A few personal lessons from an Elementary and an Advance class.

Since returning from the Christmas holidays I have been fortunate enough to widen the range of levels that I have been teaching. As such I now have taught all the way from Elementary to Advance as well as some children's groups and some business classes. I would certainly say that this has helped me understand the differences between all the levels and helped with grading my language across all the levels [or un-grading in the case of Advance]. 

I have noticed some interesting things about learning styles that I want to comment upon here.

1. Advance students can recognise, understand when to use and know how to construct a certain grammar point and yet still avoid using it. 

I covered some Advance groups that were experiencing problems with using conditionals. To start my lesson I decided to test how much they knew and so asked them some questions about their dreams goals, how they would achieve them etc to get them to use conditionals. Some of these students came up with very complicated ways to avoid using conditionals and only a couple [across 3 classes] seamed to use them naturally. 

However when it came to stating the grammar, the rules, the structures etc the students had no problem. I then asked them to use conditionals to talk about  the questions we had previously covered and they set to the task with enthusiasm. 

By the next lesson I found out that they were still avoiding using conditionals and that in fact they didn't recognise some of the more complicated forms. As such the challenge of getting students to use grammar points continues.

2. Confidence is important

I had a class of elementary students who were going over questions and short form responses for "where are you from?" and similar questions regarding country and nationality.

One student started of very enthusiastically and could remember the different nationalities very well but did confuse some countries with nationalities [i.e German/Germany]. However later on in the class she made a mistake with nationality and country, I pointed out the mistake and the difference between the two to her on her own. She lost confidence, changed some of her correct answers and then asked many other students what the answer was and didn't believe their answers frequently saying "I don't understand nothing" in Russian. 

Because of her lack of confidence she didn't believe she did anything right and found it very hard to continue learning. I've certainly learnt an important lesson about being more careful over instant feedback to a student and insuring I install confidence in my students over their abilities.