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1. General comments
Teachers need to have an awareness of the educational background and culture from which the students come. Some of them will come from a ‘traditional’ educational background in which lessons are much more teacher-centred than is current in the English-speaking classroom. This means that some nationalities will expect much more teacher talk, memorisation and learning by rote. They will be more used to fact-based learning and less used to analysing information and forming their own opinions. It may take time for them to adjust to a different style of learning – although learning by rote can certainly be used to advantage for picking up new vocabulary.
Young L2 learners will need a lot of support throughout the school day, especially if their English is very limited. Additional factors such as being new to school, and even new to the host country, make this even more important. They may at first need to be physically shown what to do and where to go. The children need clear, simple instructions to be given throughout the school day, every time there is a change of activity. These instructions may need to be given one-to-one as it cannot be assumed that they will understand whole-class instructions. The language used needs to be at or just above the students’ level of comprehension. If the teacher can use the same word and phrases, the students will grasp the meaning more quickly. In the same way, a well-organised classroom with set places for equipment and classroom furniture will help the students to become accustomed to everything. Even if students appear to have a fair grasp of English, it is important to be aware that they may not be used to hearing the teacher’s spoken version of the language. For example, they may have learned some English in Singapore but find an American or British accent more difficult to understand. From the outset, L2 students should be given classroom tasks along with the others, so that they feel part of the class and are able to practise their language while washing brushes, cleaning the board, tidying up etc with their fellow students.
Some topic areas studied in the classroom may be unfamiliar to the learners – examples are the weather, seasons and farm animals. School books were produced in the UK or the USA may well include work surrounding these topics which will not make sense to students from different parts of the world where the weather, seasons and animals bear no relation to those of their life experience. So some adaptation of the lesson materials will be required. It is important for the teacher to be genuinely interested in the culture and background of the students and to convey this in the lessons. The students should be encouraged to write/draw/talk about their own cultures and class work could involve appropriate history or geography projects. (I attempted to do this at my previous school by teaching some Korean and Puerto Rican history.) It is an excellent idea to involve parents in this as they have unique knowledge and life experience to share. They could be invited to come in and share stories, music and practical skills such as cooking. This also has the knock-on effects of making the parents feel more involved in their children’s education, and strengthening the relationship with the teachers.
Practical ideas to help with English include the following:
Music and songs, which help to reinforce language already learned.
Individual listening – children listen to stories on tape. They could do a
gap-fill or true/false exercise to help focus their listening.
Videos – show them a video clip without the sound, get them to answer gist questions such as ‘Is the man on the video angry or happy?’ play again with sound, give the children a cut up dialogue from the clip which they have to put in order, and then act it out, etc.
Home made books
Picture story sequencing
Divide a familiar story into pages and make up fun activities based on each page
Older L2 learners will still need clear instructions, and will also need opportunities to ask about language areas which they find difficult or in which further practice is needed. Again, as with younger learners, routine is important and helps them to become familiar with what is going on. Instructions should be given step by step, or could be written down as a reminder. Check whether the students have understood by asking them to tell the teacher what they are going to do. Try not to give too much detail at once and emphasise key words. Make sure that the atmosphere in the classroom is positive and encouraging so that students do not feel ashamed to ask questions or admit ignorance.
The following ideas will help:
· Use a wide range of visual materials to give
information – examples are pictures, charts and maps, tourist brochures,
cuttings from magazines and newspapers, different types of books, the Internet.
· Teach appropriate study skills such as note
taking and summarising, creating a piece of writing, producing reports.
·
When asking questions, start with factual
ones including those requiring yes/no answers.
Progress to more complicated or abstract ones later.
·
Use pair work and group work in which each
student has a role – this helps to diminish anxiety and gives the students
practice in using problem-solving English.
·
When introducing a new topic, find out what
the children already know – extend this to include unique elements from the
life experience of the EFL students.
· Use plenty of hands-on activities such as
science experiments and the construction of relief maps.
·
Questionnaires and interviews give speaking
practice and also help to provide a basis for later written work.
·
New vocabulary can be taught from pictures or
real objects. Then use substitution exercises, where students take out certain
words in a pattern sentence and replace them with new vocabulary.
·
Students could keep a daily diary based on
models provided by the teacher.
·
Students could be encouraged to create a
bilingual dictionary. They could use words and/or pictures for this.
·
Use videos as for younger learners.
2.
Teaching resources
There
is insufficient space to recommend more than a limited number of resources, so
I have picked out the Oxford University Press website (www.oup.com/elt) as one of the best
available. It is possible to download
the entire catalogue from this website (www.oup.com/elt/local/global/pdf_catalogue)
or it can be downloaded in sections. The
material is divided into British and American English, secondary and
primary. I looked briefly at two sets of
course books:
1)
Active Comprehension, a series of four books
containing activities to improve children’s comprehension and writing skills.
Advertised as an appropriate supplement to any junior English course. Contains
factual and fictional texts, comprehension, vocabulary building and extended
writing tasks. ISBNs 0-19-312001-1, 0-19-312002-X, 0-19-312003-8,
0-19-312004-6.
