Teaching older learners

I have always had a rapport with older people; growing up as a child of a geriatric social worker, I was "voluntold" to play music for populations living in retirement homes and nursing homes. In addition, I am fortunate to have been raised to respect my elders.  So, it is not surprising that at a certain point in my language teaching career, it would occur to me that older learners should have teachers that specialize in helping them to achieve their potential as language speakers and listeners.

Having often taught learners over 60 throughout my music and language teaching experience,  I have recently been doing research - both linguistic and general - on older learners' cognitive profiles.  There are many concepts and techniques that I have put on my mental list when I teach learners over a certain age; not because they are inferior, but because they just need different techniques sometimes than younger learners. 

Often, our hearing does not have the same frequency range as we age, which can make hearing the different intonation and even vowel pitches difficult.  In addition, our brains become so full of knowledge that we can be cognitively overloaded.  The biggest take away, though, that I have gained is that older learners really need to feel like they are making progress and that they are good enough to be learning a language in the first place.  Eroded confidence is the biggest detractor from acquiring the language.  In linguistics we talk about the affective filter: the level of emotion that either allows or disallows our brain access to acquisition of language.  When our emotions are too high,  we cannot learn well.  A good teacher makes the language learning experience very low stakes and so fun and engaging that the students doesn't even think it's a class!

Another take away from research and empirical classroom experience is that older adults have tons of life experience and have often figured out strategies to get through life; they use these to also learn language.  In addition, the amount of native language they have acquired helps them to grasp concepts in the target language that younger learners can't, due to a lack of knowledge.

I find that patience is the biggest quality we teachers need when helping older learners to acquire the language, as they can be much more deliberate and thoughtful with output.

The research that I have done confirms all of this, and recommends that in addition to taking into account all of the above elements, we make sure that we adjust fonts to be highly visible, maker sure that listening activities are played at a volume that is accessible and that as with any learner we vary the mode of input (print, sound and movement).