4. Which Learning Approaches might be useful for Senior Learners? 

In the previous activity, you considered the benefits of learning a new language to help preserve memory. In this activity, you will find out more about specific methods and strategies you could use to make learning with a senior learner as effective as possible.

Step A

Read "How to maximise the language learning of senior learners" by Kieran Donaghy which offers a wealth of effective techniques for teaching senior learners where you will find advice that can be very useful for teaching a language session. 

Note down one specific strategy and think of an activity you might want to design to train this strategy with your language student/s. This will help you prepare the application and reflection task in this unit.

Step B

Senior learners can spend a lot of time sitting down, being quite still. This is not always conducive to learning because you get tired more quickly. Research has shown that your brain and memory are also not working at their best capacity. In order to maximise learning, find out now how including energisers and concentration activities into the learning can make the idea you have developed in Step A even more effective. 

1. Watch the video by Epic Science: "Physical movement helps language learning".

2. Now explore Sharita Forrest's article "Gestures help students learn new words in different languages, study finds". From Forrest's suggestions select an idea to teach 5 new words supported by gestures which you would like to try out with your learner/s as part of the activity idea you have developed in Step A and take a note of this in your learning diary. 

Note: Please do consider Health and Safety regulations to determine which activities your own learner/s could safely do.  Could they do some energisers sitting down? How might you need to adapt the room, the seat etc. to allow them to try some easy energisers?