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Teach English in Shidunhe Zhen - Hanzhong Shi

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Shidunhe Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Hanzhong Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.

English as a second language instruction always presents unique student problems depending on the native language which informs students’ learning perspective. It is essential that teachers research these potential instructional challenges and tailor lessons to address them. When teaching young Chinese students, there are great differences between Chinese and English to account for during instruction which illustrate why many scholars feel that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn and master. The first challenge for students is acquiring the English alphabet as Chinese, like most Asian languages, uses characters that have no direct correlation to the Latin alphabet from which English is derived. Students will need to memorize the alphabet letters with the name, pronunciation, and how to write the letters. Even writing the letters is different as English has both capital and small letters whereas Chinese characters apply no “cases” other than to numbers used for accounting purposes. When students are ready to move on to studying points of grammar, there are numerous differences which challenge the student. Verb tenses are usually the greatest challenge as Chinese has no explicit verb tenses and English has 12. All English nouns have a singular and plural form, which follow various rules for forming them that must be memorized. In comparison, Chinese nouns do not have a plural form but instead are modified with another character. The application of pronouns is also different because English utilizes male/female pronouns and plural pronouns whereas Chinese uses different written pronouns that are nonetheless pronounced the same in speech. English uses several definite and indefinite articles but Chinese has none. Issues with pronunciation derive mainly from common sounds in English that do not exist at all in the Chinese phonology like /l/, /r/, /v/, /w/, and /th/. These will be hard for students to pronounce, differentiate between, and especially put on to the end of words. When teaching online, the natural barriers of technology make it even harder to effectively demonstrate the sounds to the student and communicate how to place the lips and tongue. Pronunciation difficulty extends to the consonant clusters of /tr/, /dr/, /st/, and /pl/. Chinese words also never end in a hard consonant so beginners will often self-correct this by adding a schwa so the teacher will not get “dog” but “dog-a” and “hide” but “hide-a”. For future success, accuracy of pronunciation and comprehension of the rules that influence it cannot be underestimated with beginner learners. When students begin speaking full sentences, the issues of pacing and emphasis arise as speech patterns that are very different from Chinese. In Chinese, each character is given the same amount of time in a sentence, but native English speakers often change the pacing of speech and even omit or contract words. Certain regional accents will emphasize this further such as a southern drawl, which is why online employment usually advertises for a neutral North American accent. English also employs strict rules about the emphasis in each word which requires a high degree of mastery and practice. The meaning of some words will even change with the wrong emphasis (CON-test versus con-TEST). These are just some of the main challenges confronting both the teacher and Chinese student. But when lesson plans account for these challenges and devise lessons and activities to help the student gradually practice their likelihood of success increases. Chinese students have a particularly high desire to succeed in their students and most will accept their teacher’s guidance towards fluency.


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