TRIPLE E TRAINING HOLDINGS

You may not see the necessity for an adult person to learn to speak. Most of us learn to speak in the first years of our lives simply by copying our parents. However, if your parents are not using language in the correct way, you cannot learn to speak correctly. The next step to learning to speak is when we reach school age and your teachers begin correcting any errors in your speech. Many people in South Africa have not had the opportunity to go to school and therefore their speaking has never improved. An adult basic education and training programme will assist individuals who want to learn to speak correctly or learn to speak a different language.

You need to learn basic maths skills to perform the most basic tasks in society. Without the ability to read numbers you cannot know what items cost and whether you have the right amount of money to make a purchase. Being able to add and subtract will ensure that you always receive the right change when you are shopping. More complicated calculations such as multiplication, division and fractions will enable you to enter into credit agreements and understand how interest works. All these skills will help you have better control of your finances and prevent people from taking advantage of you.

Even if you are not in a management position, but a small business owner or an employee you will benefit from learning to speak an African language. The first benefit of learning to speak an African language is that you will be able to communicate with a larger segment of the population and with your co-workers and employees. Communication breaks down barriers and builds respect for each other. The second benefit is that you will open career doors and thus invest in your future. For the employer it is important that the non-native African language speakers will be able to work well with all groups in the company. By enrolling employees in a course such as Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa or Sotho open communication in the company can follow, creating a positive work environment.

Adult teaching differs from teaching children or even full time students. There is less time and the learners want to see results quickly. It is however, also important to note that once a person enrols out of free will, the learner is generally more positive and eager to learn. As such we encourage employers to explain adult teaching methods with their employees to ensure a positive attitude right from the start. We follow adult teaching methods that inspire, uplift, motivate, and encourage. Our aim is never to break down, but to build on existing skills. As such the attendees enjoy our classes and prefer our way of adult teaching because they can see immediate results. This also benefits the employer that receives the advantages of an education workforce almost immediately.

If an employee doesn’t understand why it is needed to take additional classes or why he or she should for instance, take mathematics classes, attend an HIV awareness program, learn an African language or develop English communication skills, the worker will not be positive. This is dangerous because a reluctant learner may not attend classes, work hard to gain skills, or even decided to not attend at all. You as an employer must motivate employees to learn. Give them the reasons why you provide additional training. Show them the direct benefits such as promotion, ability to use the skills gained also outside the workplace and show them how they will benefit in the workplace. Triple e knows how to motivate employees to learn. We structure our courses to be fun, on the level of the employee and to give immediate results.

It may not appear frequently among multiple choices, and students may not repeat it a thousand times as they build their portfolios, but “responsibility” remains the fundamental, essential, indispensible, pervasive, and ubiquitous word in worker education. Worker education prepares students not only to become more productive and efficient, but also to become progressively more responsible. Sometimes the most important part of worker education doesn’t appear in the syllabus or among the curriculum materials, but responsibility develops as students learn the subtleties and intricacies of work-life balance. Worker education often builds students’ willingness to take-on extra projects at work, challenging them to become more responsible. Worker education also helps students become responsible for their own learning and its application. At first, they demand to know the reason and relevance for development of new skills. As they advance through worker education; however, they learn to figure it out for themselves.

Although disadvantaged students recognize the theoretical value of education, they enroll in adult basic education to advance in their jobs. They want to earn better wages, secure a better standard of living for themselves and their families, and gain some measure of power and prestige among their colleagues. Language and mathematics skills which immediately transfer from school to work help workers to learn. When they capitalize on familiar workplace situations, instructors help workers to learn English and math skills that yield immediate benefits. The architects of twenty-first century adult education agreed with their business and corporate partners that the focus must be on outcome based education. Businessmen need to see workers applying their new skills at work. Workers need to see those outcomes, too. When skills and advancement reinforce one another, motivation and engagement help workers to learn.

Because students readily learn to read and write when they have opportunities to use their new language skills in their work, basic adult English classes focus first on conversational workplace conversations. Working with corporate associates, professional educators and trainers who specialize in Basic English adult classes, develop curriculum according to everyday situations in the job site. Conversations develop interactions between supervisors and employees, or they build from common social situations, and vocabulary emphasizes professional jargon and common expressions used at the jobsite.

Basic English adult classes, although they focus on spoken language, nevertheless build simple command of phonics and they develop word recognition, the fundamentals of reading. Because rising English users are familiar with approximately ten times more spoken words than they can read, basic English adult classes capitalize on that familiarity to boost students’ vocabularies and lay the foundation for reading.

Research with rising users of English proves what common sense always suggested – When students learn English “in a meaningful context,” they learn more quickly and they retain what they learn. English adult classes, which develop students reading and writing skills in the context of their everyday work, show far greater growth and retention than English adult classes taught “in isolation.” The difference lies in motivation and reward. Although a compilation of literature introduces students to masterpieces, they cannot use literary language at work. However, speech, conversation, and texts derived from the workplace have immediate reward—learn it tonight and use it tomorrow. Moving ahead through a series of English adult classes, students work with increasingly complex, sophisticated texts taken from common workplace situations.

The conventional wisdom equates “literacy” with fundamentals of reading and writing, and it equates “numeracy” with basics of mathematics. Literacy, however, advances well beyond the basics to public speaking and conversation, figuration, and sophisticated inference.

When adults learn numeracy skills, they similarly move well beyond the basics, developing sophisticated skills that help them advance in their careers. When they learn numeracy skills, adult learners ultimately master multiple operations and the sequence of operations. They learn about patterns and sequences so that they can recognize the differences among arithmetic, geometric, and exponential growth. When adult students learn numeracy skills, they master the fundamentals of geometry—perimeter or circumference, area and volume.

When they complete the series of classes in which they learn numeracy skills, adult students ultimately have the same command of math as students entering university—no longer just the basics.