Language Teaching and the Older Adult: The Significance of Experience

Due to the aging of the population and the increasing number of older adults pursuing foreign language courses, a greater understanding of the ways in which older adults learn foreign languages is long overdue. This book offers a pioneering contribution to the literature on foreign language education for older adults (aged 60 and over), termed foreign geragogy. It details an empirical, multidisciplinary study on Japanese older learners of Spanish and focuses on the influence of learning experiences on vocabulary learning strategy use. It provides a theoretical discussion about the influence of experience on the learning process of older adults and taps into the constraints that preconceptions impose on learners, researchers, instructors and administrators. It offers a set of practical recommendations for the development and adjustment of foreign language activities for elderly individuals and introduces the notion of ‘learner re-training’, an instructional mechanism that contributes to older learners’ self-acknowledgment and autonomy development in foreign language learning. The book will be of interest to teachers and trainee teachers of foreign languages to older adults, education professionals and researchers in the field of foreign language learning in general.