scholarly journals Third-Age Learners and Approaches to Language Teaching

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 310
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Kacetl ◽  
Blanka Klímová

Foreign language learning in the third age is one of the popular activities among the elderly. The question remains as to how to teach a foreign language to older adults properly. The first objective of this review was to identify suitable pedagogical approaches, teaching methods, or strategies for teaching foreign languages to third-age learners. The second objective was to determine whether foreign language learning later in life is beneficial. The authors used a method of literature review to achieve these goals. The former objective was not fully achieved as there is no clear outcome, although some generalizations based on other review studies can be made. Namely, foreign language teaching among the older generation should be student-centred and a communicative method should be implemented with a special focus on talking about familiar topics and listening comprehension to facilitate a senior’s foreign language learning. In addition, the teaching methods ought to incorporate real life experiences and provide relevant content. Respect should also be paid to the fact that older adults have intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation to learn a foreign language. The latter objective was attained since older people can benefit from learning a foreign language at a later age in many ways, including areas like travelling, social inclusiveness, improvement of cognitive skills, and overall well-being.

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2 (2)) ◽  
pp. 101-105
Author(s):  
Mariana Karapetyan

While developing foreign language teaching methods for adult students aged 17-20, it is necessary to take into account not only teaching and learning related issues, but also a number of principles which are connected with adult teaching. The article discusses a set of issues connected with foreign language teaching methodology with view of not only the specific features of the foreign language teaching methods for adults but also the theories that attach importance to the factor of emotions in the teaching process. The article attempts to combine a foreign language teaching and learning with the theory of game. The aim of the research is to reveal how games contribute to the improvement of foreign language teaching and learning.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Diego Ortega-Auquilla ◽  
Uvaldo Recino Pineda

Communicative-oriented  language teaching methodologies need to have a central role in the current foreign language education. In fact, language teachers are expected to shift away from traditional language teaching methods that have proven to be ineffective for language learning. Nowadays, a movement, which favors and embraces interaction, communication, and negotiation of meaning, is growing in language education; therefore, pre-service and in-service teachers of English need to be responsive to and become aware of the importance of these key aspects. With these notions in mind, the present article can be seen as a contribution  to help language teachers gain an understanding of key theoretical notions related to the emergence of communicative language teaching and its most well-known methods – CLT and TBLT. Additionally, this work analyzed CLT and TBLT as these two language teaching methods are not opposing but in line with the communicative  approach. The importance of implementing communicative-oriented lessons into the English classroom was also examined. In this sense, a table made up of specific guidelines was elaborated by using works of leading experts in language teaching and learning. The table is intended to help teachers to be better equipped to design and implement  TBLT lessons into the classroom, which may have a positive impact  on foreign language learning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 110
Author(s):  
Evis Kapurani

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an interactive method which helps learning English language through communication, in a theoretical point of view CLT is a more effective method compared with traditional methods such as Grammar Translation Method and Audio lingual Method, and it is a preferred method to be used nowadays in foreign language learning. This is a descriptive study which aims to analyze and discover the 9-year elementary schools students’ opinions and points of view about learning a foreign language based on the principles of contemporary interactive student-centered methods and traditional ones. It is introduced a theoretical analyses about methods of language teaching in general, characteristics description and principles of CLT, accuracy and fluency in CLT, teacher and student role, communicative competence, CLT application, significance, impact, comparison of CLT with traditional methods. The data are collected from students of 9-year elementary schools on sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grades through a survey questionnaire. Questions on the questionnaire are focused on finding students’ opinions and points of view about language learning in a certain context in practice, according to their needs and preferences on learning a language based on CLT premises about communication, accuracy, fluency, learning grammar and vocabulary, teacher roles etc. and principles of other traditional methods. Results are converted into percentages which show students preferences about the way they are used to, need and want to learn a foreign language and with which principles of the foreign language teaching methods they agree or not. Findings are described and analyzed according to their relation with theoretical issues. From the analyses it results that using CLT may prove to be a very successful method in both learning and teaching because students welcome the principles used in this method despite their “attachment” to the principles of previous teaching methods that they are used to.


2019 ◽  
pp. 111-116
Author(s):  
Dorota Matsumoto

The third age in the life of many people in developed countries is considered to be a culmination; time for personal achievement and fulfilment after retirement. While much discussion is focused on the challenges of an ageing society, there are also opportunities. Popularity of language courses among third-agers, who do not seek further career advancement nor wish to live abroad, indicates that there are other aspects of learning a foreign language than attaining linguistic proficiency. This qualitative study will investigate third-agers’ perceptions, behaviours and emotions experienced when learning a foreign language, and how such experience contributes to their well-being. Through the lens of positive psychology, especially by exploring the concept of savouring, this study will aim to gain insights into how third-agers conceptualize their learning experience, what their savouring capacities are, and what impact these have on their overall well-being. First, an in-depth interview was conducted with a senior lifelong language learner. In the study that will follow, more data will be collected in a snowball fashion through personal connections.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blanka Klimova ◽  
Marcel Pikhart ◽  
Anna Cierniak-Emerych ◽  
Szymon Dziuba ◽  
Krzysztof Firlej

