Teach English in Hongkou Zhen - Bazhong Shi

As a Korean who moved to an English speaking country when I was six years old, I grew up speaking English and naturally became a native speaker. Throughout my high school days I saw many international students from Korea and was able to observe their acquisition of the English language. In this summative task I have decided to mention my findings. First of all, the fact that these international students were able to study abroad was a huge advantage in itself. They are surrounded by the language all the time and in the school environment they had a lot of opportunities to speak to different native speakers (teachers and students). However based on my observations, only a very few students (probably less than 10%) improved their English significantly before going back to their home country. The majority went back to Korea without gaining much fluency or naturalness in speaking or writing. The reason for this was simple. They perhaps studied hard at school and had some exposure to the English environment in day to day life, but out of class hours they stuck to Korean friends, lived in Korean home-stays, watched Korean TV and almost spoke no English at all in their leisure time. There was almost nothing different to studying in an English school in Korea. Therefore their receptive skills may have increased but their productive skills were still very low. In contrast, the few friends who became close to being native speakers before going back had English-speaking friends, spent their leisure time with them, and diligently studied hard themselves to increase their grammar and vocabulary. The effect of their study would have been compounded by the fact that they were pushed to use what they learnt straight away with their friends in English. Although it is understandable that studying overseas may be stressful and that relax time is needed (which comes with using their mother tongue) there was nothing that pushed them to get their new language into use in everyday situations. Also, especially to Koreans who tend to stick closely to themselves, it would have been hard to make friends with other nationalities because of the differences in culture and humour. However I strongly believe that spending casual time with English speakers is crucial, and that a moderate amount of stress is actually good to obtain new language as you are forced to spit out what you learn. It will only get easier and easier as the mouth gets familiar with the new sounds, and they will be harder to forget. This is the advice I would give to any foreigner learning English. As a potential teacher in the future though I can only influence students during my lessons. As the course material mentioned, students need to have a willingness to learn and listen to the language, a desire to experiment with the language and accept correction. I thought that when teaching English, motivating and reassuring students to do so should form the base of my teaching so that whatever they learn, they can take in as much as possible. This would involve praising them, planning lessons in a way that helps them see the relevance to their daily life, giving them confidence by using authentic materials, and creating a comfortable atmosphere so that they feel safe in speaking out in English. This, in turn would help them with what I emphasized above which is willingly spending informal time with English speakers. Completing this course combined with my experiences made me feel more equipped to be a good English teacher. As productive skills tend to come after receptive skills, I want to let my students gain accuracy through language study but also give them as many opportunities as possible to speak out and gain fluency.