Teach English in Jianmin Zhen - Ankang Shi

Learning a foreign language has made me a better ESL instructor. Firstly, this essay intends to provide a context for how I compare and explain the peculiarities of English. Secondly, this essay will examine some of the most common frustrations that my students encounter while learning English. English is my native language and I took 13 years of French immersion as a child. Two years ago, I enrolled in a Chinese language program at my university. My Chinese professor recommended me to work at a private ESL school. Since I worked with predominantly Chinese students at this school, I immediately recognized an unforeseen advantage in my classroom. Being able to translate words and phrases between English and Chinese was obviously helpful in conveying the meaning of course content. However, since I am only at an intermediate level of Mandarin, the true advantage proved to be that I created an environment which bolstered speaking confidence in my students. I was not afraid or ashamed to make mistakes in the language of my students and this made me fallible as an instructor. Being fallible is not a trait most people would assume to be attractive as an instructor. However, my students would always find it very funny when I would mistakenly use the wrong character and give the phrase a hilarious meaning. This created an atmosphere where I could encourage my students to venture beyond their comfort zones during the engage and activate phases of our lessons. Nonetheless, no level of understanding in the student's native language can fully equip an instructor with the necessary tools to rationalize all the peculiarities of English. The first obstacle, when teaching English to a Chinese learner, is explaining the frequency of articles and prepositions. The Chinese language does not possess these frivolous little words. Instead, verbs and nouns are assembled loosely and understood contextually. For example, it is reasonably counterintuitive for an ESL student to add the preposition "to" as frequently as it is needed. Examine the sentence, "I want to go to the pool to swim". Even to a native English speaker, this sentence sounds crude and would be changed to replace at least one preposition with a present participle verb. On the other hand, this sentence would be simply, "I want go pool swim" in Chinese. Equally strange is the addition of the verb "do" when making an inquiry, "Do you want fries with that?" The more structural rules you learn, the more you break those rules. The classic example involves irregular plurals like goose-geese, moose-moose, ox-oxen, fox-foxes. Furthermore, the conjugation of verbs in English is dependent on the tense. This concept does not exist in Chinese as the future or past is conveyed through its own character in the sentence rather than adjusting the words that carry their own respective meaning already. This process requires the students to memorize an endless variety of different spellings for words that they already know. Some examples include fight-fought, bite-bit, stack-stacked, stand-stood. The English language is an amalgamation of many different Germanic, Latin, and Slavic languages with surely some influence from forgotten tribal dialects as well. Some words will possess strange combinations of consonants, like "angst", that are derived from their Germanic roots. Often, when examining authentic materials, the class will encounter "borrowed" words from other languages that have become colloquialisms in English (i.e. hors-d'oeuvres, doppelgänger). The study of abnormalities in English is broadened exponentially when you incorporate and compare the pronunciation of words with their spelling. Words like indict, conscience, mortgage, and colonel would be impossible to spell if only heard for the first time. For this reason, English is the only language that has popularized the competition known as a "spelling bee". Words in the English language often have a myriad of different meanings and connotations. Homonyms are words with the same spelling and pronunciation but different meanings (i.e. leaves, rose). Homophones are words that possess the same pronunciation but are spelled differently (i.e. band-banned, knight-night). In the eyes of ESL students, the English language can seem rife with trickery and confusion. I encounter these inexplicable nuances with my ESL classes on a near daily basis. Although I can't make any excuses on behalf of the English language, I take it as an opportunity to draw a parallel between the complexity of Chinese characters and the endless variations in spelling of the same English words. In conclusion, I am grateful that I learned English as my first language during a stage in my cognitive development before anything was subject to reason. Now burdened with logic, I aim to be an empathetic instructor as all languages have strange nuances.