STARTBODY

Teach English in Dawu Zhen - Luliang Shi

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Dawu Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Luliang 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.

While South Korean adult learners face the same challenges resulting from the differences between English and Korean and may have significantly less time to study English due to the severity of South Korean work culture, schoolchildren face additional challenges despite constituting the largest proportion of EFL students in South Korea. Elementary and secondary school students in South Korea face unique problems in their English learning. These include high pressure to achieve tangible results, unequal access to supplemental language learning opportunities and extra study, and differences in pronunciation and structure between English and Korean. Firstly, Korean schoolchildren face enormous pressure to achieve high test scores. Third-year high school students must take the suneung, or College Scholastic Ability Test, and their chances of getting into college depend heavily on that score. However, test scores are taken seriously even before students reach that age, and students are ranked by class standing. The over-emphasis on numerical test scores leads students (and teachers) to focus more on memorization for the purpose of the test than on overall comprehension. Additionally, tests focus more on reading and writing abilities than speaking and listening abilities. Many Korean English learners, including those who go on to major in English in university, will say that they have good English vocabularies but lack the ability to produce structures fluidly when put on the spot. Thus, although students strive for a high test score, their ability to converse with native English speakers is low, leaving them at a disadvantage in an increasingly globalized Korean society. Korean children's access to additional English study also varies based on class and socioeconomic status. Many Korean children attend a hagwon, or private study academy, after normal school hours. While this can give some students extra English practice after school, other students' families may be too poor to afford to pay for their child to attend. Or, in other cases, students may attend a hagwon for other subjects but not English, leaving them with little to no time outside of school to complete homework or engage in exploratory or curiosity-driven individual study, such as reading, listening to, or watching authentic materials. This means that for some students, their in-class English study is all they have, aside from exam preparation. There are also many differences between Korean and English that make it more difficult for Korean children to learn English. One major difference is in pronunciation and phonetics. There are a number of sounds in English that do not exist in Korean, such as those made by the letters f and v, as well as sound combinations, such as si. Additionally, many syllables of English words can not exist as one syllable in Korean and must be broken up into multiple syllables when written in Korean. This can cause some confusion about pronunciation, especially that of English loan words that are commonly used in Korean. For example, the English "bench" may be erroneously pronounced as "ben-cheu" by native Korean speakers, as this is how "bench" is said in Korean. Finally, differences in structure can also pose problems to Korean students of English. One primary difference is that the two languages have different word orders. English has a word order of subject-verb-object, while Korean largely follows a subject-object-verb word order. In addition, English articles such as the, a, and an can be difficult for Koreans to understand because Korean does not use such articles. Even usage of plural forms in English may be confusing, as Korean plurals simply make use of a single particle no matter the noun it is attached to, which is used sparingly. English also has far more irregular verb conjugations. Because of the unique problems presented to Korean school-age EFL students by the Korean education system and the problems arising from how different English and Korean are, EFL teachers in Korea should be mindful of areas of difficulty and how they can be addressed. While an individual teacher may not be able to change the educational system, they can try to incorporate an even mix of receptive and productive skills into their lessons, thus preparing students for their exams while also providing them with targeted lesson content such as speaking practice. Teachers may also choose to give only the most essential homework in consideration of the time demands placed on students. If teachers build a strong rapport with their students and find out about their interests and motivations, they can also use that information to bring interesting authentic materials into the classroom since their students do not have much time to explore those materials outside of class. Additionally, problems inherent to the differences in structure and phonetics between English and Korean can be addressed by careful planning. If a teacher looks analytically at these differences, they can see the potential for student error, and they can proactively try to address those problems. For example, when drilling pronunciation, a teacher may focus on words that contain sounds that do not exist in Korean or have students complete an additional activity targeting these differences. In terms of grammatical and structural differences, teachers may put strong emphasis on word order from the beginning of the course in order to give students a more solid foundation. For other issues, such as irregular verb conjugations, teachers may devote Study and Activate stage activities to memorizing and producing the irregularities. This will help students understand these problem areas, particularly since this targeted practice can occur within normal class hours. Lastly, teachers should make use of diagnostic evaluations at the beginning of the course in order to ascertain students' weaknesses. This can help the teacher understand which problem areas to target first. Then the teacher can plan lessons accordingly in order to make the best use of class time. With a little bit of careful observation, analysis, and understanding, EFL teachers in South Korea can certainly address the unique cultural and linguistic issues that their students face when learning English.


ENDBODY