Teach English in Kehu Zhen - Luliang Shi

Classes generally fall into two categories;Monolingual and Multilingual Classes. Each class has its own characteristics that these are; Monolingual Classes are consist of students who are living their own home country where they have own Speaking language.However,Multilingual classes are consist of students who are from different countries and speaking different languages . Teaching English in both of classes has both advantages and disadvantages for English teachers. Multilingual classes have a number of advantages which have implications for the monolingual class;The learners get opportunities to practice English in during the lesson with pair or group work and also outside the classroom when doing simple tasks like shopping. Whereas in monolingual classes,the students tend to use their mother tongue so, the teacher has to encourage the practice of English inside and outside the classroom. The teacher has to use techniques and equipment to teach the language to the students, for instance audio with examples of authentic language. In the Multilingual the learners are able to bring different cultures and backgrounds to the classroom.This can be an advantage for teachers as the students are forced to speak English to communicate with each other.Whereas,the same cannot be said for the monolingual class, where the teacher’s role has to be very inventive. The teacher has a lot of responsibilities, and has to find many ways of making the classroom activities fun and interactive. The advantages of attending multilingual classes are that students will be forced to speak English between themselves and with the teacher. Students speaking different languages will work at different speeds and can create divisions in the class. the teacher should be skilled enough to deal with these problems but if not, it can limit the more able students and/ or make the less able students feel stupid and cumbersome. This means an unskilled teacher in the multilingual classrooms will rather hamper than facilitate learning. Students from different backgrounds will also come across different problems in the English language, be it pronunciation, spelling or layout. Again, with a less skilled teacher, the personal time taken to solve problems of an individual student could leave the rest of the class bored and neglected. The advantages of teaching monolingual classes are that the students are all on the same playing field, as they speak the same language, most would have similar cultures and most would experience similar problems when learning English. This gives the teacher an advantage as they generally don’t have to deal with individual problems, any problem raised by one student would likely help the other students too. Students are able to intercommunicate using their mother tongue which can be a huge advantage in the classroom when the teacher sets an exercise for group work or pair work; the students are able to organise themselves together to carry out the tasks. It allows the lesson to run more efficiently. The disadvantages of teaching monolingual classes are almost the opposite to that of teaching multilingual classes. In the native country, students may often be in the class out of compulsion not out of want, which produces an environment of contempt, resulting in slow learning. Students communicating in their mother tongue can act as a hindrance as they are not practising English in the classroom and very rarely outside the class, greatly reducing their exposure and practice of the language. Ultimately there are other factors such as preference of teachers and students, teacher experience and class objectives which may determine the success of a multilingual class. Awasti (2004, p. 3) points that “ambiguities and inconsistencies prevail between the multi lingually oriented intentions of the state and mono lingually dominated reality of the school. In the school system, the mother tongue of minorities seems to have been invisibilized and is seen as a handicap. As a result, the non-native speaking students at the early stages of their schooling face exclusion”. As most of the teachers in classrooms are dealing with the multilingual students. They must have experienced some of the common problems. It must be further challenging for them since most of the classrooms are large and heterogeneous. Because of linguistically plural classroom conditions even from basic level to the higher level, there seems to be a need for responding and inquiring this condition in order to help them to effective teaching. The teachers use different methods lecture method, discussion and communicative method translation also. In a close classroom observation of these teachers, a few of them used the communicative method although most of them claimed that they teach using communicative method and discussion, and there were some instances in which the teachers used different techniques to encourage the students use foreign/ second language in the classroom. The following are the ways they used for this purpose (as replied in questionnaires and got from classroom observation) • Inviting students for group discussion • Formation of language groups (if possible) in the large classes • Inviting them to translation activities • Asking simple questions about their casual activities • Suggesting them with instrumental motivation. The researcher came to the conclusion that ,the teachers felt comfortable in class and the students also felt comfortable in their own language but the goal of teaching is to make them competent in English. English language teaching situation seems to be affected by this situation also. The success in ELT also depends on the students’ motivation towards it and the interference of learners’ mother tongue seems to be one of the factors for poor performance in English. Because of the multilingual backgrounds of the students, it is very difficult for the teachers to devise the right type of teaching methodology. The appropriate method is that method which better fits in the particular classroom of the teachers. References: Itt, Teaching Special Group Units:19 Awasthi, L. D. (2004). Exploring monolingual school practices in multilingual Nepal. Unpublished Ph.D Thesis, Danish University of Education, Copenhegon. Prem Parsad Poudel is a faculty at the Department of English Education