TEACHING ACROSS PROFICIENCY LEVELS

-The ACTFL proficiency guideline have come to be a widely recognized proficiency standard in language- teaching circles.

- The ACTFL guidelines were created to expand on the FSI levels so that listening, reading, and writing would also be included. The guidelines have one other important diffrence: they are not connected with any one proficiency test.

TEACHING BEGINNING LEVELS

Teaching beginners is considered a challenge for the teacher. It is very stressful when you dont want to make a mistake with beginners because you know that this mistake can be reproduced in others. There are some steps for teachers to teach beginners:

Students' cognitive learning processes

The teacher need to encourage his/ her students to practice the new language that they are learning, can be simple words, sentences or whatever the teacher believe is good to practice.

The role of the teacher and talk

Beginnig students are highly dependent on the teacher for models of language. Students are able to initiate few questions and comments, so it is a responsability of the teacher to get the ball rolling. In a second language  context where instruction is acrried out in the target language, virtually all of your class time will be teacher-controlled. In a foreign language situation, where students speak the same native language, some negotiation might be possible in the native language, allowing for a small amount of student control.

Student's  creativity

Depending on the level the students are going to be able to produce some words or express what they feel. The thing is that the tecaher need to stimulate self-confidence in his/her students because sometimes they are afraid to say something and it is a problem because they are not going to show their knowledge about something.

Techniques

For beginning levels short and simple techniques must be used, repetition and other drilling.

For intermediate levels the teacher has the opportunity to increase the complexity of things because at that moment students are supposed to know more things.

For advanced levels the teacher could apply some different techniques because the students are wiser in some things. They are gonna be able to pronounce well, and they gonna have some new vocabulary.

Some skills are going to be developed for example speaking, writing, reading, listening and grammar.
Each of them depend on the level. The students since the beginning are gonna start learning one of them until they are in an advanced level.

TEACHING ACROSS AGE LEVELS

There are many things that are different at the moment of teaching. One of them is age, is not the same teaching children, that teaching adults, and obviously it is totally different when you want to teach teenagers.

TEACHING CHILDREN

Teaching children is very difficult because you need to improve many things at the moment of transmit the knowledge. Children tend to get bored easily, and in that case the teacher needs to have creativity and imagination in order to have the control of his/her students. Kids sometimes are so intelligent, but there are some cases where the students do not learn anything and it is because of the techniques that the teacher give to them. 

We also have different methods that are good to improve the learning process, such as Suggestopedia and TPR. Those methods are very useful for the teacher because the students can learn to follow some commands. We need to take into account that little kids repeat all the things that we do and say, that is way we need to have good techniques to make the class interesting and comprenhesible.

TEACHING ADULTS

Although many of the rules for teaching chldren can apply in some ways to teaching adults, the latter age group poses some different, special considerations for the classroom teacher. Adults have superior cognitive abilities that can render them more successful in certain classrooms endeavors. 

1- Adults are more able to handle rules and concepts.

2- Adults have longer attention spans for material that may not be intrinsically interesting to them.

3- Sensory input need not always be quite as varied with  adults, but one of the secrets of lively adult classes is their appeal to multiple senses.

Some management "do's" and "dont'ts":

- Don't treat adults in your class like children by calling them "kids" 

- Don't discipline adults in the same way as children because adults have more capacity to analize a situation and try to be mature in that aspect.

TEACHING TEENS

Teaching teens is more difficult that terat with children because teens are an age of transition, confusion, self-consciousness, growing, and changing bodies and minds. Sometimes they like to do whatever they want and they do not follow directions. But obviously tenns are more mature than children and the rules or directions can be more strict but you as a teacher does not treat them like they can not do anything because they complain for every single word you say.

In this moment of learning process teens need to decide what they want to be for the future and all of this depends a little of the teacher and the dfferent ways that he/she may apply tomake more interesting the process.