Teach English in Dongxing Zhen - Taizhou Shi

English has undoubtedly become the lingua franca of the world with more and more people across the world aspiring to acquire the language. However, there are certain issues that people generally face when trying to master a foreign language; in this case, English. I am from a South-Asian country called India where the problems faced by people are unique which will be analyzed in detail . India had been for long under the British rule and obviously being a part of the British colony, English language is not alien to the natives. English continues to be an official language even after the British quit India, and also, in schools it is taught as a second language. The biggest problem in India is that it is a multi-linguistic country with over 22 official languages. Hence, it becomes a burden for students to study English at schools in addition to their mother tongue and Hindi , the national language, which are all a part of the school curriculum. The major difference between English language and Indian languages is that English is a rhythmic language, whereas almost all the Indian languages are in a monotone. In other words, English language has a stress-timed rhythm and intonation, while Indian languages are uttered flat without rise and fall. It is extremely difficult for the Indians to perfect the nuances of the language as they have the tendency to articulate in a monotone which takes away the charm of the language. In addition, English language is unphonetic in contrast to the Indian languages. The way the words are written and are pronounced is exactly same in Indian languages. On the other hand, in English language you write “go tree and pronounce as fish “; said by none other than the great Bernard Shaw. The language has only 26 letters but 44 phonemes or sounds. This is probably because the language has borrowed many words from other European languages and from the languages in other parts of the world. So for people who are familiar with writing a word and pronouncing it phonetically, the pronunciation of majority of such words could go wrong. Moreover, they could exhibit a prominent mother-tongue influence when uttering words or sentences. Interestingly, the mother-tongue influence could be obvious in the sentence construction as well. The sentence structure and word order in native Indian languages are entirely different from those in English language. There is a tendency for any non-native speaker to translate to English from their native language. As a result, sentence constructions go wrong and what they say or write may not be comprehensible. Learning traditional grammar to use the language does not often seem to work for the students as most often they are not able to incorporate it while using the language. Grammar for them is a set of rules with several exceptions for each rule; quite confusing for the beginners. Finally, in India , English is a language of the elite. For people who belong to the lower strata of the society, the language is just introduced in the secondary level at schools and is most often handled by incompetent teachers who teach English in their native language by using translation method. Students who get exposed to the language at an early stage of their life become proficient in the language, but those who are not privileged to study in residential schools are left far behind. By the time they realize the significance of learning the language, they would be in their late 20s, and then there are hardly any language learning opportunities for adults in the country, barring a few cities. To sum up, English language learning has attained great importance in India because of the global impact the language. People belonging to India have their own set of problems when attempting to learn the language. In spite of these, efficient ESL teachers can help Indian students to tackle them by understanding the problem based on the context. "Catch them young" would be the motto for teaching any new language.