Teach English in Chentuan Zhen - Rizhao Shi

Learning a language presents different sets of problems for adults speaking different languages. This is due mainly to the fact that by adulthood much of the learner’s language structure and sound production has been fixed in their minds. This “fossilization” occurs when learners use linguistic features of their own native language to produce the second language, resulting in distinctive, almost predictive accents. For some their accents do not get in the way of communication, if they use language structures that are consistent with standard English. Others, however, their accents plus wrong use of grammar prevent them from being understood even by seasoned English teachers. There are as many different accents as there are English learners in the world. It is clear that the closer the language features of the first language is to English, the easier it is for learners to acquire English features such as phonology, grammar and tone, just to name a few. For the English teacher, knowing the native language of the students can certainly help, but it is not required. Even by having a basic understanding of the structure of the language, the teacher will have insight into the difficulties the students are having learning the language, especially with the receptive skills of listening and speaking in particular. In the case of Chinese, the romanized pinyin system is used to teach Standard Mandarin Chinese, which is normally written using Chinese characters which includes four diacritics denoting tones. While the pinyin is a fairly consistent system to represent how Chinese sounds like, it is limited in it’s use to represent English. Chinese students, used to associating the roman symbols with the sounds in Chinese, without an understanding of how the symbols in English sounds, often produce English with Chinese sounds. For example: • The pinyin “b” is in English the unaspirated “p” as in spy • The pinyin “d” is in English the unaspirated “t” as in sty • The pinyin “g” is in English the unaspirated “k” as in ski • The pinyin “z” is in English “ts” sound in the end of cats • The pinyin “c” is in English the aspirated “ts” sound, and never occurs in front of the word • The pinyin “x” is in English the softer “sh” • The pinyin “q” is in English the softer “ch” • The pinyin “sh”, “zh”, and “ch” do not exist in English at all • The vowel “a” is the English “a” as in father • The vowel “e” is the English “u” as in under • The vowel “i” is the English “ee” as in bee • The vowel “o” is the English “o” as in song • The vowel “u” is the English “oo” as in do So when the Chinese student sees a ten, he produces a “tun” as in tunnel, quench becomes “chuenchr”, she becomes “shurh”, duo becomes “duwo”. To help Chinese students produce the right English sounding words, more listening exercises in the study stage (in the ESA approach) will help students retrain association of letters (symbols) to certain sound. Using minimal pair exercises that distinguish between two contrasting sounds: • Aspirated and unaspirated sounds (ball/Paul, dill/till, sad/sat) • Vowels (seat/sit, look/luck, ten/ton) The teacher will need to point out that in English there is no equivalent to the pinyin “sh”, “zh”, and “ch”. Likewise, there is no English “si”, “zi”, “ci”. As the students begin to switch his association of symbols, he will be in a better position to learn the English association. In conclusion, while the English teacher is not required to know all the nuances of the language of the students he is teaching, a basic knowledge of the structure of the language is always helpful. By applying principles in language learning and sounds, and effective TESL methods in the classroom, the teacher will be able to help students from any language background to learn English.