Janet Fulks’ workshop on neuroscience and teaching at Glendale Community College, Garfield Campus was well organized and highly enlightening. As a participant, I rated it 5 on a scale of 1-5, the best of its kind.

Although an ESL instructor with 40 years of teaching in China and 8 years in the US, I came away from the workshop with some new ideas on improving my teaching. I’m going to introduce two of them from her presentation to my future students. One, the National Training Laboratories Learning Pyramid relating learning activities to learning retention, will help my students to take a more active participation in various activities I organize in class. Theotheris Crafton Hills College holistic student self-assessment, which will remind them of various factors that contribute the success of their studies. The first one is to be introduced at the beginning of a semester, and the second one, in the middle of it.

Talking about the need to create multiple inputs and pathways, I was impressed by the scores of suggestions written by participating instructors in groups of three to five. I presume that they were based on their personal teaching experiences. This indicates that almost all teachers have been working hard to create multiple inputs and pathways. Whether they do it knowingly or unknowingly, they are aware of its enormous value.

The more important thing, this author believes, is to determine which inputs and pathways effectively help the students to learn well, which don’t help much, and which don’t at all. Some activities may enhance fun in class, but not improve performance. Instructorsinadepartmentneedto make joint efforts to identify those effective inputs andpathways through screening, stick to them, and encourageallinstructors, especially the young ones, to adopt them.

In my eight years of teaching in America, I have seen teachers who work extremely hard to design activities and create a fun environment for students to learn English, but their good intentions don’t always produce the anticipated results in their students: the latter’s interest in study doesn’t increase appreciably, and their performance doesn’t seem to match their efforts. Teachers of this kind are very small in number.

Why the problem?

What follows is just my observation; it’s not based on research. And this is my point of departure for my observation: There are different students, and different students require different teaching methods.

Students of our non-credit ESL program are adults, not kids. It is true that fun and interest are important for all students, but the motivation for adult students in our program is primarily the need to learn English. They study English in order to get a job or find a better one or move on to credit ESL or other programs. Many of them are so keen to learn English that they would work eight hours a day and then come to school for the evening classes, sometimes without having a bite. For them, fun and interest are less important than for kids.

Kids ask questions in their class, too. And teachers will answer them. The difference is that with kids, a teacher may just give the answer, but not the reason. For the adult students, the reason, or rather, the reasoning helps. It is often essential, indeed.

Not every language phenomenon can be explained clearly, especially from a purely grammatical perspective. But this author believes that we must try our best. Where a sentence defies grammar analysis, we can introduce the concept of verb patterns or usage. ^[2]When an adult student asks a question, it is best not to evade it by saying simply “It’s a matter of usage,” or, as some teachers do, refuse to answer by saying “I don’t have time today.” ^[3]  

To sum up by quoting Confucius: we must not often leave our adult students in a state where they know the hows, but not the whys. ^[4] While most kids may be satisfied with that state, many adult students aren’t.

A basic concept in marketing is market segmentation. As far as adult ESL education is concerned, one can segment by differentiating between beginners and intermediate and advanced students. Level 1 students are indeed very different from Level 5 students. ^[5] For one thing, where it is difficult to explain in English simple enough for the students to understand, pictures and other such things culled from the Internet do help a lot. Body language helps, too. Some time ago I was trying to explain to my Level 1 students the use of possessive adjectives such as its, which many ESL students including those in Level 5 often confuse with it’s. I provided many examples, but it was not until I came up with these two examples along with body language that my students truly understood:

And along with a new understanding, everyone had a good laugh.

Back to the theme of this essay, creating multiple inputs and pathways is meant to help students retain in their minds what they learn, but all inputs and pathways are not equal in terms of effectiveness. Bearing in mind the fact that our students are adults, we should make persistent and consistent efforts to design and identify inputs and pathways that truly suit their needs and enhance their language proficiency. No one can monopolize, but everyone can contribute. When our efforts are pooled, the results will multiply.