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МРНТИ 16.21.27
Rysmakhan Zh
.
S. (Kazakhstan)
PROBLEMS THAT ARISE WHEN TEACHING ENGLISH TO MIDDLE-AGED
PEOPLE
Summary: Our research relates to the field of language didactics and is particularly focused on the
processes of learning a foreign language after 50 years. So far, the age element in learning a foreign language
has been studied in children, but it has been ignored in older adult students. Our study analyzes the
difficulties of older students and the effects of aging compared to learning. The results were collected using
student questionnaires, which were distributed in various language centers in Almaty, and interviews with
teachers. Teachers were selected for their experience working with middle-aged students.
Key words: teaching, middle-age, memory, problems.
Along with the aging of the Western population and the problems associated with this aspect,
the political, economic and social transformations of our society make this new audience interested
in learning foreign languages.
Today, speaking a foreign language is almost a necessity, a natural consequence of
globalization, internationalization, and proximity between peoples. As for our continent, the very
idea of Europe encourages a radical change in the way of thinking and life on our continent. The
European Union consists of 27 member States: there are 23 different official languages, although
many more are actually spoken.
But, according to Villarini and Grasse, the crucial factor for the spread of languages is the
narrowing of perceived distances between different peoples, cultures, and idioms. The ease of
travel, thanks to the very large offer at the level of prices and routes, makes the ability to express
and understand becomes a necessity. On the other hand, even at home, movies and television, along
with subtitles of movies or videos transmitted over the Internet, expose most people to foreign
languages. The consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult in our society to avoid
contact with other languages.
The increase in the number of older people, the extension of service life, good health,
combined with the ease of travel and technological progress, seem to be the reasons for the growing
interest of older people in learning foreign languages. But what difficulties does this audience face
in their training? Let's try to analyze the changes in the cognitive abilities of older people.
Understanding how the brain controls language and how aging processes affect the cognitive
abilities of people over the age of 50 is fundamental to thinking about foreign language didactics
that are more appropriate for this particular audience. For this reason, we will analyze the effects of
aging in several aspects: first the sensory, especially vision and hearing, and then the brain,
especially the ability of attention and memory.
All authors who have conducted studies of older adults agree that it is important to take into
account visual and hearing loss. The lack of these two abilities obviously affects the perception of
external inputs and the ability to respond to these same inputs. On the other hand, it should not be
forgotten that the aging process is not uniform either for all organs of a given individual, or between
several individuals, both in terms of the intensity of the deficiency and the age of occurrence of the
deficiency itself.
In general, from a visual point of view, there is a deterioration in close-up vision,
accompanied by a loss of the ability to see details well, a decrease in the field of vision and
adaptation to penumbra.
Similarly, there is a change in the perception of sounds, and the authors found a decrease in
the ability to hear high tones, too fast sounds, and, more generally, to perceive sounds spoken in a
noisy situation.
It is important to emphasize that in the above articles, these two shortcomings are not
considered as an obstacle to learning a foreign language, but rather as factors that must be taken into
account when implementing and making didactic decisions. In addition, the authors have often
observed how older students implement compensation and adaptation mechanisms: for example,
with regard to vision, often a partial reduction in detail does not change the overall vision. On the
other hand, the experiment helps to restore the missing part. Thus, teachers should take into account
the quality of the graphics and sound of the materials offered to this audience in order to avoid
negative consequences for learning.
Research cited by Villarini and Grasse suggests three main modes of attention: selective
attention, distributed attention, and constant attention. These three methods denote three types of
permissions, which we will discuss in detail below:
- selective attention refers to the ability to identify relevant information between multiple
pieces of information, such as selecting a pre-defined image among others. Regarding this type of
memory, Villarini and La Grasse cite research by Robin and Rizzo that shows that students over the
age of 60 have a longer response time than students between the ages of 25 and 36.
On the other hand, they also cite studies by Claney and Hoyer that show that this response
time can be improved with exercise, and that older students use possible sentences more effectively
than younger students.
- Distributed attention refers to the ability to do several things at once, such as memorizing a
list of names and putting them in alphabetical order. It is in this type of research focus they show a
lack of results on the part of the older students, although they indicate an improvement obtained
through the exercises.
- Constant attention, on the contrary, indicates the ability to concentrate on a given task for a
long period of time. Tests conducted to analyze this ability of attention on the part of older students
showed that this audience receives more modest results compared to a younger audience, and this,
according to Tomporowski and Tinsley, either because of the complexity of the task or because of
less motivation. Indeed, they noticed that when there is less motivation, the level of attention
decreases significantly.
