TEFL Vining Kansas

Linguistic problems in english do not take long to surface. This is possibly some native speakers can sometimes be confused by each other due to cultural or regional slang or pronunciation. Although non-native speakers may not encounter these problems as much in the class room, they encounter other even more complex difficulties which form as soon as the student starts to speak english. For example the english alphabet that is considered ‘phonetic' usually begins with the seemingly simple ‘A' is for ‘apple', which most people fail to notice are two completely different sounds of the letter ‘A'. We spell some words such as ‘table' or ‘rhetoric' with letters that are their not needed in the pronunciation of the word or that can throw the reader off completely. Although this may not be the only language that has characters with duel pronunciation such as greek, where ‘X' can make a ‘ch' or a ‘k' sound this is usually limited to regional dialects, whereas english does not. Other alphabets such as the Russian alphabet or the japanese phonetic alphabet ‘Hiragana' have alphabetic characters that never mutate as so in english.These problems do not simply go as far as the alphabet, in the spoken and written word verbs are irregular and even nouns can be complex. Such as ‘be' ‘am' ‘are' or ‘go' ‘going' ‘went' etc.Even young native speakers have difficulty with ‘sheep' and ‘sheeps', ‘foot' and ‘foots' however these younger learners have the ability to simply start using the correct forms, blindly following without questioning the irregularity. Apart from very young learners most non-native speakers try to apply sense to english in a similar way when there simply isn't any. In my personal encounters with faults in english, I have noticed two main factors of error after a non-native speaker has overcome these other problems. The use of english in a sentence, and incorrect translation. Incorrect use of english in a sentence can be shown through a friend of mine who sent an E-mail with pictures. He had simply written ‘so you don't forget how we look like.' This in my opinion was incorrect, however for some reason I couldn't even explain to myself why. Had he have written ‘how we look.' Or ‘what we look like.' The sentence would have been perfectly fine. Incorrect translation is also problematic, I remember clearly, a time when I was talking to my Romanian friend and she had told me she had taken a cooking class. When I asked her why, she simply said that she wanted to be a bus. After pointing to a bus across the street and telling her that it was a bus, she laughed and explained that she wanted to work with subordinates, at which point I corrected her pronunciation to ‘boss'. As the conversation continued, she told me she wanted to be a boss of a kitchen, which I told her was a chef. She suddenly exclaimed that it was the same in Romanian and that chef meant chief, or boss. Quite a lengthy conversation in reply to a question that consisted of three letters. Personally I am glad to be a native speaker of a language so widespread as oppose to a student that would have to deal with the minefield that is the english language, and in revised terms although many students have an array of different problems to face, they aren't without reasoning and during this course I have learnt how to help students overcome such problems.