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The role of a teacher in teaching languages to adults is not clear. By roles, I mean, for example: facilitator, manager, assessor, resources, participant and counselor.

Suppose learners concentrate on English (or another wide spread language) as second language where lots of learning materials are available and accessible, so the teacher is not the only available source of knowledge.

Also let's assume that we are talking about adult learners.

Are there studies that show what kinds of roles a teacher has in language acquisition?

I'd like to remind that I am interested in adult learners that already have life achievements, that are professional/qualified workers, graduated, able to process materials as part of their job duties (but not necessary related to linguistics) without nanny/nurse/tutor (like that is needed for children)...

I am looking for provable data based on research of groups, not for a personal or expert opinion.

Tommi
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gavenkoa
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  • The role of coursebooks, MOOC, self-study guides are to teach. Attending class means right school, methodology, professional tutor. If you are an adult you have duties and spending time/money on teacher should be justified. There are a lot of things to consider. For example how does teacher help with listening? Shouldn't you listen to radio/TV/youtube alone? There are plenty guides about passing exams. What is the benefit of teacher when you can check answer with keys? – gavenkoa Jan 09 '19 at 15:56
  • Those questions are easily answered without reference to published studies. – Tsundoku Jan 09 '19 at 15:57
  • If you know of evidence about the negative impact of correcting oral mistakes, you can post it here. And yes, there are plenty of adults who spend hundreds of hours in language courses. However, if your question is whether that goes faster than learning on your own, you should make this explicit in your question. – Tsundoku Jan 09 '19 at 16:25
  • edited to remove mistake There is evidence that certain teaching activities has negative impact. Also as adult you don't have free 400 hours to spend it in a class with fixed timetable. Do working with teacher bring you from A0 to B2 two times faster? Or only 5% faster? It is possible that your results are pure time investment into subject (assuming you have access to learning materials)... – gavenkoa Jan 09 '19 at 16:34
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    I think it is reasonable to ask how effective is teaching with a teacher present versus self-studying in terms of the time spent. I would assume that the second has huge variance and the first might also have, or maybe not, so it is not obvious one can say anything definitive. But maybe this has been studied. – Tommi Jan 09 '19 at 18:58
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    A related question might be: how much does teacher's ability affect learning outcomes? There is research on this on mathematics, where the amount of mathematics studies was used as a proxy for mathematical ability. – Tommi Jan 09 '19 at 18:59
  • @TommiBrander I agree that a question about the effectiveness of classroom learning versus autonomous learning would be interesting. But I don't see that in the current question. For me, it is still unclear what specific question gavenkoa is asking, especially since it still contains the sub-question, "Are there studies that show the role of teacher in language acquisition?" Role and effectiveness are two different things. – Tsundoku Jan 09 '19 at 21:18
  • @ChristopheStrobbe Please update question if you will. I saw articles that talked about such teacher roles: facilitator, manager, assessor, resources, participant and counselor. Some of them are necessary for teaching children and students and are not necessary for motivated / educated adults. English isn't my tongue lang, I can miss meaning of "role" here, but the point is that some traditional teacher roles are redundant for adults. – gavenkoa Jan 10 '19 at 10:04
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    I did a somewhat bold edit to focus this to only a single question about what kinds of roles a teacher has in adult education and when teaching languages. There were two other questions here, one about how big an effect the teacher has, and one if you should learn on a course or independently. The former is a good separate question, while the latter is usually a poor fit for SE site. Roll the edit back or re-edit if it is unreasonable. – Tommi Jan 10 '19 at 10:54
  • Are you asking what teaching methodology or combination of teaching methodologies is most effective? Teachers have preferences to different types. I don't know if a study has ever been done on teaching methodologies' effectiveness in student outcomes, but that certainly is an interesting question. The reason I refer to teaching methodology is because that tends to define the role the teacher plays in the classroom. – Karlomanio Jan 11 '19 at 20:10
  • Parents are usually the child's first language teachers. They talk to themselves and to the child, and they expect the child to talk back by 3 years of age. If the child cannot talk by age 3, then parents would naturally get very worried, because they'd think that something is wrong. – Double U Jan 14 '19 at 00:22

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I’d be surprised if there was enough research in this area to answer such a broad question. It would be very difficult to control for all the variables such as motivation, time spent, and the most effective learning styles for a particular learner. Some people can self study very effectively, some cannot. In the end motivation and time spent are probably the largest factor in language learning success. It is also likely that people in a class would self study as well and also have varying amounts of time and access to native speakers to practice with.

An additional difficulty in studying your question is how to decide how effective the classroom learning or self study is. There are so many aspects to language learning such as listening, speaking, and writing so to answer your question would involve picking a metric or language acquisition leveling system. The choice of metric could result in rather different answers.

Last your question doesn’t show any evidence of research. What efforts have you made to find out if this type of research is out there?

T. M.
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  • Please bear in mind that this site is not a discussion forum, so comments on the question should not be posted as answers. The question specifically asks for studies, so if you have no references to studies (or a reference, e.g. to a textbook) that claims that no such studies exist, you are not answering the question. – Tsundoku Jan 18 '19 at 12:30
  • @ChristopheStrobbe I’m aware but the guidelines also assume the poster has done some research which the op doesn’t show they have done. – T. M. Jan 18 '19 at 16:18