#teachingadults

Lessons from a year of teaching adults. A YL teacher looks back.

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The bigger picture

A great majority of the time that I have spent in the classroom as a teacher has been with young learners, those aged 3 and those aged almost 18. I have worked with adults, too, both beginners and advanced, exam and general or business English, in EFL and in teacher training, and here and there. However, there is no doubt that if I ever had to choose between these two, I would always choose kids. This is what I like most of all, this is where I can be really creative, this is where I find the challenge and the pleasure.

Over those 11 years that I spent as the ADOS and the YL and VYL Coordinator at BKC IH Moscow all my classes were kids’ classes, with a few exceptions of random cover and summer classes. It became kind of a joke between me and my brain, to pose the same question, every single August, when the new academic year was approaching, ‘Well, maybe I will ask the timetabling department for some adult classes this year?’. I never did, not once over those 11 years. Mostly because it quickly turned into making a choice between teaching my kids who I taught for a few years and taking on some new, unknown adults. I just wasn’t interested enough. Simple as that.

However, last year, a few unsolicited changes were introduced into my life and I went to in the motherland, picking up the pieces. As a result, I switched to the online, became a freelancer for a year, and found myself with a timetable in which about 80% of classes were with adult learners.

Now also this chapter in my life has come to an end and I could pack it up, label it as ‘mission complete’ and move on to reflecting on it. Hence this post.

I am a YL teacher and even though the changes were unsolicited, I really did make an effort to make the most of it and to find something that I could put on both sides of the chart. I took four months to write that post but it is finally here.

The highlights aka making the lemonade of all these lemons

First and foremost, the real hightlight of this year was the ability to impart knowledge and to rejoice the fact that the students were making progress, becoming more accurate, more fluent and more confident about their English, those who were beginners and those who were advanced, each of them was progressing and improving. Although, it has to be said, that it is the general highlight of teaching English. Your students’ achievements are a source of joy and happiness, and it has got nothing to do with their age group.

In the same vein, it was very rewarding to be receiving a positive feedback from my adult students, although again, that is always true and it has nothing to do with how old the students are.

It was an interesting experience for me as a teacher and as a human to work with students coming from a variety of professional backgrounds, true experts in their own area, be if finances, IT, banking, coaching, psychology, food manufacturing, car manufacturing or printing and. I was a kind of a privilege to become a part of their professional world and to learn about it, about the area, about the corporate world and about my own country, too, in a way. I met many interesting people and we got on, well or very well with some of them. Some of the lessons, apart from being a good product, were also lots of fun.

That also means that my resume looks even prettier than before because apart from the plethora of achievements in the area of YL EFL, I also have a nice paragraph about Business English and corporate English and a long list of high-profile companies that I have worked with.

I suppose that for me, personally, the most exciting part was the fact that, although, seemingly, I was like a fish out water, in a new area, in which I had less experience than in YL EFL and, in many ways, out of the box, I could find my way there. Teaching Business English, teaching Banking and Finance, teaching corporate English (which is the term that I personally coined for the general English classes in a corporate environment in which the traditional materials related to travelling, health etc are not the best) in a way that was effective and interesting for the students and also interesting for me was a challenge and I am proud to say that I did rock it. Over this whole year, I created and adapted materials, I experiemented with different techniques and resources and, as a material creator and a planner, I did have fun and I developed a lot. Hooray to that!

The other lights aka ‘Breathe, Anka, breathe’

I have to admit that, despite the whole year and a lot of opportunities for developing this particular skill, I (still) find it difficult to deal with the adults in class revealing their inner child. Naturally, I am trying to be a professional and I have a lot of patience and understanding. However, when something like that happens, I quickly become aware of how much of my resources and energy, I use up to deal with these situations. How thin is the ice on which I am walking.

For example, there were the situations in which the students would get stuck and who would give up instantly, even before they have even tried to do anything at all and even before the teacher even got a chance to explain, to scaffold and to support. This would happen regardless of the level, with some beginner, some pre-intermediate or some upper-intermediate students and what would trigger me especially effectively was the defensive ‘It’s so difficult‘, ‘I don’t understand‘ or ‘I don’t know‘, not when it is merely a piece of information signalling a problem but when it is used as a more polite version of ‘I will not do it. No. No. No!‘.

