The advantages and disadvantages in teaching ppt

The advantages and disadvantages in teaching
English to Adult Learners
The advantages and disadvantages in teaching English to
Adult Learners in the Current Situation in Vietnam

A brief look at the current English language teaching and
learning context in Vietnam will show that the demand for
English learning is very great. This is clearly seen in the
multitude of institutions and centers that offer English
courses as well as in the great number of learners who go
to English classes. Among these learners adult learners
form a big special group. Due to some of their
characteristics the teaching of English to this group of
adult learners has some advantages and disadvantages
as follows.

The first advantage is that adult learners have some
degree of extrinsic motivation. They may study English for
a variety of reasons but they all do so because they want
to or need to. For some students, the motivation may be in
the form of integrative motivation because they wish to
integrate themselves into the culture of an English-
speaking country like Britain, America, Canada or
Australia. For others, the motivation is instrumental in the
sense that the mastery of the English language is seen as
an instrument that can bring them a better job or position.
When these adult students go to class with some
motivation they are easier to teach than those who bring
no motivation to the classroom.

The second advantage is that adult students can transfer

those study skills and learning strategies they have
acquired in their first language to their study of English.
Unlike children and adolescents, adults are autonomous in
some way. They have finished their studies or have
undertaken at least some in their own language, so they
must have gained some basic skills like reading,
summarizing, identifying and applying formulae and
information and such critical thinking skills as analyzing,
synthesizing, hypothesizing, speculating, etc. Moreover,
they may also have some well-established strategies for
learning. Therefore, the English language teacher can
make his job easier by creating conditions for adult
students to reactivate these study skills and learning
strategies and apply them to their study of a new
language.

One more advantage is that adult learners can make use
of whatever kind of knowledge they have accumulated in
their own language. Again this advantage cannot be seen
in other groups of learners like children and adolescents.
First, adult learners have extensive experience of using a
language, which is their mother tongue. Now that they
start learning English, they can remember the new langue
system better by making use of what they know about
their own language. It is not uncommon to see learners
comparing and contrasting their first language with the
foreign language they are learning to find out areas in
which the two languages are different or similar so that
they can learn the new language more quickly. Second,
adult students’ life experience, world knowledge and

specialist knowledge can contribute much to their learning
a foreign language. It can help them a lot when they have
to read about or discuss complex or controversial topics in
English. So the English teacher can engage adult learners
more easily if he knows how to tap the knowledge they
have gained over time.

On the contrary, there are some disadvantages to the
teaching of English to adult students as well. The first
disadvantage is that English learning makes a strong
demand on adult learners in terms of time. As a matter of
fact, it is really difficult for adult students to make time to
learn English. As most institutions and centers teach
English in the evening adult students have to study after
work. Three one-hour-and-a-half sessions or three three-
hour sessions a week seem not to add up to a lot of time
but not all adult students can manage to set aside that
much time for study purposes. The simple reason is that
they all have their own lives to live outside the classroom
or they all have other commitments in life than learning
English. As a result, some students fail to invest as much
time and effort in learning as they should. Of course,
teachers will have difficulty in monitoring the performance
and progress of those students who cannot attend class
regularly.

Another factor that can interfere with or even impede adult
students’ learning English is their fear of failure and
frustration with lack of progress. As can be seen, some
adult students are very successful professionals or have a

high status at their work place. And now, at school they
are just normal students coping with tasks, assignments,
examinations, etc. as they have been successful in their
career, they do not want to fail to achieve their desired
goal of mastering English. They may therefore put
themselves under unnecessary stress if they do not give
themselves enough time to achieve their goals or if they
set themselves unrealistic goals. Other students may be
hard on themselves in a different way. For example, adult
intermediate and advanced students, those who already
know a lot, may find progress difficult to perceive. In this
case, the teacher has more work to do: they must help
these students get the level of challenge right or view
success in a broader sense.

In addition, the lack of well-qualified teachers and the poor
physical conditions of the classrooms at some English
language schools and centers can be damaging to student
motivation. Currently, in Vietnam a great number of
institutions and centers provide English courses and they
range form universities and their satellite centers, joint-
venture centers, privately-owned centers to privately-run
home-based classes. Such proliferation of schools and
centers is useful in the sense that it offers students a wide
variety of programs to choose from. However, because of
a lack of quality control, the reality of some schools and
centers may fall short of student expectations. Some
teachers are untrained or inexperienced, delivering boring
or uninteresting lessons; the physical classroom
conditions and resources for learning are just basic. All

this cannot of course supply students in general and adult
students in particular with any intrinsic motivation, a crucial
factor for successful language learning.

In general, this analysis of the current teaching context for
adult learners of English in Vietnam in general and of the
characteristics of this group of learners in particular partly
reflects the increasing need for English language learning
and mainly shows the advantages and disadvantages that
adult students have in their English study. Both teachers
and students need to be aware of these findings of the
analysis so that they can find ways to maximize the
advantages and minimize the disadvantages. Only in this
way can teachers deliver quality English language
programs for students to benefit from.