If you are a teacher coming to this kind of work for the first time you will almost certainly feel unsure about how you will cope or react in certain situations.  This was a common feeling among everyone who taught on the ALLEGRO and VIVACE projects.  How will I react and speak to people with serious learning or physical disabilities? What’s it like to go into a prison?   How do I relate to recovering drug addicts?  These types of fears are both normal and important – we must experience them in order to overcome them and to be open to learning from others.  In these guidelines we cannot answer every question – you will find your own answers depending on your own personality and attributes. What we can tell you is that in every case – and we have run around 150 learning groups of this kind – teachers who have taken part have told us how it has changed their attitudes, their teaching and, at times, their lives. We never had a teacher who withdrew from a project.  So we believe that the experience is as important for teachers as it is for learners. Here are some of their words:  

“As a teacher, I feel that I have greatly benefited from this experience of working with very mixed groups. I have learnt to be more innovative and organised. I have definitely gained in terms of confidence.”

‘I can use this resource  [a programme of multi-national songs devised for a group of adults with learning disabilities] with the primary school children I normally work with. I never thought of combining music and languages before.’

“Working on this project has changed the way I think about language teaching and the way I respond to others. It has broadened my mind and has been an amazing educational and personal experience”

The guidance below is based on the experience of our teachers working with all kinds of learners in many different situations.

TEACHING SPECIFIC GROUPS

• THE SOCIALLY MARGINALISED

This group may include people who live in socially marginalised or economically deprived areas. They may live alone. They may come from broken or single families. They may be the victims of abuse. They may be addicts or alcoholics. They tend to be poor achievers with low expectations.

When teaching this type of group:

1. Be aware of the problems you may encounter when dealing with and teaching socially disadvantaged people. Learners may be withdrawn, introspective, verbally abusive, apathetic. Knowing how to react effectively and turning a potentially hostile situation into a motivational moment would set a precedent and possibly facilitate the learning process by establishing a cordial, or even friendly, tutor-learner relationship.
2. Remember that anybody can learn a language, at a basic communicative level, even when potential learners do not master all skills in their native language.
3. Find out what issues, topics will motivate learners.
4. Plan activities to ensure they are varied, short and involve learners. Whichever the type of activity, it should be interactive.
5. Ideally, materials should be real, for example, actual food, clothes, accessories, as opposed to pictures, in order to enhance the relationship between the foreign language and the object. Similarly, actions and concepts should be enacted.
6. Learners in this group may respond well to competition and usually like to be rewarded in some way. A small prize, ideally related to the topic taught, is a good motivator.
7. Learners feel a great sense of achievement when they have managed to understand and respond to sentences or questions.
8. Remember that many positive benefits have been recorded in working with learners in this group - improved self-confidence as learners realise that they can achieve at least basic communication in a different language; the acquisition of new skills (e.g. cooking); crossing the boundary of their own “restricted” world and gaining a knowledge of other ways of life and finding other ways of looking at the world.

At the Southgate Centre in Derby, UK, two young men with very low educational achievement, poor literacy and serious behavioural problems took part in a one-day VIVACE activity.  Even working as a pair was unusual as they are normally taught in one-to-one situations.  They learnt some Spanish and some Italian during the day.  The teacher used carefully planned activities, aware that their concentration spans were very limited and that they would need to be quite active during sessions. She found out what their interests were – one was keen on high performance cars, for example – and built some of her activities around these. She also decided to cook tortilla as part of the Spanish session. Both boys enjoyed this and both managed to cook the tortilla under supervision. This was a real achievement - one of them had never even switched on a cooker before. 

• THE BLIND OR VISUALLY IMPAIRED

People in this group will have attained various level of education during their lives but their blindness or partial sight loss has placed them in a disadvantaged position either socially or from the point of view of employment.

When teaching this type of group:

1. Build activities or courses around objectives identified by learners themselves
2. Conventional teaching materials, such as books or any other visual aids, are clearly of little use with this group. Audio material, podcasts, radio and TV for more advanced groups, are better suited to keep these learners motivated. There are specialist language learning materials available from another European initiative, the Listen and Touch project.
3. Activities will develop in response to feedback from the group and agency staff and flexibility will be key in developing methods and resources
4. To provide further practice and support, other staff working with blind groups on a regular basis could be encouraged to be “mentors” in a study circle since they know their clients well and can put what has been taught/learnt.into practice.

• ADULTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES

1.  Preparation/motivation 

a) It is good to encourage people to join in activities voluntarily.  If you’re working in a residential setting or a day centre you may be able to hold taster sessions. It’s important to show that your activities will be quite different from what some may have experienced in school – music, simple games.

 b) Let the staff know that your “teaching” will be quite different from what their own language learning at school had been like, that you’ll be using new methods, raising their clients’ self-esteem, and helping them to develop new skills and competences.

