Contextualized English Learning with Older Adults: A Qualitative Study of the “My Supermarket” Experience

Abstract

This study describes how a project-based teaching sequence supported the use of basic English among three older adult women enrolled in Cycle II of an accelerated primary education programme at the José Manuel Restrepo site of the Manzanas del Cuidado system in Bogotá, Colombia. The research followed a qualitative descriptive design with a case study orientation. The pedagogical intervention comprised nineteen sessions taught between February and April 2026 and culminated in a final task called “My Supermarket”, in which the participants ran two simulated stores and traded products using play money. The analysis drew on five lesson plans and their accompanying teacher reflections, pedagogical worksheets and learners’ written productions, project materials, six photographs, and three video recordings of selected classroom activities. A reflexive thematic analysis generated three categories: the progressive shift from explicit bilingual scaffolding towards project-driven language use; the anchoring of language content in the participants’ everyday experience, including their ages, family recipes and shopping routines; and the differentiated adaptation of instruction to uneven literacy levels within a very small group. The documented reflections indicate that content tied to familiar situations sustained participation and reduced the hesitation the learners expressed at the beginning of the process, and that the final project brought together content that had been practised separately in earlier sessions. The study also documents a tension between the explicit translation support used in the early sessions and the communicative orientation claimed by the project approach, and it discusses what that tension implies for teaching English to older adults.