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Teach English in Chengqu - Jinzhong Shi

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Chengqu? Are you interested in teaching English in Jinzhong 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.

Grammar is a description of how a language is structured. When a child grows up in his/her native language environment, he/she is ex-posed to sounds from people surrounding him/her. These sounds and the ambient context (who is speaking, who are present, what are his/her facial expression and gesture, what happen before, what happen afterward, etc.) serve as input to the child to form interpretation and develop meaning. The sounds, in particular, are organized by the child and developed as perceived (hearing) language. As the child tries to respond and interact with the surrounding, this becomes the uttered (spoken) language. Later when the child grows up and learns to associate written words with per-ceived (hearing) language, this becomes reading. Finally, when the child grows up further to put down his/her spoken language and thoughts as written words, this becomes writing. With that, the child can communicate with others through his/her native language according to all the sounds, words, and rules so devel-oped. All children, except those with developmental issues, have an innate ability to learn to communicate with other through their native language. However this in-nate ability slowly disappears as children grow up. If an older child or adult who no longer have this innate ability is to learn a new language, the language learning process become a different and more diffi-cult task. He/she will have to learn the words or convert the continuous sounds (spoken language) into words, and learn the rules governing these words. These rules collectively are the expression of grammar. For a non-native student of a language, he/she will have to learn the new lan-guage grammar rules in a more analytical way. Using the learning of reading English as an example, he/she may start with learning the 26 alphabets and their particular arrangements to form words (with the help of gaps between words as word boundaries). He/she may further learn the meaning of words after someone explains to him/her, or by looking up dictionaries. However, without mastering the language grammar, he/she may not be able to understand the meaning of the sequence of words (sentence). Furthermore, only by learning the language grammar, he/she will understand that words take on different functions (parts of speech) in a sentence. The lan-guage grammar contains “rules” on the ordering of words having different parts of speech. For example, a typical simple English sentence consists of a subject, verb, and object in that order. After he/she understands the simple sentence order, he/she will be able to associate the word functions when he/she reads a simple sentence of say three words. Needless to say, in learning a language like English with many words that can take on different parts of speech and many different sentence structures, the grammar learning process becomes extremely tedious and overwhelming. How-ever, all the hard work will pay hefty dividend as he/she may then communicate with 20 percent of the world population. Furthermore, there are many literatures written in English, and English is one of the main languages of international communication (e.g., in United Nations) and sometimes the only language of in-ternational communication (e.g., air traffic control). So the mastery of the English language (and grammar) opens up many doors of opportunity which will be oth-erwise not accessible.


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