Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Liguo Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Xuzhou Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
In Hong Kong, people study English in primary school, secondary school, university, and even kindergarten so you may think that Hong Kong people should be good at English like Cantonese which is their native language. Unfortunately, it is not true. English learners in Hong Kong also face difficulties when facing English. Hong Kong is one of cities which provides the stressful syllabus for students and parents. In schools, there are many tests and exams for students, and those tests and exams may determine their future such as which university they could go to. Therefore, many parents start arranging different kinds of courses for their children to learn different things such as instruments, dance and foreign language. Because of the tight schedule of learning after school, children are hard to learn things deeply. What many of them to do is to meet the requirement of the tests and exams because the most important thing for Hong Kong learners and parents is the result of the exams and tests but not the learning motivation and involvement. We can see that most of the common teaching way in Hong Kong is drilling. Students spend most of their time on words copying, gap filling exercise, and matching so obviously students are hard to understand English deeply and make use of English in social life. As time passes, they would be lacking of the passion of English learning and avoid to learn and even use English in the future. As English teachers, although it is impossible to change the educational system in Hong Kong, we should try our best to design encouraging, fun and meaningful lessons for students in order to enhance their learning motivation and build their confidence of learning language which could help them to develop English constantly. In the kindergarten that I am currently working, my students are 3 years old who speak Cantonese as their native language so they barely speak English and it is hard for them to understand English. In my opinion, the most important factor of teaching English to children who do not speak English is to enhance their interest of English learning but not passively teaching tuns of information to them. Therefore, I design different activities based on different learning objectives. I provide chances for them to participate actively such as role-play and games. Besides, I make use of teaching materials to gain their interest such as using mystery box to let them make a guess before the main activity, and using pictures in order to let children understand the content easier. After these changes, I found that they are more active in English lessons, and more confident to make use of English. I truly believe that they would be able to make use of English actively and even independently in the future. In conclusion, each country might have their own difficulties on English learning. As teachers, however, we should identify the problems beyond the difficulties and try to solve the problems with our professional knowledge in order to enhance children’s learning.
