Teach English in Longhe Zhen - Suqian Shi

After China´s opening, more and more foreigners come to China every year. Not only an increase in international tourists can be seen, but also international firms open new factories all over China. This leads to an increase of jobs for English speaking Chinese. But also parents already understood the importance of English as the world language and want to provide their kids with the best education possible. Hence, English becomes more and more important in schools and an increasing number of private English teaching centers open in China every year. But Chinese like all other nations have their distinctive problems when learning English. Chinese is a completely different language than English. The difference is not only in tones and grammar, but also the Chinese characters are totally different than the Roman alphabet. But although it looks like Chinese is a language without Roman alphabet, it is not completely true. Especially with the development of the smart phone, the attention shifted more to Pinyin (the official Romanization system for Standard Chinese). The now middle aged Chinese have sometimes not much knowledge of Pinyin, so they rather draw characters on their phone screen when writing messages, but teenagers often use Pinyin to write on their smart phones. By now, all children learn Pinyin in kindergarten or school. So they have an understanding about the alphabet. The only small problem is the same as with every other language using the Roman alphabet, that the same letters have different sounds than in English. So, before teaching English to Chinese, it has to be made clear to what extend the students know the Roman alphabet. Another point to consider is that Chinese grammar is quite easy and there are no verb forms. The verb is always the same, even for past or future tenses. The verb form never changes, only some additional words are added. Though Chinese students understand the English grammar, they have a hard time using it. In writing or speaking, Chinese often forget the ending –s of the third person singular in the simple present tense and the ending –ing in the continuous forms. Because of the same reason, they have a similar problem with the past tense of verbs. China is a country that relies on tests. Therefore also the English education is based on tests. Nowadays Chinese children already start to learn English in kindergarten, so their level is very good when they go to high school and university. But schools and universities only emphasize on writing, reading and passing tests. So, even university students and teachers are scared to speak English to foreigners. They have never really practiced speaking, so foreign teachers have to take away the fear of speaking, which needs a lot of patience. Another problem for learners in China is, that school in China is very demanding. The children have class the whole day and a lot of homework in the evening. English classes are mainly on weekends in English teaching centers. The children are so overwhelmed with their normal school work, that many students don´t do their homework for the English classes or don´t want to be there on their weekends. The mainly biggest obstacle is the general opinion about English teachers. The English teacher has to be western looking to make a decent living. Parents don´t care much about the education of the English teachers, therefore the training centers pay few attention to the education of their teachers as long as they have a western look. That means that although parents pay a lot of money and students invest a lot of time studying English, the student´s English does not necessarily improve a lot. To put the matter in a nutshell, to my understanding, the main problems for learners in China are the language differences, the fear of speaking and the pressure.