Teach English in Wori Zhen - Aba Zangzu Qiangzu Zizhizhou —

According to a research conducted by EF(Education First) company regarding how well English is learnt among seventy countries,Turkish students were ranked fiftieth. This did not come to me as a surprise due to the fact that i have been living and teaching English here in Turkey for quite some time now. When I took a look at the statistics, Turkish students take more than thousand hours of English lessons right from primary to high school but the average Turkish student can neither express him/herself in English nor understands what an English speaker says. What seem to be the problem then? I decided to observe and research about what the educational system offers regarding the teaching of English language. The first thing i realized was the medium of instruction used by teachers during lessons. Students are basically taught in Turkish language when they're having an English lesson. A student learning a foreign language needs to be instructed in that particular language ninety nine percent of the time. As students keep hearing and getting used to some pattern of phrases, automatically it stays in the long term memory making learning easy and simple. In this way their pronunciation skills also develop alongside the listening skills. Secondly,i learned that there is basically a repetition of topics year after year.In other words there is no progress made by the teachers since students usually completely forget what they were taught the previous year due to the failure to use and practice the language. It is definitely no fault of the students' because the methodology used to teach them English in school is not productive. Students generally lose interest in the language due to the fact that they have to be taught the same thing over and over again. Another crucial point is that as students proceed to higher classes, they blame their inability to learn and speak English on the English language proficiency of their teachers. I was disappointed when a student said 'Our teachers do not even know English very well so how do you expect them to teach us'. In fact this saying is common among young students in Turkey and everyone will side with me that this is really depressing. The last point i would like to address is that, the teaching of English language is more of loading the students with tonnes of grammar rules forgetting that practice is key to learning a language that is completely new to them. I would say that there is negligible time allocated to practice what these students learn in school. When you give the average Turkish student in middle school questions regarding grammar, there is a high probability that they will perform good. On the other hand this same student cannot speak or understand when somebody speaks English. Looking at all these stated problems i believe there are simple and effective solutions that can really help these Turkish students to learn English. Firstly, these students must not to be taught English in their native language. In this way it will raise their curiosity about the language and increase the zeal to understand and make significant progress in their journey. When they are curious about learning the language,they will try and use it anytime and wherever they find themselves. This will really help both students and teachers and create a conducive atmosphere in school to enhance the learning of English language. Lastly, the number of lesson hours must be increased and geared towards practicals. In this way, the involvement of students in the lesson will be increased. The more the involvement the greater the interest shown by these student in learning the language. Student' areas of interest can be identified and they can be encouraged to use the language in these areas. Students can be made to read books and try to narrate what they learned from them. Developing their interest in the language is key to ensuring that they participate effectively during lessons.