Teach English in Wushengqiao Zhen - Heze Shi

The word is not a sparrow, if it crashes, you won't catch it... So says the popular Russian proverb. Every resident of the country knows it, and everyone who aspires to a successful life tries to think before discussing anything. The fact that many conversations in our life are deprived of intellectual burden is widely known, but an intelligent person always seeks to reduce the level of idle chatter to a minimum, thereby filling his life with truly interesting conversations. No doubt this problem is regularly raised in a multilingual society. However, today I would like to touch on the problems that students face when beginning to master a foreign language, specifically English. It is the problem of pronunciation. As a native Russian resident of the cultural capital of Russia, I was worried about this problem from the beginning of my English studies in primary school. It so happened that in my family my grandmother was an English teacher in high school who had worked in this position for more than 50 years. Naturally, I began my acquaintance with English much earlier than most of my peers. And the first step in the work of my grandmother in teaching me a foreign language was the formulation of pronunciation. A distinctive feature and undoubtedly the difficulty in mastering English for a Russian person is the presence in this language of sounds other than Russian. The Russian language is rich in hissing sounds and so-called iota vowels. We rarely think about it ourselves, but traveling around the world, I noted for myself the undoubted similarity of my native Russian with, at first glance, exotic Portuguese. Later this fact was confirmed by many compatriots who visited that beautiful country. English, on the other hand, is rich in “Approximant”, “Fricatives” and “Affricates” which require a very specific skill. Correcting their incorrect pronunciation, later turns out to be a difficult task. Another distinctive feature of the English language is the presence in the language of a large number of so-called “Silent” sounds. Many words in writing are denoted by 5 or more letters, while only 2-3 sounds are pronounced (Tough, knife etc). This is complicated by the fact that in English, along with the rules of reading and pronunciation of such letter combinations, there are a huge number of exceptions to these rules, and the only effective way to master them is memorization. This feature, in my opinion, is one of the key links in the process of understanding the difficulties of English pronunciation among Russian-speaking students. Another common difficulty for a person from Russia is mastering the rules of reading vowel sounds. The most difficult being the exceptions to the rule. Depending on the position of the vowels in the word, their letter order and the etymology of the word (its origin is from another language), the pronunciation will change, and to master this skill is the task of a diligent student. Virtually any foreigner, especially a native English speaker, easily identifies a Russian person by his accent. Sounds that are too harsh for natural English pronunciation, the vocalization of normal, noiseless sounds and the distortion of the English language sounds are easily detected in conversation. Speaking about the problems of the pronunciation of English by Russian-speaking students, it is worthwhile to think positively, and a good teacher will surely find a way to convey to his students that in addition to the grammatical and phonetic differences between the two languages, one cannot help but recall the similarities. English is a mixture of several modern European languages, which at first glance are completely different, but in practice they are not that far from each other. Russian, in turn, has also absorbed a lot of words and expressions of foreign language origin (Middle Eastern and Asian languages, French, German and other Romance languages, and of course English). This fact allows a student studying English language in Russia to discover and draw parallels and associations with their native language, which ultimately can alleviate the problems of pronunciation, in particular, and mastering English as a whole. Returning to my own experience and summing up, I must say that the efforts that were made by my teachers to master the competent pronunciation of the English language brought their results. Learning, articulating practice, training in front of a mirror, listening to songs and watching movies and cartoons in English, with constant correct pronunciation, have borne fruit, and I often see a surprise on people's faces, since I have a weak “typical” Russian accent. Undoubtedly, in my work as an English teacher, I have given and will continue to attach great importance to the formulation of adequate and correct pronunciation by my students. In the modern multicultural world, a person’s desire to be understandable, is their main priority. A Russian person today is an educated, cultural, interesting and open person, traveling to the farthest corners of our planet, finding friends everywhere and striving for correct mastery of English pronunciation is an indisputable prerogative from an early age.