Successful adult students employ strategies to learn, and effective adult education programs attend to the development of learning by enabling students to study learning processes in addition to content. Good learners have the ability to identify goals and the steps required to achieve them, identify the strengths of their own learning, actively…

This book presents an overview of the body of knowledge about adult learning, including the context in which it takes place, who the participants are, what they learn and why, the nature of the learning process, the development of theory in adult learning, and other issues relevant to the practice of adult learning. The book takes into account…

This book summarizes the research on adult English language learners (ELLs) reading English, offering English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teachers and administrators suggestions for instruction and noting areas where further research is needed. It is based on an annotated bibliography of research on reading development for adult learners of English…

When autonomous adults are faced with challenging tasks within a nonstressful, collegial environment, they may have an optimal opportunity to learn. This paper asserts that educators should therefore consider strategies for infusing games with academic concepts. Guidelines are offered for conducting three games to stimulate thinking, active…

Written for professional people returning to study, this book provides practical guidance and strategies to increase confidence, enhance skills, and develop critical awareness and creativity. Chapter 1 helps students identify reasons for return to study and their implications; examine their interpretations of what learning is; and think about…

The immediate stimulus for this collection of papers was a conference, Self-Access and the Adult Language Learner, organized by the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) and the Language Centre of the University of Cambridge in December 1992 at Queen's College, Cambridge. Several 1-day conferences on the same theme were…

Goal setting is a dispositional trait that influences motivation to learn and to perform. Individuals with a Performing (or Proving) Goal Orientation are characterized by a desire to please authority figures, the belief that personal abilities are stable and unchanging, and a tendency to become frustrated and give up quickly when faced by…

This book explains how work organizations can create a workplace climate that encourages real-time, on-the-job learning and development of competent workplace learners, who are wiling and able to seize the initiative for identifying their own learning experiences and evaluating the results. The following are among the topics discussed: (1) the…