STARTBODY

TEFL Worthington Pennsylvania

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

You could also be interested in:

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:
I have been teaching english in china for three years. My experience includes teaching classes of children at a private school, ages ranging from 3 – 17; teaching adults at a private school ages 16 – 50; teaching freshman and sophomores at a prestigious university; teaching english classes for 3 to 13 weeks to professionals from various companies; and providing one-on-one tutoring to students of various ages. Apart from one-on-one tutoring, class sizes have ranged from two to 50. Through my experience, I have made many observations and have discovered various patterns that are consistent among all age groups, class sizes, and education level. These include 1) a lack of oral english taught or practiced in school, 2) a lack of motivation to learn english, and 3) poor listening materials used to teach and measure listening skills. Oral english Is Not Taught or Practiced in School When it comes to learning english, one of the biggest challenges (and needs) in Mainland china is oral english practice. english is a subject that students are taught in both primary and secondary school so they are exposed to the language at an early age. However, I found that there is very little, if any, focus on speaking and listening. I have found that when chinese students see a word in writing, they often understand the meaning; but if I say the word, they don't recognize it and they can't speak it either. Often times they are so nervous about speaking because they've had such little practice in their lives. Even teaching at one of the most prominent language schools in china, the english majors are not given many classes for oral english, and listening is given much more weight than speaking. Because of this, I believe that there is a great need for speaking and fluency practice. In recent years, many chinese nationals are beginning to see the value of being able to communicate orally in english and many private language schools are flourishing in china. Lack of Motivation china is a very large, densely populated country. According to The World Factbook, a publication of the united states Central Intelligence Agency, china's population count was over 1.3 billion in July 2010. Although china is doing more business with overseas clients, most people do business with other chinese. For example, there is a very popular website in china called Taobao. Taobao is similar to E-bay, where people and companies sell things to the general population. Tabao is a chinese website and is not available in english but it has done very well and continues to grow. I have been to eight provinces in china. I have found that most shops and hotels have no employees who speak english and most restaurants (unless they are western), have no english menus or english speakers working there. Even in hospitals, I need to take a student with me to communicate with the doctors and nurses. Because there is such a large community here in china, many chinese don't see a need to learn english and don't have the motivation. Poor Listening Materials Many of the classes I teach include listening materials. At the University, english majors have a listening class and a listening exam. I have found that the listening sections are often too difficult for the students. Even though they are able to effectively communicate with and understand me and each other, they often get low scores when tested. I have found that the listening materials often have accents that are hard for the students to understand and there are sometimes vocabulary words that the students have not learned so the measure used for the students' listening capabilities are sometimes inaccurate and can effect students' confidence level. Conclusion In my experience, the biggest challenges english learners face in china are the lack of oral english taught in schools, the lack of motivation to learn english in china, and poor listening materials provided for learning and testing. It should be noted that pronunciation and the difference in grammar structure are also a challenge, but I believe that this is a challenge for learning another language regardless of country and chosen language so I chose focus on challenges specific to china.


ENDBODY