Agency Global TESOL

Problems for learners in China The population of China is 1.3 billion and more than a quarter of chinese are learning english at this moment. The problems for chinese learners can over most of the learning areas because of the difference in both language, chinese and english. Most of the chinese thought the major problem of learning english is the grammar but I say no. The speaking is the biggest problem in China. Our chinese students have spent years and years in school to learn english since they were five years old or even younger. When they graduated from the university only a small amount of them could speak fluent english. Why? We learn english on paper. We learn english by doing hundreds and thousands choices. We learn english by filling the blank. We don't use it. We don't speak. We don't use it to communicate. That's the biggest problem I think because language to me is used to communicate rather than exams and tests. The lack of speaking practice makes listening another problem for chinese students. They haven't got enough exposure to the language so they can't understand it or need a long time to comprehend when others said something in english. Accents also make listening hard for chinese. Our students get used to listen to the tapes or CD with standard english while not everyone speaks standard english. That also hard for chinese to understand others when they use english to communicate. Enhance the vocabulary is not easy for chinese students. Most of the chinese learn their english words by memorize the spelling and the chinese meaning of them. That might work when they were young and the words they were learning are basic and easy with their meanings. When you got older and the words got harder, this way would not work longer. That's why many students found out that they stuck on a certain level of learning and couldn't make any improvement. Tense can be challenge. In chinese you don't need to change the form of verbs to fit in different tenses but there are so many tenses and rules to remember. In chinese you only need to add certain time markers to switch from present to past or to future. For example, I go to school. In present tense in chinese you say I go to school. In past tense in chinese you only need to add a past time for the same sentence like I go to school yesterday. We need to put more efforts on pronunciation. chinese use the different part of the speech organ from other languages. We use the front part of the speech organ so some of the sound like 'r' and 'h' are not easy for chinese to pronounce. When we speak chinese we usually speak every word clear but in english there are so many words that you can join them up or omit some sounds when you speak. Pronounce a single word is not a problem but a phrase or a sentence might not be easy especially when they have the similar sound at the end or beginning of some words. Subject-verb agreement is another problem because we don't need to use different verb for different person or things in chinese. One verb can fit in all situations. So subject-verb agreement would be a new area for students to pay a bit more attention on. Countable and uncountable nouns are very confusing. We use measure words for everything in chinese and we don't sort nouns out in such ways. That also leads to another problem which is singular and plural for chinese students. For most of the nouns we use the same form to represent singular and plural in chinese. There are so many differences in between chinese and english that would cause many problems in language learning. I have just listed down a few main or quite obvious ones.