Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Niuquan Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Laiwu 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.
The English language, which has been accepted as a universal language, is of great importance in terms of commercial, economic, socio-economic, academic, educational and cultural aspects. In order to be able to master this language, people have experience in their own country and abroad. One of the language learning systems which consists of various methods is group lessons. There are significant and potential disadvantages in the non-native English language, where people from different nationalities take English courses in the same group. First of all, because the structure of the sentence, subject, object and verb in the sentence vary according to each country; it is not expected that each student is able to create sentences with the same accuracy and speed. Students in countries like Italy, Russian and Spanish who have a lot of sentence items in the same order as English are very fortunate in this issue. However, the students who use the subject, object, verb sentence structure in their native language such as Japanese, Hindi and Turkish are slightly more disadvantaged. The adaptation of the students to the course who have different mother tongues, the speed of their understanding the lessons and accordingly probable timidity can cause problems among students. Secondly, students who use similar alphabets with English are a bit luckier but students of other nationalities who use different alphabets are having problems. For example, whereas the Turkish language does not contain the letters W and X, the Chinese alphabet uses Latin letters. In this case, among Chinese, Arab, Japanese and Spanish students in the same group, it is clear to say Spanish is much more advantageous. In the same way, given that native speaker teacher who speaks a comfortable and swallowing speech, students may have difficulty understanding the words. Moreover, each nation's speech differs from one another. For instance, whereas Japanese people use their tongues during speaking, on the contrary, Arab people also use their larynxes. This may lead to accent shifts among students especially in speaking lessons. Furthermore, students may experience a certain extent of accent loss in their own language. Another disadvantage of students from different nationalities taking English lessons in the same group is the overlap of cultural differences. This situation has an adverse effect on students in two different aspects. Firstly, due to international past or present disputes or extreme racism, disagreement among students and addressing a historical topic such as war in speaking lessons may disrupt the atmosphere during the lesson. As well as, that leads to the dominance of one student of a nation and the distress of another; it would have a negative effect on the group. This will negatively affect students' consonance with each other, the course's ambiance and duration, and even the teacher's control. Last but not least, another disadvantage of students from different nationalities taking English lessons in the same group is that cultural differences vary in terms of idioms, proverbs, abbreviations, and humor. Every nation has its own molded sentence patterns, idioms, proverbs and that represent the traditional way of living. Students who use idioms and proverbs that have similar meanings in English will be more fortunate, as the nation’s applying similar abbreviations in similar words with English are more fortunate. For example, the idiom 'shed crocodile tears' also exists in the Turkish language, but the idiom 'it is raining cats and dogs' does not mean any meaning in Turkish. What’s more, in the course of speaking lessons, a Japanese student's use of a country-specific phrase would lead to the confusion of Spanish. In summary, it is also possible to mention about the many difficulties apart from shyness, the differentiation of alphabet systems, proverb and idiom differences, the diversity of sentence elements in each country, the difference of language-linguistic discourse, and the variety of cultural differences on racial discrimination on expression. The efficiency of the education in these conditions is an open-issue that can be discussed.
