Additional TESOL School

Problems for learners in Spain‘’There’s never been a language that’s been spoken more as a second language than a first’’ according to english language expert, David Crystal and according to British Council, by 2015 about half the worlds’ population will speak english. spanish people have recently become very enthusiastic about learning english because their employment opportunities depend more and more on a person’s level of english. However, they are facing numerous difficulties which are to be covered while reaching spanish learners. First of all, english is Germanic language, but as a ‘cousin’ of Romance language, such as spanish, contains many words which spanish learners can recognize. On the other hand, there are also a number of false friends, for instance: ‘librero’ (bookcase) and ‘libreria’ (bookstore) are often confused with the english library. There is a whole list of false friends, e.g. actual, deception, embarrassed, equivocation, genial, notice, notorious, relevant, sane, sensible, etc. (Larousse, Diccionario Compact Plus) Most of spanish speakers learning english have problems with pronunciation due to the difference between these two languages’ sound system. In english, there are 12 vowel sounds and 8 diphthonghs whereas there are 5 vowels and 5 diphthongs in spanish. Most english words have a strong and a weak form but in spanish all the vowels are fully pronounced and one word always sounds the same. Sometimes, in regional accents some of the consonants are dropped, like for example in Andalusia they drop the final "s" from most words, e.g. ’He stops’ becomes ’He stop’, as well as all nouns in the plural are pronounced as singular nouns. They also find initial ’s’ difficult to pronounce, so they add an ’e’ sound. Instead of ’stop’ they say ’estop’, ’Spain’ becomes ’Espain’, ’spanish’- ’Espanish’, etc. They confuse ’b’ and ’v’, and usually cannot say ’z’ like in ’zoo’ and it becomes ’thoo’ or ’soo’. ’City’ becomes ’thity’. They often cannot distinguish words like ’she’ and ’see’; ’shopping’ and ’chopping’, ’cheap’ and ’sheep’, ’t-shirt’ and ’teacher’. spanish learners also swollow some consonants, such as in ’taxi’ so it becomes ’tasi’, or ’next’- ’nest’. It is understandable that spanish learners have problems when it comes to using the possessive apostrophe as in spanish, there is only one way to express possession- using ‘of’ (de). In spanish, words are spelled exactly how they sound, which makes english spelling even more complicated for spanish learners. Doble consonants are very often in english, but in spanish, there are only three combinations ‘ll’, ‘cc’ and ‘rr’. Therefore, they reduce two consonants to one or add a consonant unnecessarily, so ‘swimming’ becomes ‘swiming’ and ‘hoping’ – ‘hopping’. Moreover, learners often forget that we need the subject in english, as that is not the case in spanish, which leads to sentences like ‘‘Is raining’’. In addition, since all the nouns in spanish language have gender, they need some time to get used to using ‘it’ for objects. As ‘people’ (la gente) in spanish requires singular, they often refer to it in the singular, e.g. The people is friendly and nice. Moreover, they tend to insert an article before nouns that do not take articles, especially before general nouns as in the previous example. Order of adjectives and nouns is one of the troubles for native spanish speakers. In spanish, an adjective normally comes after the noun, so they might say: ‘I have a house big.’ In addition, adjectives have plural form in spanish which is also confusing, especially to children. The Present Perfect is very similar to spanish tense Preterito Perfecto, but not the same. It often creates difficulties to understand that for something that happened ‘(2) minutes ago’ we will use Past Simple and not Present Perfect. In spanish, simple tense is used to talk about future which leads to a sentence such as ‘I call you tonight’ or ‘I go to the cinema tomorrow’. Resources: Complete First Certificate for spanish Speakers Larousse, Diccionario Compact Plus http://ezinearticles.com/?spanish http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/XX/2/131.extract http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/spanish.htm http://www.ehow.com/way_5393754_teaching-english-pronunciation-spanish-speakers.html