Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

Teaching English to Adults
189
is very common that one year’s intensive English, and in some
countries two years’ study, is required before a student is in a
position to do any justice to the subject matter of an advanced
level degree course.
The pedagogic solutions for mixed ability classes are
varied. It is useful to discover just how great the range is by
using a diagnostic test. There will certainly be a large block
in the middle of the ability range who can be separated off
as a group for some parts of the lesson, or for some lessons,
and will form a more homogenous teaching group. If this
strategy is adopted, the poor ones and the better ones must
receive their due time and attention. Individual work is
essential for each person not in the main group, with the
emphasis on bringing the weak ones up to standard to join
the main group. A planned scheme of work using available
textbooks and particularly class tape recorders and the
language laboratory is vital in individualised learning of
this type. A great deal of time, probably outside class hours,
will need to be spent coaching the weak ones. There is one
advantage, however, in that the weak ones may well not be
proficient in English through lack of practice or
opportunity, but they should, through the very fact of being
selected for Higher Education, be intelligent and able. With
care and attention they should always be capable of
catching up with the others.
A danger of splitting a heterogeneous group in this way is
that the very act of division may intensify rather than
alleviate the difficulties. So it is probably better to have the
whole class together for the majority of the time, and use
techniques which involve each person at his own level. With,
say, oral questioning, it is possible to ask the more difficult
questions of the able students at a speed that will tax them
and the easier questions of the less proficient and at a slower
pace. Similarly, there might be a choice of titles for the
composition, some more difficult than others, to cater for
different levels of proficiency. One effective technique here
is group work, where the good students are asked to be
group leaders and given the task of helping along and
getting the best out of the others. In general terms, the
teacher’s task is to provide each student with a learning
experience at his own level and a challenge to improve, so

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Teaching English to Adults
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that the initially heterogeneous class becomes over time a
more homogeneous unit.
The problems are quite different where English is not the
major subject of study. A student in the English department
who usually has integrative motivation, identifies to at least
some degree with the subject of his study and wishes to make
his own the good things he find in the cultural, literary and
aesthetic life of English-speaking countries. On the other
hand, many scientists, for example, are interested in English
simply as a tool, an instrument to make them better at their
job by giving them access to the extensive scientific literature
in English and by allowing them to speak to their English-
speaking colleagues from around the world. With the growth
of English as an international language, there has been a
corresponding increase in the teaching of specialised English.
Teaching English to non-specialists in tertiary state
education is just one branch of English for Special Purposes.
English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is a growing branch of
ESP peculiar to Higher Education. This can of course be
radically different from country to country, especially when
English is the medium of instruction for a scientific subject, as
it is in large parts of Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The
local languages do not have widespread acceptance amongst
all the students concerned, they do not have the lexis to cope
with the technical terminology, and there is very little in print
of a specialised nature, hence English is the medium of
instruction. The main problem here is to ensure that the level
of English is sufficient to deal with the complex subject
matter and with the demands of the learning system—
listening to lectures, note-taking, reading textbooks, coping
with tutorials and seminars, writing reports, essays and exam
papers, and ultimately carrying out the research leading to a
thesis. And of course all this must be done in English. The
teacher’s task here is to foster his student’s study skills. There
are several helpful courses available, such as J.B.Heaton’s
Studying in English (Longman, 1975).
In many other countries in the world, particularly where
English is a foreign, rather than a second, language, it is very
common for a teacher to be confronted with a group of
medical students or engineers who have little existing
knowledge of English and demand to be taught how to read

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Teaching English to Adults
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their technical books and journals, and nothing else. They
have no need to write in English nor even to speak it. Their
need is for a course in reading technical English. It is not
impossible to provide this by starting with very elementary
examples of the written word and by taking the students
through a carefully graded sequence of texts with copious
commentary in their mother tongue.
A better approach is to argue, first, that this is in fact a
misguided, short-term view of what is needed. There is
always an opportunity to use the skills of writing, speaking
and listening, whatever one’s immediate circumstances.
Many write reports or articles for publication in
international reviews, others must talk to and understand
expatriate colleagues and visiting lecturers. With the ease of
travel today, many must surely travel outside their own
country to international conferences and courses, where
English will certainly be widely used. And it is a necessary
precondition for many scholarships that the candidate has a
good level of English.
The second argument is pedagogic. It may well be that the
best way to learn to read efficiently in English is to pay