The same applies to the insecurity related to learning a foreign language, the lack of confidence in own skills and the fear of making a mistake, especially if they are paired up with a position in the company and age. Praising, reassurance and support, something that is easy and absolutely natural when it comes to kids or teenagers, all of a sudden becomes a real task requiring conscious effort and focus in the classroom with adults. I would like to believe that over the course of the year I got better at managing such situations and managing myself in such situations. It was interesting to realise that my patience batteries go flat much faster with adults than they do with kids.

Another thing that I found out about after a few months of teaching these groups was that peace and quiet in the classroom is not my favourite kind of environment and that, fortunately or unfortunately, I thrive in commotion, in noise, in a whirlwind, in a mess that is so typical of YL classes. Teaching my adults I found out that peace and quiet quickly leads to stillness and that quickly leads to routine and that leads to something dangerously close to boredom…I feel really guilty saying it because many of my students were amazing people, fun and intelligent but I have to admit that there were a few occasions in class when I would be teaching, listening, taking notes of all the emergent language and, on the margin, writing down notes for the lessons with kids because my brain would get bored and start wandering and coming up with ideas.

Last but definitely not least, there is also the question of oversharing. As a teacher of a language I do spend a lot of my days and weeks getting people ready to communicate. Naturally, what all the students are really interested in communicating as the things related to their life, private and professional, their opinions and views. However, sometimes it gets a little bit out of control and the conversation with the teacher may turn into a conversation with a friend or a barman or even a therapist. Personally, I do not feel comfortable with it because we are not friends, this relationship should remain within some professional framework. I don’t really feel comfortable with sharing any details about my life and, even more so, I don’t feel comfortable with receiving someone else’s emotional load, even if it is done in English. It doesn’t mean that we don’t share at all but there were quite a few occasions in which I felt the line was being crossed and some contingency plans had to implemented. Although, again, perhaps this is another thing that needs to be worked on and a skill to develop.

This paragraph will finish with an anecdote (for that is what that has become): Monday, evening, the end of a very hot day in July, the last lesson with a 1-1 professional in the area that will remain unnamed. We say hello, how are you, the student switches off the camera and it is only after a while that I notice that, due to the temperature, he chose to appear in class without any garments covering his upper body. I said nothing mostly because of the shock I was in, thinking ‘Well, there you go. I bet you not a single one of my kids would think that it is ok to arrive in such a state to a lesson. Even my teens have the decency to switch off the camera when they don’t want to be seen…’

Anyway, as I was clambering out of the state of shock, getting on with the lesson and coming up with different courses of action and when I had just decided to send the student an email after the lesson to ask him to either wear a t-shirt or study without the camera on in the future, all of a sudden my student switched off the camera and, after a few minutes, reappeared in a t-shirt. I suppose that even though I said nothing and even though I did my best to keep on my professional demeanour, there must have been something in my face that send out the right message. And it never happened again.

Coda

I don’t want this post to be a simple exercise of weighing advantages and disadvantages. This is an account of my personal experience and both things are true:

  • this past year of teaching adults (almost) full-time was an interesting experience and when I look back I still smile thinking about some of the lessons and some of my amazing students and although a teacher should not have any favourites, I wish I could wave from here to all of them but especially the amazing IT people, all the boys and all the girls.
  • although this can change in the future, right here and right now, I am a teacher of young learners.

If you are interesting in reading a little more on that, here are some other posts inspired by this year of teaching adults: the first impressions from the YL teacher who went back into the adult classroom, what my adult students could learn from my kids, and a whole series on discourse development tricks that was created during that year. I would still like to write a proper post on the corporate English but that will have to wait until the following weeks…

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #52 Discourse development: All your thinking hats

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Ingredients

  • A set of cards with opinions, for example those that have been used with adults or those that have been used with teenagers.
  • A list of the discourse tricks displayed on the board or on the screen (see below) if the activity is done in pairs OR a set of six thinking hats if you want the students to debate in groups of 3 – 6 people. I have created two versions of these here and here. If you are interested in the orignal thinking hats that this activity was inspired by, you can start here.