In conclusion, the results of various studies of the attention abilities of older people lead
Villarini and La Grasse to consider three aspects:
1. older students tend to have less productivity and therefore less attention capacity compared
to younger students when asked to complete complex tasks in limited time;
2. exercise and training allow them to improve their performance and therefore their attention
capacity;
3. motivation helps to maintain the level of attention: when there are activities that the elders
consider "interesting", their concentration increases.
Memory deserves a separate discourse for its complexity and for the enormous importance it
has in all human activities. As Mario Cardona says: Every action and every learning involves the
processes of memory. The cognitive, emotional and motivational processes that found our self
could not exist without memory. So we owe to memory the possibility of being who we are. In fact,
more that the memory is correct to say different types of memories, saw that at the base of the many
and complex operations of the mind, there is only a memory, but a complex set of neural circuits
that control the different memory systems with specific functions are interconnected and
interacting.
In reality, as Jean Yves and Marc Tadié say, " it is memory that makes man ". Without
memory it would not be possible to perform practical activities, such as using a computer or
walking, nor to perform cognitive activities: above all, without memory there would be no
language. The study of memory is therefore an area of fundamental importance for language
acquisition.
Memory can be studied from different points of view: philosophical, as has been done since
the age of Aristotle, psychoanalytic, just think of Freud, neurobiological, or psychological. It is
mainly in these last two areas that we have found research on the role of memory in language
acquisition.
First of all it is important to return to the notion that there is no single memory system. This
statement is confirmed by psychological and neurobiological studies. The best known model speaks
of three distinct types of memories with specific features that Cardona schematizes thus:
Context
Input information
Sensory registers
Sight,
hearing,
touch, smell, taste
Short-term
memory
=
working memory
Long-term
memory
=
episodes,
concepts etc.
Information is perceived through the various sensory systems that hold it for an extremely
limited period of time, from a minimum of one thousandth of a second to a maximum of 3 seconds.
If after it there is no further elaboration of the information, it is lost permanently.
The distinction between two types of «memory warehouses» i.e. places of memory storage,
dates back to the end of the XIX century. Cardona cites William James, one of the fathers of
psychology, and his distinction between "primary memory" and "secondary memory". The first
represents the ability to remember things that have just happened, while the second is the ability to
remember things past. But the distinction between two memory systems, short-term memory and
long-term memory began in the ’50s, with opposition between supporters of a unitary model and
defenders of the hypothesis of a multiple and interactive system. Numerous neurological studies on
patients affected with different forms of amnesia confirm the theory of distinct memory systems. In
this regard Cardona cites LeDoux who presents the case of amnesic people who had undergone the
removal of a part of the brain, and who showed a deficit in the long-term memory but not in the
short-term, or vice versa.
The characteristics of short-term memory are, according to Cardona the following:
A. limited capacity and duration;
B. essentially phonological coding;
C. retention of information through repetition;
D. interference-related forgetfulness.
On the other hand, the place where our memories are permanently and permanently archived
is long-term memory. It is generally divided into two main subsets: explicit declarative memory and
implicit non-declarative memory. Cardona schematizes long-term memory in the following way:
Declarative memory is very important for language. In particular, its semantic component is
responsible for the meaning of words and concepts. It represents an abstract and general knowledge
of the world and is not related to personal episodes.
The characteristics of long-term memory are:
A. unlimited capacity;
В. mainly semantic decoding, partly visual and auditory ;
C. maintenance of information through repetition and organization;
D. can be no forgetfulness but loss of access to memories.
After this brief presentation of the main characteristics of memory from the general point of
view, we will further analyze working memory, which is part of short-term memory and plays a
very important role in learning foreign languages. According to Daniel Gaonac'h, the working
memory would be:
A transient memory system responsible for maintaining and processing information for the
purposes of a given task. The offending task is in our case the L2 learning, and the success of this
one is supposed to depend in part on the efficiency of a working memory responsible for
temporarily storing the information useful for the implementation of the learning.
In addition, this type of memory requires the activation of selective attention to identify
relevant information. According to Villarini and La Grassa the differences in age-related mnemonic
abilities are due to a lower capacity of working memory. As with other changes in cognitive
Long-term
memory
Declaratively
semantic
episodic
Non-
Declarative
procedural
packaging
abilities, it is not possible to establish either an age or a cause for these changes, but the authors
imagine that there are three factors that need to be considered:
- speed
- strategies adopted
- emotional and motivational factors
In general, older people have a greater difficulty managing multiple information in a limited
time, as we have already observed for attention processes. This is demonstrated in the case of tasks
related to memorization, for which the effectiveness of responses increases where it is possible to
choose the speed of the presentation of the subject to allow repetition and memorization of the
elements to be learned.
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