2. Methods

You will find that a number of different approaches can be valuable with these learners:
a) Physical activities e.g. movement, dance, games
(useful for awareness raising of “difference” in language; introducing first words)

b) Contextual activities e.g.
i) numbers: rolling dice; playing with balloons
ii) food: going to a restaurant; cooking together (preparing shopping list, buying ingredients)
iii) clothes: ”fashion show” presenting different clothes; cutting clothes from a mail order catalogue and naming them

c) Arts
It can be really engaging for participants to produce their own learning materials e.g.
i) making objects from papier-mâché and painting them (fruits and colours)
ii) making simple card games (Memory)

d) Cognitive activities
Recognizing some key words in writing (using signs with words in very big letters; “painting” these words)
Memorizing sequences (e.g., months; days of the week)
Answering standard questions (e.g. age; birth date)

3. Developing access to new concepts and areas (which may be unknown or not used when communicating in the mother tongue)

a) social competences e.g. “polite” speech (please, thank you, would you..)

b) better grammar (again this can have a positive effect on the use of mother tongue) e.g. using correct articles using correct plurals

4. You will also need to be aware of and recognise limitations (depending on the severity of the disability)

a) lack of concentration, short attention spans
b) need for constant repetition
c) great problems with making cross references
d) only respond to “learning by doing”

5. But you must also be aware of and recognise opportunities for

a) teaching the basics of a language through new methods
b) enhancing and promoting the intellectual, social and emotional development of the participants
c) increasing self-confidence and self-value of participants
d) providing new insights (language awareness) and working methods for staff

Caption: Learners at Empatie in the Czech Republic doing a simple vocabulary building exercise using pictures

Teaching people with brain injuries

Members of this group will come from all types of educational and social backgrounds but circumstances - an accident, illness or stroke – mean that they often find themselves seriously disadvantaged in all aspects of everyday life.

When working with people in this group you should:

1. be aware of what learners’ disadvantage or disability is, what they are capable of doing and what their limitations are.
2. take time to become acquainted with the learners and their condition in order to establish a relationship of trust.
3. be sensitive towards the learners’ needs and reach a concensus with reference to methodology, especially if the group is relatively large. Some people may be strong-willed and insist on one way of learning, which may not suit the rest.
4. be aware that many learners will have problems with their short memory and will require constant repetition of one word or simple structure; some will insist on seeing a word or structure written in order to visualise it and attempt to commit it to memory.
5. not be discouraged by the learners’ forgetfulness. It is part of who they are.
6. be patient and allow plenty of time
7. look out for positive secondary outcomes, as in our example below  

In the VIVACE group at Headway, a UK organisation which supports people suffering from serious head injury, a man learning simple Spanish remembered he had once spoken French with a degree of fluency, in spite of his declared bad short memory.

TEACHING PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN

1. You don’t need to be a fluent speaker or a ‘specialist’ teacher to introduce a foreign language into the early years’ setting. You can achieve a lot with just a basic knowledge of the language and lots of enthusiasm and ideas.
   
   2. Don’t let the fear of making mistakes in the language put you off – even the most experienced teachers and native speakers make them!
   
   3. Before you start, decide exactly what you want to teach the children, but keep it simple. Start off with just a few words and phrases that you want to introduce e.g. greetings or saying their names. Build up on these gradually as the children become familiar with them and your confidence grows.
   
   4. Don’t introduce too many new items of language at one time. Remember also to keep going back over words and phrases that you have already introduced and re-visiting previous activities
   
   5. Children will learn more quickly and effectively with short, regular exposure to the language, rather than longer, infrequent sessions.
   A little and often is the best way!
   
   6. Find lots of different opportunities for the children to hear and use the language. Everyday routines and activities such as taking the register, meal and snack times, circle time all provide language-learning opportunities. Involve other staff in this, as much as possible. An adult speaking another language, even to a limited extent, provides a good role model for the children.
   
   7. Include language-learning activities in your daily planning. 10 – 15 minutes spread over each day is ideal. Keep the activities short, varied and fun.
   
   8. Build up a bank of 5 or 10 minute activity ideas so that you can draw on them at any time.
   
   9. Introduce simple songs and rhymes in the foreign language. Their rhythm helps children remember the words in an enjoyable and effective way.
   
   10. Use or adapt your current resources to practise the foreign language e.g. there are lots of educational games in most early years’ settings which teach numbers, colours, names of animals etc.
   
   11. Involve parents and carers in what you are doing. Let them know that their child is learning another language. Invite them in to watch and encourage them to take part. Send home information on what the children have learned and how parents can support this, e.g. through tapes of songs learned, examples of simple games and ideas for watching TV programmes together. Children whose parents are positive about language learning will make good progress in it themselves.
   
   12. Most importantly, enjoy learning the language and have fun!
   
   

Working in secure settings 

In the ALLEGRO project we worked in prisons in the UK and in Slovenia.  Reports on these initiatives can be found on the ALLEGRO website. The teachers who worked in the UK prisons were university teachers working on both undergraduate provision and in continuing education. They had not worked in prisons before. They found the experience somewhat daunting at first but also very rewarding, with learners keen to progress and learn not only the language but also about the culture of the countries concerned (we taught Spanish, Dutch and French).   

In these settings you will be well briefed by the prison authorities before the classes begin. The most frustrating thing that teachers found was the unpredictability of their classes, as there were often last minute changes to their timetables as a result of problems with the prisoners. 

In Slovenia, we took a different approach with prison guards themselves trained as study group mentors. This was a particularly successful and sustainable approach and is reported in further detail in the Study Circles section.