TEFL West Point Utah

Learners of english as a second language face different problems depending on their origins. The first language can interfere with every aspects of the second language, including pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. The mother language of the students should therefore be taken into account when teaching. Indeed, knowing what aspects of english are most problematic for learners of a specific language can make it easier for the teacher to understand difficulties encountered by the students. To illustrate this issue, the following paper will examine a few typical mistakes made by German speaking learners. The pronunciation of some words can be problematic for German learners. For instance “wine” becomes “vine” and “we” becomes “ve”. This occurs because the usual pronunciation of the letter “w” in German is similar to that of the english letter “v”. Another frequent mistake is to pronounce the word “cost” like “coast” as the sound /o?/ is confused with the /?/ sound that is learned as part of the alphabet. Moreover, the “th” sounds does not exit in German and can be particularly hard for learners to produce. German learners also have problems with particular grammatical elements. A difficulty often faced by beginners is the order of the sentence, since the second verb of a clause or sentence has to be put at the end completely in German. This is visible in the following German sentence: “I werde heute Abend kommen”. German speaking students might translate it “I will tonight come”. This phenomenon is also visible in the use of phrasal verbs, as in the following sentence: “I'll take the garbage later today out”. Another potential problem for German speakers is the use of verbs with the continuous aspect. In fact, the absence of an equivalent for this in German often leads to the use of non-continuous forms in situations where a continuous form would normally be used, and vice versa. As example, a student might say “I eat now” instead of “I'm eating now”. This aspect should therefore be explained clearly, with the help of various examples and of a timeline. Another problem for German learners is the presence of false friend between German and english. Among others, there are the following pairs: Gift (poison)/gift, bekommen (get, receive)/become, also (so, therefore)/also, aktuell (current)/actual, fast (almost)/fast, spenden (donate)/spend. To illustrate the use of those false friends, one can think of the frequent mistake “she became a child”, which is meant to mean that she got a child. In addition to false friends, a few German words have two different meaning in english, such as errinern, which can mean either to remember or to remind, or aufgeregt, which can be used to say excited as well as anxious. These words often create confusion and might be used with the wrong meaning in english. A similar problem is the use of the modal “can”, which is often used by learners in the same way as its German counterpart “können”. Students are often unaware that the degree of politeness express by those two words is different and that ”could” is closer to the German meaning. The ways in which the mother language of a student can influence his learning are various. It can have an impact on how a student learns english grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation and it is therefore important that the teacher takes it into consideration when planning classes. Here are a few internet addresses where more information on common mistakes made by German learners can be found: http://www.sanseira.de/mccabe01.htm http://www.eslcafe.com/idea/index.cgi?display:1085312332-77282.txt http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/german.htm