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Monday, February 8, 2016

HALINA'S LEARNING, TEACHING AND MUCH MORE....: Teaching English Adults

HALINA'S LEARNING, TEACHING AND MUCH MORE....: Teaching English Adults: When we decide to teach adults, the awareness, as well as comprehension of whom we teach and what we teach, is essential here...

Teaching English Adults




When we decide to teach adults, the awareness, as well as comprehension of whom we teach and what we teach, is essential here.


1)     Adults do not want to waste the time.

Some adults take language courses because of a job requirement while others have their specific goal to attain (such as a language exam or a professional interview ).
Adults expect direct, practical benefit. All of them will raise the similar questions
·        Why,
·        What for,
·        How,
·        Who (is my teacher?),
·         What else could I achieve instead?
·         Is the time well spent?
All lessons must have a clear outcome, perhaps even a practical takeaway. It is necessary to define specific profits at the end of the lesson and associate the benefits to the individual learning purposes.
2)     Adults are reflective learners; they think about
·       what is challenging or where I require more support
·       individual learning strategies and self-evaluation
·       maintaining a sense of responsibility for learning and achieving goals  
3)  Motivation is varied, and flexibility is crucial.

Teachers have to be flexible and ready for different approaches, wide-ranging content or even unconventional paths to lead to the same goal.
Creating a context for meaningful learning is one of the tasks.
4) Mature students feel the need for direct benefit as well as dominant language skills.

·        Learners are looking for a solution to an exact problem at hand, immediately.
·       The fundamental question is: “What should I do to get this to work?”
·        Mature learners usually want to accomplish a particular task, or at least, see a noticeable benefit for the future.
·       Adults want to use language for a real-world reason.
5) The different abilities of adult learners are evident.
I am against using grammar tables, linguistic terms and other abstractions in language teaching. However, if they can help the grown-up learner why do not explain the grammar rules?

Friday, February 5, 2016

Fiddler on the roof - If I were a rich man (with subtitles)




The song is broken into four verses, with a bridge between the third and fourth and a chorus sung at the beginning of the song, and after the second and fourth verses.
Musically, it is written in a Jewish klezmer style.
Through the first two verses, Tevye dreams of the material comforts that wealth would bring him. Sung boisterously and comedically, Tevye first considers the enormous house he would buy and the needless luxuries he would fill it with, including a third staircase "leading nowhere, just for show," then the poultry he would buy to fill his yard.
Tevye switches his attention to the luxuries in which he would shower his wife, Golde, in the third verse. He talks of servants to alleviate her workload, fancy clothes for her pleasure, and mountains of food. The song is sung in the same boisterous, comedic style.
The music and vocals intensify during the bridge, when Tevye starts lamenting his place in the community as a lowly milkman, and considers the esteem and importance that wealth would bring him.
In the final verse, Tevye softens as he further considers his devotion to God. He expresses his sorrow that the long working hours he keeps prevents him from spending as much time in the synagogue as he would like, and how wealth would allow him to spend less time working and more time praying and studying the Torah, and finally asking God if "it would spoil a vast eternal plan" if he were wealthy.
A repeated phrase throughout the song, "all day long I'd bidi-bidi-bum," is often misunderstood to refer to Tevye's desire not to have to work. However, in an interview with Terry Gross, Sheldon Harnick said he basically made up syllables that he thought would give the effect of Chassidic chanting. The first person to play Tevye, Zero Mostel, then replaced the syllables Harnick had written with ones that Mostel thought would be more authentic