Teach English in Huankeyuan - Wuxi Shi

Being an English teacher in Spain, has bought me to consider the specific learning difficulties I, as the teacher, and my students, may come across during the course of my career teaching English to native Spanish speakers. I believe that it is important to ascertain the most common challenges my students will struggle with when learning the English language. Inevitably, there are always some common Language learning problems that unavoidably arise, which are not necessarily specific to Spanish speakers but tend to make the language learning process more difficult in the first place. Firstly, with the intensity of everyone’s current lives, the lack of time tends to always be an issue as well as the lack of having someone to practice with. I believe that it’s important, once a student has decided that he or she would like to undertake the challenge of learning a new language, that we, as teachers, encourage them to somehow integrate English into their daily lives as much as possible, even if for just a short while each day. Consistency is the key! There is also the common fear of making mistakes or doing it wrong. As teachers, we should strive to make students as comfortable as possible by creating a relationship of trust and confidence in order for our students to feel reassured when expressing themselves in a language that is not their mother tongue. Lack of consistency within the English Language can make things tricky. There are many rules to follow, yet there are also many irregular verbs and exceptions, which simply need to be learned with time and experience. Through experience, I have come across learning difficulties most Spanish speakers find specifically challenging, such as but not limited to: Pronunciation, syntax, forms of courtesy, false-friends and confusion with gender. We shall proceed to consider a few of these specific difficulties. Pronunciation seems to be one of the main learning difficulties Spanish speakers are faced with. Spanish speakers generally have problems with silent phonemes and tend to pronounce every single letter in a word, as that is how it works in their language. Vowels and consonants combined create an extensive amount of sounds which are specific to the English language and are difficult to grasp. English having short and long vowels also seem to be the source of pronunciation issues. Furthermore, English words starting with the letter “s” tend to be pronounced starting with an “e” creating words sounding “espanish” or “eschool” for example. The -ed ending of the past tense also tends to be problematic and often goes unpronounced. All in all, listening exercises, pronunciation practice and consistency is what finally leads to progress! Syntax in another area of difficulty for Spanish speakers. In Spanish as opposed to English, the adjective usually goes after the noun. Spanish speakers therefore tend to have difficulty putting nouns, verbs and adjectives into a correct sentence structure. Furthermore, Spaniards tend to forget that the subject in an English sentence must always be said. “It” as a subject, often seems to be a difficult notion to grasp. What does “it” represent? Forms of courtesy and degrees of formality, which often are expressed through modal verbs, tend to be difficult to comprehend and use appropriately. Some words, which we call False-friends, are nearly exactly the same in Spanish and English but have a completely different significance. This creates the need to pay particular attention when using them and not get confused, as their misuse can be quite dangerous and might lead to awkward situations. When speaking English, some of my Spanish students get confused with gender. Though in English nouns are neutral and do not have gender, more common mistakes are made with possessive pronouns such as “his” or “hers” because the pronoun “su” in Spanish represents both male and female. To conclude, identifying and being aware of specific problems, helps to combat them and leaves plenty of room for improvement and progress. Though there are some difficulties for Spanish speakers to learn the English language, there are also many areas of English that make it an easy language to learn. Even though English is a Germanic language, it is also based on the Latin alphabet and being so widely spoken and accessible, it is a huge incentive to learn. In English, the lack of gender for nouns and corresponding changes to adjectives and articles are cause for less headaches. Conjugation, grammar and forming plurals are as well relatively easier than in the Spanish language. After all, though there may be some difficulties and challenges, it is always worth the effort to learn a new language, as efforts do pay off! On a motivational note, as Edward De Waal once said: “With languages, you are at home anywhere”.