My mother started to learn English at forty-one, after eighteen years without a class.
Her company changed its , and every report to the head office had to be in English.
She was in the first lesson, because two students were her son's age.
Her teacher gave the group a different : no grammar tests, only real emails and phone calls.
Every week they wrote three emails from their real work and corrected them together.
My mother also listened to the same twenty-minute programme every morning in the kitchen.
After a year she could write a report alone, however she was still afraid of the phone.
So her teacher arranged five minutes of phone English at the end of every lesson.
Last month my mother explained a to a customer in Singapore for eleven minutes.
She says the difficult part was not the language; it was accepting that she was a again.