It seems that authentic texts, even at the elementary level, serve their purpose better than do artificially composed texts. They give the learners a challenge as well as a foretaste of real English. As many adult learners stress, they need to be equally acquainted with the spoken and written form of the foreign language they are learning. Aural-oral skills are important, but we must not forget that adult students need some more sound reading practice, too. What characterises an adult learner is his or her perennial lack of time.
Adult learners do want to learn but have very little or no time for it at home.
They expect to learn as much as possible in the classroom. Being assigned homework and not finding time to do it can be very frustrating and may eventually lead to giving up the course. When assigning homework is pointless because the learners never do it, classroom activities must be enough. There may be alternative homework which does not require extra time, like listening to the radio or TV news in English and reading the press in English. Some Polish newspapers, for example, Nowa Europa , now have summaries of the issue's articles in English, and in almost any newspaper one can now find advertisements in English.