English just doesn’t make sense sometimes. There are so many idioms and words that are counter intuitive to what they should be. One famous example is that you park in a driveway and you drive on a parkway. Translating word for word might make learning English harder in most situations. There are two ways this could occur:
The first is that many words in the English language have many different definitions. Buffalo is a great example of this. Buffalo could be an animal, a city in New York, or a verb (meaning “to intimidate”) which leads to this strange but grammatically correct sentence) : Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Even me, being a native English speaker, have to stare at this for a while before it makes sense. The phrase translates to: “Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community, also intimidate other bison in their community.” (mental floss)
The other problem that could occur is an idiom or common ...
The Vietnamese take English very seriously. Along with their own language and mathematics, English is accorded the highest priority in primary and secondary schools. Not only is the subject studied in school, but in Hanoi all parents that can afford the fees arrange for their children to receive extra instruction in the evenings and at weekends. Extra lessons taught by the school English teacher are virtually compulsory, as teachers need the opportunity to boost their incomes, but in addition, many parents seek lessons from a native English speaker.
Teaching a class of nine twelve-year-old boys and one girl for more than one hundred lessons spread over a little more than a year was a stimulating and rewarding experience. At first the children seemed to be surprisingly advanced in grammar but they were shy to use English in conversation, speaking reluctantly, hesitantly and quietly. It was decided that the main aim of the classes would be to build confidence in self-expression in ...
In this article instructors learn how to improve students’ reading and writing skills using news stories and the 5 W's of journalism. Students in return write one-page summaries of news stories as a part of their writing assignments.Overview
Reading for EFL students, in general, increases vocabulary, advances writing, and boosts general language proficiency (Nagy & Herman, 1987; Krashen, 1984; Grabe, 1991, respectively). Basically there are two types of reading in teaching EFL, extensive and intensive. Extensive reading involves students reading texts for pleasure and to develop general reading skills. It can be compared with intensive reading, which means reading in detail with definite learning aims and tasks. The significance of reading in the ESL classroom is well known.
Despite the benefits of reading, it is challenging for many students to move from short, intensive passages to longer texts. This is especially true in countries where the grammar-translation method is still ...
A year of teaching English to twelve-years-old children in Vietnam has provided some insight into some of the special areas of difficulty which derive from fundamental differences between their mother tongue, Vietnamese, and the language of the Anglo-Saxons. Language students everywhere have a problem in preventing the structure and tone of their native tongue intruding on their efforts in using the new language, and the problem is magnified when the two languages are so widely separated in every respect.
The Vietnamese language consists of short words that can have as many as eight different meanings depending on the tone of pronunciation. A word can be spelt with the same letters but differences in tone are indicated by diacritical marks placed above and below a vowel. Most words in Vietnamese have only three or four letters and almost none has more than six, so one might expect that the spelling of English words, which are often much longer and with irregular spelling, would ...
Reflections on Standard English in EFL classroom
To be unable to write Standard English or to use its spoken forms in appropriate public contexts is to be disenfranchised, to be deprived of true citizenship…. Where it is appropriate to use the standard, you see it but there are many uses where other forms, or other languages, are as appropriates… It is astonishing to reflect that no linguistic theory has ever begun to pose the question of the permissible range of variation within a standard although it is obvious even from the history of English that the range is not fixed.
(McCabe 1990)
Languages all over the world have significant changes over the years and the English language is not an exception. Differences in patterns of sounds, vocabulary and grammar from all over a country make a distinctive way of speaking a language. The way we address to someone in different contexts, situations and places requires our speeches to vary and that ...
Education is all about cultivating learning and no matter which age group it caters to, it requires some serious approach especially when it comes to early childhood education. If someone has the affinity towards taking care of children and teaching them, especially the English language, then TEFL for young learners is a great way to do that. Teaching English to young learners has been gaining a lot of importance today. On the other hand, in this present time parents are more than willing to send their kids to English language classes and this has led to a huge demand for trained EFL/ESL teachers.
Schools are playing an important role when it comes to learning English. The schools generally run on professional methods where they know exactly how to teach children a foreign or second language and help them to grasp a new language – English in this case. Teaching English to young learners is challenging and rewarding all at the same time and English language learning can be tough for ...
