Helen wrote in asking:
Hello again Richard,
I’ve started teaching an elderly person English who has a good understanding but is a bit timid .
Any ideas! Â I can’t really see her doing the disco warm-up!!!
Many thanks
Here’s my reply:
From what I’ve experienced, retirees tend to fall into two camps, one are the groups of genki-as-anything-will-beat-each-other-up-in-games old ladies – this is the type I always used to test my games out on first! Â (Be careful, they can be more violent than any first graders!)
And the on other hand it sounds here you might have a “false beginner” who knows lots but just needs the confidence to speak.
As with any class I’d first of all do a needs analysis to find out exactly what the goals of the lesson are (Foreign trip coming up? Want to keep their mind active and stimulated? Â Just want to get out of the house?) and then build from there.
My “more serious” old ladies used to want to do things like festivals or stuff from the news so I used to print out stories from the net and work with those. Â Usually though it just ended up as a chat, which they were happy with (although it made me focus more on kids where we could make more progress!)
There are also a couple of good exercises in my Success Secrets of Learning English course that might help, especially the waking up and going to sleep diaries. Â I find these great for adult classes as they give you a lot of material to work with that is very personalised i.e. the student is usually very motivated to learn it.
Other than that I don’t have much!
What are everyone else’s top tips for this age group?
P.S. I’m a little behind with my emails at the moment, you’ll hopefully see why very soon!
P.P.S. Â If any of you are wondering where Grandpa Monkey is …
Hi Helen!
I am also struggling a little doing a conversation class with 2 ladies and a man in their 50s. It is so much harder than my boistrous kingergarten groups!! The man is shy and obviously feels very awkward. When he is not there then the conversation flows more easily, but still not great. The things that have worked best so far were looking at and asking questions about each others holiday photos, looking through recipes in english and discussing the ingredients and cooking techniques, putting lots of questions (so far about the topics home, internet, have you ever.., childhood, work) into a lucky dip box, and taking it in turns to pull one out, read it, understand it, and answer it.
If you come up with any other good ideas, I’d love to hear back from you! Hope that might help,
Charlie
My husband (69) & I (65) are both TEFL trained teachers, but we also just went to Panama to learn Spanish. We both worked with 1 teacher for 2 hrs & then we each had a private teacher for an hour every day, for 4 weeks. What we found we liked the best was: 1) relevancy to what we wanted Spanish for (travel & survival) and 2) games…like hangman, matching card games of Spanish/English adjectives/adverbs, or opposites. The games gave us a chance to have fun after we were tired of learning grammar rules. Making sure we had lots of different activities was the KEY!! THANKS for your suggestions!
Thank you Ann! It is always so good to hear things from the students’ side of things! Do check out Michel Thomas Spanish if you ever go back there!
Thanks a million for your constant help that give us so hard to be better every day, and all that without even know us personally.
You are our inspiration.
Take care,
Maria