learners of of several L2s go through which shows what the grammatical target language of an L2 user – based beginners course might look like

Corpora and descriptions of native speech are secondary information for L2 user based approach.

THE TYPES OF SITUATION PORTRAYED English and Italian students based :-the language school digs and tourist traveling and shooping find their way around the town go to parties , meet people

In the French courses: street life , entretainment and sport drink in cafes , go to the cinemas and discos date each other

3. Language teaching has been held back by unquestioning acceptance of traditional nineteenth-century principles:

The principles of the priority of speech and the avoidance of the first language.

LANGUAGE TEACHING HAS BEEN HELD BACK BY NOT QUESTIONING TRADITIONAL NINETEENTH CENTURY PRINCIPLES

Language teaching taboos , such as the mother tongue, grammar , the printed an written word , which have affected our teachers with over – sized guilt complexes, are nothing but superstitions handed down from one innocent victim to the next´(Dodson , 1967:65)

RELIANCE ON THE FIRST LANGUAGE The writers have adopted the nineteenth –

century injunction to avoid the first language

The point about L2 users is that the two languages are always present in the same mind , one language cannot be totally switched off when the other is being used , wether in term of vocabulary (Beauvillain and Grainger 1987) syntax (Cook1994) phonology (Obler 1982) or pragmatics (Locastro 1987).

EMPHASIS ON THE SPOKEN LANGUAGEChanges & Atlas emphasize Listening Speaking Reading Writting

In Atlas written language is mostly used to represent spoken dialogues or to provide cues , list etc.

Libre echange &ci siamo provide more use of informative texts poems , many of the exercises involve reading aloud , wheteher of sentences into which the student has inserted words

TEACHING METHODS CAN GO BEYOND THE PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE TEACHING FAMILIAR SINCE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Use the first language is countenanced in the classroom it can be used to give instructions and explanations to increase L2 practice to link L1 and L2 knowledge firmly together in the students minds to help collaborative dialogue with fellow students and to encourage L2 activities such as code switching for later real life use .

CONVEYING MEANING

Audiolingualism & audiovisualism is how the teacher presents the meaning of the language to the students, whether of words , functions & grammatical structures

Most course books provide little help with presentation & acquisition of meaning (pictures of concrete objects are provide & some explanation of grammatical meaning)

EXPLANING GRAMMAR Technique of FonF – focus on form – has

brought grammatical explantion back into the classroom as a follow-on from other activities , the discussion in, say, Dougty & williams (1998)

GIVING INSTRUCTIONS AND TESTS The loss would be certain amount of

genuine communication with the students through the second language , the gain would be not only the students being able follow the instructions more swiftly but also a greater complexity of activities and up wpuld no longer get in the way

USING WITHIN TEACHING ACTIVITIES Without going back to undesirable forms of

translation activities , the course books could include activities where the students deliberately have to use both languages , say through code switching as in the new concurrent method (jacobson & faltis, 1990)

Explain to each other check their understanding Production of language(all in the first

language )

USE OF THE LANGUAGE IN THE COURSEBOOK

The existing provision of written language in the coursebooks for supporting spoken exercises , as scripts of spoken dialogues as fill in , sentences and forms or as short informative texts , coursebooks need to teach the distinctive feature of the written language , the basic elements of the english writing system in terms of spelling , orthography, direction of writing etc. Need to be built in to the beginners course in one way or another