teaching+adolescents

YLs – what are the differences..?


 * Adolescents **


 * Anyone who has taught secondary school students had had lessons, even days and weeks, when the task seemed difficult, and on especially bad days hopeless. Yet if, as the methodologist Penny Ur suggests, teenage students are in fact overall the best language learners (Ur 1996:286) this suggests that this is only part of the picture.

When Herbert Puchta and Michael Schratz started to design material for teenagers in Austria they, like many before them, wondered why teenagers seemed to be less lively and humorous than adults. Why were they so much less motivated, they asked, and why did they present outright discipline problems (Puchta and Schratz 1993:1)?

It is widely accepted that one of the key issues in adolescence, especially perhaps in the west, is the search for individual identity, and that this search provides the key challenge for this age group. Identity has to be forged among classmates and friends; peer approval may be considerably more important for the student than the attention of the teacher which, for younger children, is so crucial.

There are a number of reasons why students – and teenage students in particular – may be disruptive in class. Apart from the need for self-esteem and the peer approval they may provoke from being disruptive there are other factors too, such as the boredom they feel – not to mention problems they bring into class from outside school. However, while it is true that adolescents can cause discipline problems, it is usually the case that they would be much happier if such problems did not exist. They may push teachers to the limit, but they are much happier if that challenge is met, if the teacher actually manages to control them, and if this is done in a supportive and constructive way so that he or she ‘helps rather than shouts’ (Harmer 1998:2).

However, we should not become too preoccupied with the issue of disruptive behaviour, for while we will all remember unsatisfactory classes, we will also look back with pleasure on those groups and lessons which were successful. Teenagers, if they are engaged, have a great capacity to learn, a great potential for creativity, and a passionate commitment to things which interest them. There is almost nothing more exciting than a class of involved young people at this age pursuing a learning goal with enthusiasm. Our job, therefore, must be to provoke student engagement with material which is relevant and involving. At the same time we need to do what we can to bolster our students’ self-esteem, and be conscious, always, of their need for identity.

Herbert Puchta and Michael Schratz see problems with teenagers as resulting, in part, from ‘…the teacher’s failure to build bridges between what they want and have to teach their students’ worlds of thought and experience’ (1993:4). They advocate linking language teaching far more closely to the students’ everyday interests through, in particular, the use of ‘humanistic’ teaching.

Students must be encouraged to respond to texts and situations with their own thoughts and experience, rather than just by answering questions and doing abstract learning activities. We must give them tasks which they are able to do, rather than risk humiliating them.

We have come some way from the teaching of young children. We can ask teenagers to address learning issues directly in a way that younger learners might not appreciate. We are able to discuss abstract issues with them. Indeed part of our job is to provoke intellectual activity by helping them to be aware of contrasting ideas and concepts which they can resolve for themselves – though still with our guidance.

Harmer (2001) The Practice of English Language Teaching ||