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Well I'd like to start off out by saying that I chose this topic of interest because I am currently living and working as an ESL teacher in Shanghai, China. i arrived in China four and a half years ago with absolutely no experience at all in teaching as a second language. It was a long and difficult journey but along this journey I got to experience and learn a lot of ESL learners in China. One of those problems, in my opinion is that the cultural and ethnic difference may create many challenges when teaching English as a second language to a student that you know nothing culturally about. Them not understand my culture and vice versa, I believe can cause problems. Another issue that I believe causes issues when teaching Chinese students is the four tones that they have in their language. They have four tones in their pronunciation and each tone indicates a change in meaning. In the United States we don't have that. We do express different emotions when we change our pitch but that does not change the meaning of the word at all. Something I hear a lot in Chinese students is not being able to distinguish between singular and plural nouns. A question I like to ask my younger students during our warm up exercises is "What are your favorite animals?". Most of the time the answer I get is "My favorite animal are tiger". So they forget to make animal and tiger plural. Most Chinese students take English at their Chinese school and 99% of the time their English teacher Chinese who does not have a good control of the English language. And that is another problem that I believe hurts ESL learners in China, and that's having an English teacher who in not a native English speaker. I believe they are not being taught correct grammar at school which in turn is hurting their learning process. Out of all these issues the one biggest issue that I have encountered with 99.9% of my students is their oral English or ability to speak English. Know I really haven't figured it out but I assume that most of the ESL students are shy by nature and afraid to talk because they are scared of failure. But even with my private students, it's difficult getting them to speak. But I also understand that they only come to English class one day out of seven days and the class is only one hour and a half. So they only practice English for an hour and a half once a week. Once they leave class, they go back to speaking Chinese. Most of their parents don't speak English or are working most of the time and don't have time to study with them during the week. Now after spending an hour and a half practicing English, they leave class and English is forgotten. The next 6 days will be spent speaking Chinese until their next English lesson. Well, that concludes what I think some of the problems are for ESL learners in China.
