Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners in the Classroom
I have been working with LADPP (Latin American Disabled People’s Project) since October 2016. This programme was originally designed to help Latin American immigrants with disabilities to integrate in the UK. However, with time it became open to all Spanish speaking people.
My role there is to teach English as a foreign language and I have been having Spanish speaking adult students from Latin America, Africa and some European countries. The challenge of the teaching process with LADPP is that the classes work on drop-in bases. Students themselves choose their level. Although they are priory interviewed and advised a certain level, they sometimes choose to attend as many classes as possible regardless of the level of difficulty or just find a class according to the time convenient for them.
This, together with some other further described factors, creates a mixture of students with very different abilities and requires from a teacher to be very flexible and adaptable in order to meet various learning needs.