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TEFL Halifax Washington

Check out Tesolcourse.com about TEFL Halifax Washington and apply today to be certified to teach English abroad.

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This is how our TEFL graduates feel they have gained from their course, and how they plan to put into action what they learned:

said:
Language learning is a fascinating and often thrilling process for learners, although there is a lot of debate about the best way to go about doing it. All children learn their native language in basically the same way, following the same process, with very little variation. Since we all learned our native language in the same way without any difficulty, why is there so much fuss and confusion when it comes to learning a second language? There are several reasons for why this is, which I will touch on here briefly and show what they mean for teachers in language classrooms. One of the most fundamental differences between adults and children is a sense of identity or “ego”. Because of their lack of life experience compared to adults, children do not have as secure a sense of who they are. This concept of identity also extends to and includes their mother tongue. While they might only know their native language and have even already achieved an essentially fluent level in it, younger children are not as attached to the language in the way that adults are with regards to it as representing their ego. After they reach puberty, children will feel more and more attached to their native language and the identity they have constructed using it, being hesitant to break out of that shell and start all over in a new language. This is a big reason why adults often feel inhibited or uncomfortable when learning another language- they are afraid of sounding like fools when they are used to being articulate and confident when they speak in the ego of their native language. This inhibition naturally slows down their progress and prevents them from moving forward as quickly and seemingly effortlessly as children. Adults' more solid foundation in their native language can also be a hindrance when learning the accent of another language. children's muscles are still developing and are thus more malleable to the new sounds of a foreign language. Adults, on the other hand, have already been speaking their native language for so many years and the muscles have been so exactly trained and refined to produce the sounds of that language that they encounter great difficulty when faced with the sound system of another language. While accent is certainly not the most important thing in language learning, it does represent an element when learning a foreign language that can be difficult to train to match a native speaker of that language. There is also a tendency in foreign language classrooms to use a method of learning that is quite different from the one we used to naturally acquire our native tongue. Whereas the natural order in first language acquisition is listening, speaking, reading and writing, classrooms often introduce two of the more advanced activities, speaking and reading, into the course very early on. Some courses are even designed to have you start speaking from day one. While this may serve one well for learning a few basic phrases and vocabulary in the language, it will not likely carry you to a more advanced level later on, or may take much longer to do so. Based on the results of many language classes, the available research on the subject and my own personal experience, I have found that, while there are certainly differences between adults and children which cannot be ignored in education of the two and which prevent an exact duplication of the L1 language acquisition process of children for L2 language acquisition of adults, as much of the learning process of children that can be taken as a model and imitated in the classroom as possible the better. For instance, starting with listening and using meaningful, communication- and needs- based repetition in the classroom are very effective and help to reproduce the L1 learning conditions of children for learners of all ages, with positive results. People are moved by personal meaning and emotion, and the more you can attach learning and language to these two things, adults, like children, start to form natural connections to the language and show remarkable development. Sources Cited: http://www.literature.freeservers.com/image_polat/ccfsla.html http://www.csun.edu/~galasso/lang1.htm http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SLA/L1%20and%20L2.htm


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