Positive psychology has recently seen unprecedented rise and has reached vast achievements in the area of quality of life (QoL) improvement. The purpose of this study is to show that there are different aspects of well-being that make healthy older people motivated to learn a foreign language at a later age. The research was conducted in the Czech Republic and Poland in two groups of learners aged 55 years and more. The experimental group consisted of 105 Czech respondents who were targeted with an online questionnaire with the aim to determine the level of FLL outcomes connected to QoL in healthy older adults in their L2 acquisition. The second experimental group (n = 100) was established of Polish seniors who attended similar language courses. The findings of the research clearly show that FLL has an irreplaceable role as one of several non-pharmacological strategies utilized to improve the aging process and reduce drawbacks of aging. The results indicate that seniors' overall satisfaction and subjective feelings of well-being are enormously high when attending foreign language classes at older age. FLL, therefore, creates an environment that can enhance QoL of older adults that can be supplemented by other means such as well-balanced diet, other social activities, sport and physical activity, music, or computer games. All these intervention methods can significantly improve QoL of older adults and the parties engaged and/or responsible for taking care of older generation should take it into serious consideration.


Author(s):  
Olena Ivashko

The article tackles the problem of teaching foreign languages to seniors. The general trends in FL education for the third-age learners are outlined. The institutions in which seniors can study foreign languages in Poland are enumerated. The psychological, physiological, methodological and social peculiarities of teaching a foreign language to the third agers are analyzed. Special emphasis is laid upon educational needs of the Third Age learners. Some language learning strategies which help seniors’ foreign language learning are suggested.


2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-433

The Editor and Board of Language Teaching are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2014 Christopher Brumfit thesis award is Dr Hilde van Zeeland. The thesis was selected by an external panel of judges based on its significance to the field of second language acquisition, second or foreign language learning and teaching, originality and creativity and quality of presentation.


Pragmatics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-227
Author(s):  
Chad Nilep

Ethnographic study of Hippo Family Club, a foreign language learning club in Japan with chapters elsewhere, reveals a critique of foreign language teaching in Japanese schools and in the commercial English conversation industry. Club members contrast their own learning methods, which they view as “natural language acquisition”, with the formal study of grammar, which they see as uninteresting and ineffective. Rather than evaluating either the Hippo approach to learning or the teaching methods they criticize, however, this paper considers the ways of thinking about language that club members come to share. Members view the club as a transnational organization that transcends the boundaries of the nation-state. Language learning connects the club members to a cosmopolitan world beyond the club, even before they interact with speakers of the languages they are learning. The analysis of club members’ ideologies of language and language learning illuminates not only the pragmatics of language use, but practices and outcomes of socialization and shared social structures.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 273
Author(s):  
Muzakki Bashori

The integration of computer in the service of FL (Foreign Language) learning is expected to be inevitable in the future. It is seemingly due to (a) its considerable affordances for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, (b) the characteristics of today�s learners as the Generation Z (Gonz�lez-Lloret & Ortega, 2014), and (c) the widespread use of the internet in the 21st century. This situation then leads to transforming CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) into WFLL (Web-Facilitated Language Learning) as an alternative paradigm for EFL teachers and learners. Furthermore, TBLT (Task-Based Language Teaching) is likely to serve as a pedagogical framework in designing the Web for the purpose of FL learning. The present study was therefore mainly aimed at (a) developing a particularly teacher-designed learning website, namely I Love Indonesia, and (b) investigating high school learners of English in Indonesia with different attitudes towards CALL (positive/moderate/negative) in correlation with how they perceive WFLL (agree/disagree) and perform web-based activities. Descriptive Statistics, IF Function in Excel, Correlation Analysis, and Independent-samples t-test were employed in the study. Finally, the findings of the study showed that (a) the website seems to benefit EFL learners in some certain aspects, and (b) positive attitude learners are likely to perceive more positively (agree) than moderate and negative attitude learners (disagree) on the use of the website for the purpose of language learning. A greater number of learners over a longer period of time should be taken into account when conducting further studies on the effectiveness of the website for EFL learners in order to be able to shed some light on learners� language development.�Keyword: attitude, perception, task-based language teaching, web-facilitated language learning


Author(s):  
Hui Su

AbstractSince China’s reform and opening up, foreign language teaching (FLT) in China has achieved rapid development under the guidance of foreign language teaching theories both at home and abroad. However, problems such as ‘time-consuming and inefficient foreign language learning’ and the presence of ‘dumb foreign languages’ in FLT in China have not been fundamentally solved. Based on Whitehead’s process philosophy, this research aims to put forward feasible solutions to the existing problems in FLT in China so that the level of FLT in China can be promoted by discussing the purpose, contents, processes and stages of FLT and the relationship between teachers and students in both FLT and FLT evaluation systems.


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