Manual

The Manual is a document addressed to language teachers who are teaching foreign language to adults. The aim of this manual is to supply teachers with useful, practical, user-friendly tools for teaching languages to adults in a more effective way on the basis of 12 Montessori principles. It aims at offering new insights to language teachers offering language courses for university students or adults and teachers trainers. Its final beneficiaries are therefore university language students and adult language learners everywhere.

This manual can be adapted to the teacher’s soft skills, experience and personal attitudes, and can be used in addition to the teacher’s own methodology and the students’ level. Most of the activities proposed are suitable for the levels A1 to B2.
Teachers will find several activities and perhaps some of them are currently being applied. The aim of this manual is not to supply new activities but to show a different approach based on Montessori principles, even with those activities already used.

The aim of the manual is not to train Montessori teachers. There are specific training programs for this that last several years. The aim of the manual is to provide to the language teachers that teach adults and university students the possibility to improve their teaching by implementing the Montessori Methodology principles in their classroom.

The manual is developed around 5 main chapters. In the first chapter there is a brief introduction of the Montessori learning principles. In this chapter there are presented the 12 Montessori principles around which the activities proposed are developed and also the peculiarities of the Montessori teaching.

The second chapter describes how Montessori methodology can provide expedients to alleviate the recurrent “classroom problems”. It lists 10 stress causes that are very common in the language learning for adults and for each stress cause it proposes an activity based on the Montessori principles that could alleviate the problem. For each activity proposed, there is described the stress cause, the symptoms, the suggested activities and approaches, the reference to the Montessori principles and a brief description on how these principles are applied to children.

The third chapter describes how to set up a language class for adults based on the Montessori Method. After an introduction regarding the use of the methodology for language learning for adults, the manual presents four model lessons which show how Montessori principles can be applied to adult language training. At the end of each model lesson, pedagogical considerations are presented. In the last part of the chapter, the manual presents practical suggestions to teachers to design their own Montessori language course.

The fourth chapter, finally, presents some theoretical considerations regarding language, language learning, what makes Montessori Methodology work, which are the aims of the MMLT project and how the research realised provided the basis for the development of the manual.

The fifth chapter was added after the piloting phase and includes considerations following the piloting phase, issues that have to be re-considered and necessary clarifications.

You can download here the MMLT manual