I have now been teaching our Adult English class for a week and a half. I have designed the programme based on some prior knowledge of vocabulary, but not really of grammar. The topics covered so far have been greetings, basic introductions, numbers and plurals. With a total of 16 students having turned up at any one time, and an average of about 12 each lesson, I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself and assume that they are all enjoying it.

Its tough, not only because they really do understand very little English and so I have to teach largely in Swahili. I soon learnt that teaching adults is very different to teaching children. Whereas the latter involves large amounts of "sit down" "keep quiet" "open your books" "don't write on the desks" "don't eat the glue" etc, the adults have somewhat more intellectual requirements. Nevertheless, as with any challenge it is one that I enjoy, and the fact that the students get the homework more or less right must mean i'm on the right track.

However, I have also encountered some interesting problems that would not necessarily occur in a other foreign language lesson in England, for example.

Take the numbers lesson, for example. I first taught the ones, then the tens, then the hundreds. So far so good. Then some rules (i.e. we say "one hundred AND one", but not "thirty AND one". All OK. Then on to the exercises, the first of which was number dictation. I read out some numbers and the students had to write them in figures, and I wrote some figures on the board and the students had to write them in words.

Cue the first unexpected problem: Whilst the adults are more or less literate, they cannot read numbers well. We have to remember that these are people whose exposure to the written word is virtually nil. No newspapers, novels, timetables, brochures, letters, junk mail, emails, facebook..... So whilst they know that if you buy three pineapples at 1000 each and pay with 5000 you'll get 2000 change, if you ask them to write "2000", or "3500" or "10,050" they struggle. The zeroes get put in the wrong place, or added where they shouldn't be, and numbers get transposed. 

Today was plurals. Having carefully researched the rules for making a plural (not being entirely au-fait with them myself) I wrote out the following:

- Words that end in a vowel + y          e.g. boy, day: add s        boys, days

- Words that end in a consonant + y   e.g. fly, city:   change the y to ies      flies, cities

Can anyone spot the problem. Anyone? You got it - they don't know what vowels or consonants are. After a bit of "umm-aahing", I tentatively write the alphabet on the board, not being quite sure what to expect. That may seem a strange thing to say, since all the adults can copy from the board and read with a certain degree of confidence. Nevertheless, i hestitated to ask if they knew the alphabet, and breathed a sigh of relief when they began reciting it back to me. I then wrote "aeiou" and they were more than happy to recite that too. Certainly, my experiences of the children's Swahili lessons have shown that they get these 5 letters drummed into their heads by rote several thousand times a day. It turned out therefore that they simply didn't know the words "vowel" or "consonant". But, knowing the former they by default also knew the latter.

This has therefore taught me to revise my lesson plans from now on, especially since tomorrow is adjectives, and i need to make particularly sure that they are confident with that grammatical concept.

God help me when we get to the subjunctive...