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My essay is devoted to teaching and learning the peculiarities of the English language. On one hand my choice is based on my teaching experience and understanding the difficulties of the subject. On the other hand when I was a student myself I got interested in Otto Jespersen´s bibliography and also in "The Adventure of English" by Melvyn Bragg. Keeping in mind both reasons, I have made up my mind to deepen my knowledge of teaching the peculiarities of modern English as a foreign language. It goes without saying that the simplest thing to begin with is a phoneme. Having contextual features, a phoneme can be turned into an allophone. For comparison - English "t" with aspiration in "toy" differs from "t" without aspiration in "little". In turn, "t" in Russian is pronounced without any aspiration. Students all over the world from Slavic to Austroasiatic tend to pronounce English sounds like in their native languages. Aspiration with "p,t,k", a wide variety of vowel sounds, postalveolar approximant "r", [θ] and [ð] consonants, a phonetic smile can be marked as peculiar properties and difficulties simultaneously. After explaining the theory, it would be entertaining and effective to offer the students to pronounce a sentence in Russian according to English phonetic rules. But drilling exercises are impossible to avoid. Intonation should be in the spotlight when teaching English. The intonation patterns such as fall/rise or rise/fall etc. ensure complete comprehension. Intonation helps to structure and organize the main idea of utterance, to express communicative type of sentences, but it is not very easy for foreigners. Having a choir conductor background, I find it fruitful to control combinations in pitch, volume, tempo and pause by gesture using humming or singing. Parts of Speech in English have their own features, and in my experience, it can be both difficult and easy to learn. It is important to notice that English Nouns have no gender whereas Spanish endings usually can be changed. For example, in Spanish we can differ a male cat "gato" and female cat "gata". Indefinite and definite articles in English are very troublesome topics for Slavic students due to their absence in these languages. It would be valuable to explain the theory using detective story about articles devised by a teacher. Meanwhile the cases of Article usage are simple for the Danes and the Germans. In Danish, for instance, the definite article comes before a noun and can be common or neuter and the indefinite article is not a separate word but an ending. Both articles have the gender and number. The English Articles don't have gender. But in Spanish you have to bear in mind number and the gender choosing the necessary article. Verbs in English have categories of Tense, Voice, Mood, but Aspect and Time Correlation should be highlighted as special categories when teaching Slavic students. It is appropriate to mention the Russian language where these categories are completely different. Teaching languages, I have to explain logic and harmony of English Irregular verbs. For convenience of remembering, it is useful to distinguish similarly sounding forms of Irregular verbs. Moreover, English Phrasal verbs, being an ingrained instrument of expressiveness, are very laconic. There are more than 5000 phrasal verbs used in everyday spoken and written communication. It's important to know their meanings and how to use them correctly.The extraordinary fact that one verb can have a few meanings sometimes is surprising for students. And for being polite single-verb synonym is preferable as more formal. "Look out" is a demonstrative example for foreign beginners to be involved. It is impossible to underestimate conciseness and pithiness of a Gerund. However, an immense application list usually terrifies English learners. A consistent explanation of the usage cases can be achieved by means of presenting sentence patterns and visual aids. The relative simplicity of Adjectives makes the English language easily teachable and accessible. Thus, Danish adjective "smuk" (beautiful) changes its ending due to neuter gender "smukt hus" (beautiful house) or number "smuk dag - smukke dage" (beautiful day - beautiful days), and doesn't change with common gender - "smuk pige" (beautiful girl). It can be traced that "beautiful" in English has no any transformation in the given examples. This fact facilitates the process of acquisition. Using quizzes, simple funny verses and stories and charts can help teaching. English word formation can be divided into two processes: derivation (word-building), including compounding ("windmill", "hide-and-seek" ) and affixation ("happiness"), and inflexion (word-changing), including clipping ("exam", "flu"), blending ("brunch"), back formation ("action - act"). Knowing these rules can help foreigners to broaden their active vocabulary. It makes them more self-confident. Scramble Words or Hangman can make the lesson exciting and beneficial. Summing up my modest attempt to describe the peculiarities of the English language, it is vital to touch upon different social requirements concerning formal and informal speech etiquette. The world famous play "Pygmalion" by Bernard Shaw proves that, according to the rules of the upper society, your perfect language might be a key to success. Staying in an English speaking country is the best way to get acquainted to the peculiarities in practice. If there is no opportunity of travelling, reading such books as"Watching the English" by Kate Fox (the anthropological survey discovering characteristics of "Englishness") reveals "top secret" social codes and rules of behavior. Thus weather-speak is a suitable facilitator of a social interaction, a simple greeting, an ice-breaker, a go-to guy in an awkward lull... Language acquisition can't be effective without knowing the basic rules of introduction, privacy rules, the guessing game rules, reciprocal-disclosure strategy and lots of others. I would encourage upper-intermediate students this to read this book to upgrade their experience baggage of the English language peculiarities. The fact that more than 1000000 people speak English is the best motivation for students to join this army and acquire English perfectly taking all the possibilities to avoid ambiguity, misunderstanding and being impolite.
