Teach English in Sheikhpura - TEFL Courses

As I said before, I live in spain. This is a country of 45 million inhabitants placed in the south of Europe, between france (at the north) and Morocco (at the south). Traditionally, spanish people has not been good at learning new languages; I can't exactly tell the reason, but the fact is that most part of spanish population only speaks spanish (well, except of people coming from regions like my region, Catalonia, whose native language is also Catalan apart of spanish. Anyway, just a small part of spanish population speaks english properly although it is taught in our schools as a compulsory subject, and there is also an even smaller group of spanish inhabitants who speak french as a second language. If we focus on those spanish inhabitants who speak english (the ones who don't of course don't present any problem of pronunciation as they can't speak english), we can see that there are some pronunciation problems that are often repeated. These problems are a result of the fact that, as we speak spanish, when learning english we all repeat constantly some mistakes or errors which should not happen but indeed they happen. Which are those problems? Before focusing on the problems, I have to say that the problems which I will note are not the same than a mexican speaker of spanish would have, as the spanish language that we speak in spain is the Castilian dialect, while in America they speak some other dialects whose pronunciation may be quite different, so the problems that a mexican or Argentinean learner of english may face are not the same as an spanish learner of english may. As David Dalton describes, "We are comfortable teaching reading, writing , listening and to a degree, general oral skills, but when it comes to pronunciation we often lack the basic knowledge of articulatory phonetics (not difficult to aquire) to offer our students anything more than rudimentary (and often unhelpful) advice such as, "it sounds like this ; uuuh". These are the main pronunciation problems that I have found out : a)The dental english fricative / th / in "those" ,becomes converted by spanish speakers into the dentalized spanish /d/ , producing "dose" as this is what the speaker hears. b)spanish speakers will have a problem realizing consonant clusters like [sts ]. c)Maybe the most important pronunciation problem: the english /h/ sound, which is sometimes not noticed by a spanish ear, is also difficult in spain. Here people try to bring the 'h' a sound it does not have in english and pronounce a strong 'j'. In spain, we aspirate sound /j/ and we pronounce Javier or San José in a strong way, saying /javier/, similar in the way Arabic people say /Mohammed/. This provokes that spanish speakers pronounce /him/ or /her/ in a wrong way, as they aspire this sound more strongly. I recall how this fact is emphasized by most english teachers in spain, but anyway spanish students go on with this mistake. d) I n spanish there's no difference (there was in the Middle Age but not now)in the sound of a "v" and a "b". So spanish speakers do not distinguish both sounds correctly. e) spanish students usually pronounce the sound /??/ in the word "note" by saying /?/. These are the main pronunciation problems that I have found out by myself. Of course, I am sure that linguists must have noted down hundreds of problems, but my goal in this essay is not to note all of them, but to remark some of these problems, the ones that I consider the most important. To sum up, I have to say that this efl course has helped me a lot, because I had never studied english phonetics before, just spanish and Catalan phonetics, so now I have the tools to appreciate the errors and the keys to teach my students how to avoid them. I hope I will be able to do it!