The role of a teacher is a vast and varied one and there is a considerable amount of factors that will affect this role. One of the main factors that really effects how and what we decide to teach is the age of the students. For instance you could not walk into a classroom full of eight year old primary school children with the same lesson plan designed for teaching a group of 3rd year degree students. Other then the differences that would occur in academic ability, between these two groups, people of different ages have very different needs, competences and cognitive skills. For example, it is through play that much of children's early learning is achieved. (1) ‘The physical, socio-emotional and intellectual development of children is dependent upon activity’. Where as adults use a greater quantity of abstract thought.  

When considering how we should teach different age groups we first need to take a look at the differences in the way that these age groups learn. For instance young children learn not just from explanation but also from the other stimulus they receive surrounding the explanation for example what they hear, what they see and even what they touch and interact with. (2) ‘Their own understanding comes through hands and eyes and ears. The physical world is dominant at all times’. Traits you will see among children is enthusiasm to learn, they usually will be willing to ask lots of questions, have a happiness to talk about themselves and will respond well to learning using themselves and their lives as main topics, it is important to consider when teaching children, that most children possess a very short attention and concentration span and can get bored easily. They also need to be shown attention and approval from their teacher throughout the lesson.

This requires the teacher of young students to be adaptive allowing their students to get their information from a variety of sources. You need to prepare an array of short exercises which keep the children’s interest, such as games, songs, drawing activities and activities that involve movement. (2)’children have an amazing ability to absorb language through play and other activities that they find enjoyable.’ More complex ideas like the structure and function of grammar should be kept to the bare minimum, very few children will be able to cope with the workings of grammar, they will generally learn the rules passively ‘how good they are at foreign languages is not dependent on whether they have learnt the grammar rules or not’.

On the other end of the spectrum we have adults. Learning language as an adult according to Steven Pinker (3) 'often depends on the conscious exercise of their considerable intellects, unlike children to whom language acquisition naturally happens'. But being an adult means they can rely more on abstract thought. Adults also tend to be more disciplined and can struggle on despite boredom. They have life experiences to draw on which allows teachers to use a wide range of activities. They often will have clear aims and goals of what they want from English and this allows for continued motivation. Although adults can be more inflexible to try new teaching methods, they may have anxieties or be under confident from past experiences learning a language, they also may feel their intellectual power is diminishing. Alan Rogers believes that the intellectual power of adult learners (4) ‘is directly related to how much learning has been going on in adult life before they come to a new learning experience’.

When teaching adults(5)‘you can involve more indirect methods of learning through reading, listening, communicative speaking and writing’. You can break down to adults the complex grammatical and phonetically structure of the English language and an adult is more likely to understand the rules and use their intellect to learn consciously how the use of English language is applied. As the attention span of an adult is longer we can also prepare activities that last for a considerably longer amount of time, then that of a child. Bad effects of past learning experiences can be diminished by offering activities that are achievable and listening to students concerns modifying what we do to suit learning tastes.

So from this we can see how important it is to know the needs of your audience before preparing a lesson. Although some things remain constant, for example it is important to form a good relationship with your students to be patient and remain professional at all times to help inspire them to learn.

• www.sasked.gov.sk.ca
• Scott, W and Ytreberg, L 1990 Teaching English to Children Longman
• Pinker, S 1994 The Language Instinct Penguin Press
• Rogers, A 1996 Teaching Adults open university Press.
• Harmer, J 2001 The Practice of English Language Teaching Longman.