Procedures

  • Pairs: student A expresses an opinion which, in the earlier stages, can be limited to only reading the opinion off the list or cards) whereas student B reacts to it using one of the approaches. Afterwards, they swap roles. It is good to highlight that student B has to use a different approach in every round.
  • Small groups: student A expresses an opinion (see above) and the other students in the group react in accordance with the hat that they are wearing in this round. Afterwards, they swap roles and the new hats are assigned. In the original activity, in the real classroom, we have been using dice. In the online world these have to be replaced with the wordwall spinner.
  • Regardless of the format, it is better to play the first few rounds with the whole class and with the active participation of the teacher to show the students that it is in fact easy to switch from one hat to the other and that the hats really help to generate ideas.

Why we like it

  • The main aim of this kind of an activity is for the students to develop the habit of reacting to what their interlocutors say and to give them a range to tools (or tricks) to contribute and to develop the contributions of other students. Hopefully, with time, my students will be able to participate in a debate and opinion exchange without any support of the spinner or the display.
  • This activity also encourages the students to listen to what their peers are saying. This has been more useful with the teenagers and juniors who are more likely to space out and start daydreaming in class.
  • The list of all the tricks can be limited to only the two basic ones (I agree / I disagree) and, later on, when the students are ready, further extended.
  • The wordwall spinner in the online classroom was a bit time-consuming for my liking but it turned out to be very beneficial for my shy / withdrawn / panicky adult students because it gave them the additional time to think and to assume the new role. Later on, we were able to switch to a simple list which served only as a reminder of all the options out there.
  • The same goes for the whole class and teacher participation. With some of my adult groups, I had to be involved more in the beginning, to model both the activity itself (to help with the speaker’s block (does it even exist) and, at the same time, to model the ways of getting involved in a debate. Otherwise, they would be just ‘politely’ waiting to be nominated to speak, even at the C1 level.
  • I have been using these with my adult groups and with my young learners, too, with teens and with juniors, when appropriate.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #46. Case studies aka My new favourite thing

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Preface

It’s been almost ten months since I took on more adult classes. I still teach my kids but the balance of adult EFL to YL EFL has definitely been tilted towards the adult classes. While I take a lot of pleasure in teaching 18+, I am hoping that this is only a temporary fixture because I miss my classroom and my carpet. At the same time, YL or not YL, I still get ideas and I want to share them. So, here we are – the first post in the Category: Adults.

Case studies in the EFL. A bite of theory

‘Case studies, a form of task based learning (TBL), allow teachers to implement the communicative approach: the central focus is on completing a task, and students use language as a tool to communicate their ideas instead of doing language exercises to practise a grammar point or lexical item’. This definition comes from Christine Roell’s 2019 article (see references) and it is a piece I’d recommend to anyone who is looking for some theoretical input and ideas on creating and using case studies in the EFL.

There are many arguments for including case studies but for me, personally, the priority has to be given to the fact that they create an opportunity for the development of a variety of skills, the language itself but also critical thinking, organising information and team work (Daly, 2002). Among the disadvantages that Roell mentions, the most important one would probably be the time and the effort that needs to be invested in finding, researching and preparing a case study for the class use.

According to Roell, a case study lesson follows the following six stages: introduction of the situation (relevant information, background, the necessary vocabulary), analysis of the additional information, discussion in small teams, presentation of ideas, teacher-led feedback session and reflection, both on the case study itself and the procedures in the lesson. In the article you can also find some valuable notes regarding the creation and implementation of a case study in the lesson.

