Materials for Adult Beginners from an L2 User Perspective .

1. MaterialsforAdultBeginnersfroman L2 UserPerspective.

2. Italian English French

3. 3 assumptionsaboutlanguageteachingmaterialsforadults: • Adultstudentshaveadultmind and interests: Theadultcoursebookis catering forpeoplewho do notthink, speak, learnorbehave in thesameway as children.

4. AdultStudentshaveAdultMinds and Interests • The adultness of the students has consequences for the coursebookwhich has to maintain the interest of people who often have particular reasons for studying a new language, adult interests, social relationships and level of intelligence.

5. TheTypes of StudentsAimed at • Tovisualizethetypes of studentsthecoursebooks are intendedforoneneedsto look at thecharacterstheyfeature and thetopicsthey are about.

6. TheTopicsDiscussed • Thetopicsthatstudentshavetotalkaboutduringthecourseshould be interesting and alsoshouldenablethemto use thesecondlanguagefortheirgoals.

7. Popular topics: • Introducingpeople • Makingplans and arrangements • Tourisim • Identifying and describingpeople • Parties • Discussion • Food

8. Suggestion 1: Materialsaimedshould be adult in theme, teachingmethod and language • Adultness has consequencesforcoursebooks. TalkingaboutAdultTopics. • Thetopicshaveto be explorable toanadultlevelof conversation. • Soap operas, gardening and housedesign, sports.

9. Engaging in theAdultActivities • Atlas: • Matching • Clasifying • Conversational patterns • Cooperating • Willis describes 6 maintypes of tasks: • Listing • Ordering and sorting • Comparing • Problemsolving • Sharing personal experience • Creative • Changes: • Giving directions • Panorama: • Body parts • LibreEchange: • Comparing individuals

10. Learning a secondlanguageinfantilizespeople. • Tojustifyinfantilizationwe can use thescaffoldingfromVigotsky.

11. Secondlanguageusers are people in theirownright: L2 users are notjustmonolingualnativespeakerswithanadditionallanguagebutpeoplewith new strenghts and abilities.

12. SecondLanguageUsers are People in TheirOwnRight Adoption of theNative Speaker Goal • Succesismeasurebyhowclosethestudentsgetto a native speaker norm. • Nativespeakersspeakdifferentlywhen a non-native speaker isaround.

13. Suggestion 2: MaterialsBasedonthe L2 UserPerspectiveAimed at AdultsshouldreflecttheSituations, Roles and Language of L2 Users, NotJustNativeSpeakers. • User Roles A goodmotivation factor forthe L2 learners are famouspeoplewho has learnanotherlanguagefortheirownpurposes.

14. User situations We need to see every day situation in which L2 users are successfully dealing with each other or with native speakers.

15. User target language • Klein and Perdue (1997) have indeed established a basic variety of grammar that learners of of several L2s go through which shows what the grammatical target language of an L2 user – based beginners course might look like • Corpora and descriptions of native speech are secondary information for L2 user based approach.

16. The Types of Situation Portrayed • English and Italian students based : -the language school • digs and tourist • traveling and shooping • find their way around the town • go to parties , meet people • In the French courses: street life , entretainment and sport drink in cafes , go to the cinemas and discos date each other

17. Languageteaching has beenheld back byunquestioningacceptance of traditionalnineteenth-centuryprinciples: Theprinciples of thepriority of speech and theavoidance of thefirstlanguage.

18. Language teaching has been held back by not questioning traditional nineteenth century principles • Language teaching taboos , such as the mother tongue, grammar , the printed an written word , which have affected our teachers with over – sized guilt complexes, are nothing but superstitions handed down from one innocent victim to the next´(Dodson , 1967:65)

19. Reliance on the first language • The writers have adopted the nineteenth – century injunction to avoid the first language • The point about L2 users is that the two languages are always present in the same mind , one language cannot be totally switched off when the other is being used , wether in term of vocabulary (Beauvillain and Grainger 1987) syntax (Cook1994) phonology (Obler 1982) or pragmatics (Locastro 1987).

20. Emphasis on the spoken language Changes & Atlas emphasize • Listening • Speaking • Reading • Writting • In Atlas written language is mostly used to represent spoken dialogues or to provide cues , list etc. • Libreechange &cisiamo provide more use of informative texts poems , many of the exercises involve reading aloud , wheteher of sentences into which the student has inserted words

21. Teaching methods can go beyond the principles of language teaching familiar since the nineteenth century Use the first language is countenanced in the classroom it can be used to give instructions and explanations to increase L2 practice to link L1 and L2 knowledge firmly together in the students minds to help collaborative dialogue with fellow students and to encourage L2 activities such as code switching for later real life use .

22. Conveyingmeaning • Audiolingualism & audiovisualism is how the teacher presents the meaning of the language to the students, whether of words , functions & grammatical structures • Most course books provide little help with presentation & acquisition of meaning (pictures of concrete objects are provide & some explanation of grammatical meaning)

23. Explaning grammar • Technique of FonF – focus on form – has brought grammatical explantion back into the classroom as a follow-on from other activities , the discussion in, say, Dougty & williams (1998)

24. Givinginstructions and tests • The loss would be certain amount of genuine communication with the students through the second language , the gain would be not only the students being able follow the instructions more swiftly but also a greater complexity of activities and up wpuld no longer get in the way

25. Using within teaching activities • Without going back to undesirable forms of translation activities , the course books could include activities where the students deliberately have to use both languages , say through code switching as in the new concurrent method (jacobson & faltis, 1990) • Explain to each other • check their understanding • Production of language(all in the first language )

26. Use of the language in the coursebook • The existing provision of written language in the coursebooks for supporting spoken exercises , as scripts of spoken dialogues as fill in , sentences and forms or as short informative texts , coursebooks need to teach the distinctive feature of the written language , the basic elements of the english writing system in terms of spelling , orthography, direction of writing etc. Need to be built in to the beginners course in one way or another