Second Language Teaching & Learning Across Ages

Teaching a new language involves much more than choosing between grammar exercises and conversation. Learners bring different language repertoires, literacy experiences, goals and opportunities to use what they learn. This course helps teachers connect these realities with practical decisions about input, interaction, feedback and assessment, for children, adolescents and adults.

Participants start by comparing learner profiles across ages and questioning popular claims such as “younger always means faster”. They learn to turn broad topics into communicative goals, adapt input with visuals, modelling and chunking, and plan vocabulary encounters, recall and reuse. They then focus on interaction with a real reason to talk. They design information-gap and decision-making tasks with roles that make every learner take part, and support clarification and repair of misunderstandings. Further days cover:

• analysing learner language and giving focused feedback on a defined goal, not every error
• choosing models, guided practice or prompts for the next attempt, and working on pronunciation for intelligibility
• using learners’ existing languages strategically and designing mediation tasks beyond word-for-word translation
• anticipating barriers in literacy, access and anxiety and avoiding fixed labels based on accent, background or age
• assessing with CEFR descriptors or clear classroom criteria and planning progress checks

Throughout the week, participants develop, teach and revise a short teaching sequence for their own learners in two rounds of microteaching, and leave with a teaching portfolio. This is professional development in language teaching, not an English language course.