Case studies in my classes aka the notes from a beginner case study creator’s diary

  • An indispensable connection to reality as all the case studies that I write and use have been taken from the real life, either from the news or from my personal experience. On the one hand that means that the case study is realistic, based on the facts and numbers. On the other hand, that automatically introduces ‘the answer’, which is not only a reward for the students but also allows for another layer of the feedback session: not only the students’ ideas, reflections and solutions but also the opportunity to analyse their ideas against the real life developments. These ‘real’ case studies were definitely a lot more popular among my students than the made-up case studies from the few coursebooks that I have used recently.
  • A more obvious focus on the target language use which I try to create, in order to give the students a chance to practise specific structures or vocabulary. Naturally, he students have a lot of freedom, however, the case studies are introduced in the freer practice part of the lesson and they come with the Structures To Use section.
  • The bare minimum as regards the data to analyse. This, partially at least, has been due to the implications of the lesson format (online, limited lesson time, corporate clients who very rarely have time to do the homework etc). I have been choosing only the case studies that do not require any extensive reading and that can still be effective and generative even with a small number of facts and figures.
  • The element of surprise as the actual details, ie names and brands are kept secret until the very end of the activity, in order to make sure that the students focus on the situation and the processes, rather than on specific names. It is also to ensure that they are motivated to discuss and debate, rather than just look up the events online.
  • The adaptability as an added bonus. So far, as demonstrated below, it has been possible to smuggle particular case studies into different lessons, by changing the angle and the target language to use. This means that the time invested in researching and designing the case study really pays off for the teacher.
  • A wider audience. It has been suggested by Daly (2002) that the most important target customer for the EFL case studies are the advanced Business English students but this has not been my experience. If adapted and staged properly, they can be used with the low B1 students and I have used them successfully with the Business English students, with the general English students with the corporate background and in general English ‘regular’ classes, too. The reason for that is that the students had a lot of background knowledge and could relate to the situation not only as the CEO of a company but also as the film audience members or the pizza restaurant customers.

5 case studies from my classes

Most of the ideas below come from my adult EFL classes in the last two months.

Case study: Kanye West and Addidas

Source: the news and especially the two posts, here and here.

Lessons: We have used it in lessons to discuss risk and risk management, brand image and reputation and general values. The main grammar structure here was the first conditional as the students discussed from the point at which no decision has been made yet.

Case study: Domino’s Pizza

Source: Domino’s Pizza Turnaround available on youtube created with the owners and Domino’s employees and the analysis of a great, albeit risky, marketing campaign in 2009.

Lessons: We have used it in lessons to discuss marketing and advertising (EAP) as well as in the BE and general English students in lessons on: risk, brand image and reputation. As regards grammar, our main focus were modal verbs for deduction, giving advice, conditionals.

Case study: Starbucks and racism

Source: the news such as the Guardian and here

Lessons: This was the main case study we used in the lessons on brand image and reputation and, as regards the language, our main focus was the language of advice.

Case study: The Shawshank Redemption

Source: the wikipedia and the related articles such as this one

Lessons: This is a really fascinating case because, after over thirty years after its release, it is still one of the popular films ever despite the fact that, initially, it was considered to be a flop. We used it in the lesson devoted to risk management and the focus was the first conditional (‘Imagine you are the CEO of the studio. What will you do?’) and the second conditional, with the contemporary twist (‘What would they do today, in 2022?’).

Case study: Famous people

Source: The news, unsourced, google images for the photographs of some famous representatives for the following professions: a chef, a sports coach, a ballerina, a politician, a writer, a CEO. The only trick here is to choose the names that the students in your country are less likely to be familiar with and the photographs that show them in their private life. The real names and professions of all the people involved are kept secret until the very end of the activity.

Lessons: This is one of my favourite activities that I have managed to adapt to the needs of my older YL students. It got inspired by an activity that I saw in one of the Rewards Resource Pack, only the original activity did not include the element of reality. For that reason, I have decided to use my own ‘characters’. With the teens and juniors, the main language focus is the modal verbs for deduction and the vocabulary necessary to describe the character and the personality. With the adults, we extend it towards a discussion on stereotypes and the ways of overcoming them. Here is an example of the set that I have used with my adult students in Poland.

References

Peter Daly, Methodology for using case studies in the Business English classroom, The Internet TESL Journal, III / 11, 2002, available online

Lynne Hand, Using case studies in the ESL classroom, LeoNetwork, available online.

Christine Roell, Using a case study in the EFL Classroom, English Teaching Forum, 2019, available online

Happy teaching!