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It was instructive to read the best practices for teaching populations I have never encountered. I prefer working with adults, and yet reading the do's and don'ts of working with young learners is still quite helpful. A theme I noticed running through both adult and young learner guidelines is not to use the native language. Because I gave one on one lessons, specializing in but not limited to helping absolute beginners in German, I had to violate this rule routinely because the learners were on the other end of a phone, and in my early days of training there was only sporadic opportunity for them to log in to the chat room available to them, so we had to communicate in their L1. The results really depended on the learner. If they were motivated, they would try their hardest to use English and they would do their assignments, but I also had learners who basically put their feet up and only ever uttered a couple of words in English, such as \"it's okay\" from one woman. I have learned that people in the former East Germany are at a double disadvantage when it comes to learning English. Firstly, if they are over 45 (as of 2017), there was seldom if ever English taught in their school, and their choices were Russian or French. Secondly, after the reunification, the jobs did not come to the east, so a lot of people in those areas had to go work for large pharmaceutical or maybe agronomy-industry companies, which over the years tended to be bought up by English-speaking companies, so a lot of my very low-level Germans were more resigned to English than anything. The first lesson with them was supposed to be a leveling and needs assessment, but many of them could not even understand the most basic questions about their job. Having said all that, they were often significantly relieved to hear that there was someone who understood their language, who was willing to help them along in that language, at least at the start, and many of them did get to a place where they could work with a non-speaker of German if need be. Some learners even made a point of booking their lessons with non-speakers of German so they would not be \"lazy\" and lapse into their L1. I've had learners whose companies cut their training budget, and they ended up losing their individual lessons for class lessons. Their criticisms of those whole-group lessons were exactly as outlined in the unit materials: Everybody's at a different level, and only the talkative/non-tired learners are benefiting. I would like to see a hybrid company-sponsored business English course, part one-on-one and part group instruction where learners are grouped by level, because you really could have the best of both worlds.
