TEFL Owasco New York

Problems for learners in Georgia (10.) As I am now in the country of Georgia I find this subject that I have chosen a lot easier than if I was outside of the country. I am going to base this information around the problems for students learning english in Georgia and a little with problems for students in general. Georgians learning english will be a slow process at the start as they have to learn a whole new alphabet and script. The younger learners will especially have difficulty as they have trouble writing their own name in their own script let alone in a whole different script. Learning in a country where the native language is not english can be quite difficult as they are not forced to use it outside of the classroom. They usually just have their english lesson and then go back to their native language. As much as I encourage them to speak it outside the classroom, I don't think they do. No students I know speak english to their family at home as the older people of Georgian usually have little or no english and are not interested in learning it; this is especially in the rural villages. They are also learning Russian and German languages which can get confusing for the students. The pressure of remembering and not getting confused with all the languages can be hard, especially for the younger ones. The majority of males generally seem to be uninterested in learning english, again especially in the villages, most of them will be going to become farmers on their family farm when they leave school. Many of the females are and plan to marry young and become housewives and mothers. There are various sounds that the Georgians are not familiar with and are hard to pronounce. Some examples are “TH” sound, and the letter C sounding like an “S” or a “K”. The Georgian language is called Qartuli and the grammar is a lot less important than the english language. Access to the internet and materials in english can be hard to come by. Most schools have limited amounts of paper you are allowed to use, and the power can be out for long periods of time. I have two different co-teachers at the current school I am teaching at. I feel there is a problem with the students discipline; it's defiantly different to New Zealand schools. The teachers in Georgia are not afraid to use physical contact when disciplining the students, for example, pulling their ears. The co-teachers can waste a lot of time yelling at certain students and I feel they are defiantly making them feel dumb. The co-teachers tell me they are lazy and dumb in front of the whole class because they are “special” which I think most of them are just a little slower. I think describing them as lazy, dumb and special (especially in front of the class) is disgusting. Georgian english teachers are more than likely to be still learning the english language themselves. When I've experienced talking to a co-teacher of mine I said, “Where are you going?” and they just looked at me very strangely. They often make mistakes with grammar and pronunciation etcetera. I have to really push to do lesson plans and have explained how important these are, but still they are not interested. They seem to want to get through the course book as fast as possible. I have explained using a variety of materials and education games is good. Making my own activities up has helped as I am pushing them into the lessons more and more each day. All of this information I feel is relevant for this subject from my own personal experiences, I have talked to other volunteer teachers in Georgia that also have these problems. In saying a majority of the problems in Georgia with learning, there are also a lot of good things about it and I am glad I am here to make a difference.