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Teach English in Guanyin Zhen - Hanzhong Shi

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Hello Mentor As I am Vietnamese, I will write about the Problems for Vietnamese students when learning English at school. This is quite interesting topic to discuss about and hope my essay can help provide solutions to the problems which have been long time a concern for all English teacher in Vietnam. Let me start the story by telling you how hard I’ve studied English before! Come back around 20 years ago, that’s the time of 1990s’ since I was high school student. Almost English learning time in was a nightmare for all of us because we could not find the hobby and momentum in the class. We did not have chance to study English until we did enter high school when we were 15 years old already. English is somewhat a costly subject for those who has good conditions. Why? Because we are poor, at that time in around 1995 I still remember, we did not have enough English Book, both student books and teacher books. We did not have tape recorder either. Radio was still a luxurious hi-end device to us. We, the children living in villages in remote mountainous areas, even didn’t know what is Karaoke until we rushed to the small city where our high school located. And that was the first time we saw MLTR singing with the song name: Someday –MLTR, also that was the first time I know Micheal Learn To Rock band. And from then I love singing too much even I have a bad voice  Because of long complicated history of Vietnam, some of the teachers at that time teaching Russian languages. It was easy to understand that Vietnam had kept following China and Russia at that time as the separation between Socialism block and Capitalism site, we called them this way and later on when studying about World politics I know at that time the world has been divided into multi polar. The order of the world mostly led by USA and Russia and maybe China later rising on. Since Vietnamese PhD students at that time received a lot of scholarships from Russia, they come to Russia to study Russian language, some of them learn English in Russia. So Russian language had been taught at school from 1980 to around 1990. When the USSR went bankrupted, then the teachers again started studying English language to become English teachers. But in our memory, the English teachers, who had studied Russian before, spoke very uninteresting English and sound boring. That made the class not interesting and tedious. Another reason that is our first time to learn English, we were not able to see the teacher’s pronunciation is right or wrong, we even didn't have dictionary to check the spelling. Let take an example: PREPARATION, many teachers read it /ˌpripeˈrāSH(ə)n/ only later on I realized this is wrong pronunciation after around 5 years more or less. Or let take another example: EVENT /iˈvent/ but many teachers read /i’v(ə)nt/. This is wrong pronunciation. Another funny thing is that we can hardly differentiate L and N. In our region which is near Ha Noi city, people usually pronounce confused between L & N. Let say LIBERATION but someone say like: NIBERATION. I would take the last example of outstanding difference between S & SH like: See & She which is really a terrifying task for some students, those has bad habit of lisp pronunciation. Now we can easily check the pronunciation due to the development of information technology and internet also. You can learn English anytime you want, just log in YouTube channel or turn on many interesting TV programs or English videos... At that time around 1997, I just know by chance a program called English Everlasting Songs when I turned on FM radio looking for some music programs, from then I love listening to English songs everyday and my passion for learning English improved greatly, I know more English words and my classmates called me: living dictionary. Actually, I know English better than my classmate but I am not the one who is the best English student at the school. There are still some students much better than me but they studied English since they’re at primary school and they have plenty of Cartoon movie with English subtitles and many English comic books. At that time we had only one and half an hour weekly learning English. It isn't enough time studying, is it? Now my daughter just 7 years old using 6 hours weekly study English with full support of multi media (YouTube, Internet, English game software) and indigenous teacher from America or UK, Australia. My daughter even speak more sounding, fascinating English than the elders. Even at our time before, English language is always difficult to us, not because of that we give up learning English. We keep learning new words daily. We learn by writing new word 20-30 times on paper until we keep the word in our heart. We do very good English grammar. We learnt by heart tenses of English like: Past Simple, Simple Present Tense, Future Tense, Present Perfect Tense etc....and we do perfect grammar lessons even it is difficult. But when we meet foreigners, we dont understand what they say and they dont understand what we say because of our mistaken pronunciation. In sum, we fail to communicate with them. In Order To Improve Our Communication Skills as well as Student’s ability of using fluent English, after 20 years learning English, I would like to have some suggestions as below: • The teacher should have more sources of materials for teaching English including: Teacher books, Course Book, Referential books, Dictionary, Materials from BBC English, British Council, VOA English and so on • The teacher also need to invest at least 30 minutes daily watching: CNN, CNBC or BBC to correct his or her pronunciation • To have more frequent training with Native English Speaker or more interactive with Foreigners (Indigenous). Before 20 years ago, even English Teacher (Vietnamese) didn’t talk to foreigner for years ....or at least have chance to listen to CNN, BBC daily • To create more Speaking environment for students and focus on students. Teacher dont talk too much, teacher should consider student as the target of the class, not teacher consume up all the time of the class by talking and writing (this used to be an ineffective class room and cause the anxiety to the students once I experienced before) • Invite more English native teacher to participate in the class. This would be a big project of Ministry of Education and have been fruitful result for primary school students. • Need more volunteer teachers from US, UK, Australia as well. Some of the teachers have done very good job in Vietnam and keep noble impression to students in Ho Chi Minh and Ha Noi city too. • Send the children to English school at the age of 4 instead of start learning English from high school, this is too late. As the children mind is quick adapt to the new language, also from my experience sending my kids to English school when they are 4, the sooner the better a child can learn a new language. • The children also need an English speaking environment by communicating with English Kid Songs, Kid Movie and many English programs for Kids on YouTube and Television In such a short writing, we can not give all solutions to improve or fix the problems of learners in Vietnam, but this is also some tips or ideas to make your English communication better and more effective. The ultimate purpose of learning English is to communicate with people globally and connect with the people, culture all over the world to understand more about you, more about the globe. Thank you Eric Duong Quang Duy


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