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It's a great honor for me to learn TEFL lessons at ITTT. I'd like to thank you all for your support. I've learnt a lot from the course. So today I'm going to talk about some learning difficulties Chinese students have and some soulutions to it. In China we have several different enterance exams to put students in different schools. And the exams mostly focus on writing. So there are a lot of problems. First they could hardly practice other 3 skills, which are 2 receptive skills listening and reading, and another productive skill speaking. Students usually put more focus on how to get great scores instead of knowing how to speak English well. This is too ridiculous to talk about because a language is all about how to communicate with others, not for getting great score to show off. I'm a teacher in an English training center. Almost all of my students are graduated from the university but they could hardly speak fluently, all things they know is about grammar and the skill to pass the exams. the first difficuly I met during my working could be speaking Chinese. It's really hard to stop them from talking in Chinese. And there are times that they couldn't get your point, which forces you to use the mother language. I use to have no idea to deal with this problem but speaking Chinese with them. After learning this coure, there are several useful tools that I use. the First on is using visual aids. No matter body languages, pictures or videos, that helps a lot when this kind of situation happens.But it requires a lot of preparation before the class, you need to preidct what they could understand and what they couldn't. If you're not well prepared, your class would be draged too long. Also trying to give the clear instructions and do speak slowly. Although our course metioned that we should probably do these to children. Sometimes, from my own experience, it's useful for all low-level students. They will be very happy if you use graded language to talk to them because they thought they could get your point. And your attitude is important as well. If you respond in Chinese, that's a kind of encouragement, they won't try to speaking English because you will try to explain in Chinese anyway. This is what teachers in Chinese high school did, they would fell very comfortable. So mother language is for the things they really couldn't get you only. The second learning difficulty is about tenses. Everytime in a review class for a particular tense lesson, I could have been asked a lot of questions. The very basic problem is that in Chinese there is no concept of tenses. That could bring many different difficulties from different students. Here we will talk about 2 different kinds of tupical problems. Some students actually know the grammar point, but they wouldn't notice that they said something wrong just now. But after reminding, they could get it right immediately. Some other students, they are cofused about all tenses, they don't know which one is right, so they will use they randomly in sentences. Everytime we need to guess"do you mean..." For Chinese students. I think a lot of practice based on proper activities. For example, Fortune telling, palm-reading is perfect for future tense, daily routine discription is great for present simple. So for us the preparation could be initial. You need to have at least 4 or 5 different activities for each level, and also several signle student activities in case there are 1 student classes. Also there are several points that how we should correct them. I found out if you stop them right in the middle of their speech to correct them, it's hardly going to work. I think it's because they were focusing on what they want to say. So what I will do now is taking notes and try to repeat what they said and let them correct themselves. That works very well. And Actually I also want to try pair correction, Because I think that could get all students involved as well. The third and the last one relly confuses me for a really long time. Chinese students will really want to remember more words. There are many times I've been asked that if it is because of the vocabulary that I could understand the meaning of the sentences. And also they'd prefer to answer you questions by using just 1 or 2 words. The only thing I could tell them now is that a language has a lot of different parts, so you couldn't focus on only 1 thing, if I give you all words that you know, sometime you still couldn't get the meaning. We could do this but we couldn't just do this. there are different aspects. But there's no way for me to prove this actually. So hopefully after learning the rest part of the course, I could get my own answer of it. At last, Thanks to ITTT again. Hope I could be a great teacher in the future.