2)
Brainwaves, designed for students learning
English from age 9. Three levels, with basic grammar in Level 1, more complex
in Levels 2 and 3, special focus on vocabulary, revision units, total of 72
teaching hours per level. One or two of the topic areas are a bit New Age and
discernment would be needed – however, most English schemes have something like
this which Christians would wish to screen out. The basic material is good and
can be adapted.
3)
A useful resource to help teachers is Coreen
Sears’ book, ‘Second language students in mainstream classrooms: a handbook for
teachers in international schools’, ISBN 1-85359-408-3. This book is American
and contains specialist chapters on language in the classroom, strategies to
support second language children, teaching language arts (English), supporting
ESL students in mathematics, answering ESL students’ needs for social studies
and science.
3. Challenges
faced by Korean learners.
The
recommendation is that Koreans, as with all L2 students, learn to read and
write in their own language first. When
they learn English they will then have to adapt to a number of differences, but
this is generally considered to be far preferable to learning English first and
then having to adapt to Korean.
Korean is
unrelated to other oriental languages, although it still uses some Chinese
characters. There are seven dialects, of which the one from the Seoul area is known as
‘standard Korean’. The speakers of some dialects find English easier. The
Korean alphabet has 24 letters, 10 vowels and 14 consonants. In combination
they make 40 sounds – 8 simple vowels, 13 diphthongs and 19 consonants.
Pronunciation is an
issue and problems can arise as follows:
Vowels:
horse and phone can sound like hoss
and phonn
cup can sound
like cap
work can sound
like wohk, leading to confusion
between
work and walk
sit/seat and
similar sound pairings are easily confused.
(Koreans do not lengthen vowel sounds in the same way as English –
instead they use rising or falling intonation.)
Consonants:
confusion can arise as follows:
- writing/riding
- lock/log
- r and l are represented by the same consonant in Korean – hence sentences like velly velly dipikelt.
- v sounds like b
- f sounds like p - pamily
- z sounds like dz – dzoo
- sh is difficult to pronounce
- ch as in church is found in Korean but at the end of a word they add a vowel, hence churchi
- th as in mother is pronounced d
Speech
style, stress and intonation are very different. Koreans do not stress
either syllables or words. In the following example in English the stress is
placed in different places giving a different overall meaning to the same
sentence.
John is at the dentist. (Peter is not at the dentist, it is John.)
John
is at the dentist. (He is not at home or elsewhere).
In
Korean the change in meaning is not achieved by intonation but by the addition
of a suffix to one of the words in a sentence.
In
English, correct intonation is used to convey politeness. In Korean the polite
mode is achieved by the use of different verb forms instead. This means that
young Korean learners will need to be taught the use of correct intonation in
English, or they could easily appear rude without intending to do so.
Writing,
spelling and grammar There are implications for spelling stemming
from the pronunciation differences already described. In addition, it is important to note the following:
Korean
letters are phonetic symbols, and the phonetic value depends on the position in
the word, the association with other letters, and whether or not it is doubled.
There are no capital letters, but question marks, exclamation marks, full stops
and quotation marks are used in a similar way to English. There is no
possessive s – it is replaced by a noun suffix. For example, Gill’s pen becomes
pen Gill. Commas, colons and semi-colons can cause difficulties.
Word
order tends to be subject-object-verb rather than subject-verb-object.
There
are no auxiliary verbs (as in have gone) as only one word is used to represent the entire verb
phrase. Verbs are divided into two categories, action verbs, describing what is
happening, and adjectival verbs, referring to the state of things generally.
E.g.
A boy is going to school (literally boy to school going-be) – action
This
flower is beautiful (literally this
flower beautiful-be) – adjectival.
There
is no equivalent in Korean for there is
and there are. Hence, Beautiful-be
and going-be are a kind of adjective
including the verb to be. This means that a Korean speaker does not see the
need for a separate verb part such as is or
are, hence:
Tomorrow will hot and Many foreigners exist.
Tenses are
expressed differently and this leads to examples such as the following:
It has been snowing since yesterday becomes From yesterday to now snow coming.
Tomorrow
I am going to Scotland becomes Tomorrow I to Scotland go.
There
are numerous other examples to do with verbs.
The
expression ‘to have something done’ does not exist in Korean – hence,
I have had my hair cut becomes I have cut my hair.
Questions can cause
confusion, as follows:
Don’t
you like carrots? No (I don’t – English)
Yes (I don’t – Korean)
Yes
(I do – English)
No (I do – Korean)
Tag
questions, such as It’s hot, isn’t it? Or You can do this, can’t you?
are
replaced by only one expression in Korean, like the French n’est-ce pas?
Phrasal
verbs
such as to take up, to look at, to join in, are difficult to learn and there is usually confusion
with the word order. E.g. I look up it.
Nouns
have
no articles, so the and a/an have to be taught. Uncountable nouns, such as news, advice, luggage, do not exist so
would be mistakenly referred to in the plural in English.
Personal
pronouns have
three forms, self-effacing, plain and honorific, reflecting the degree of
respect to be shown to the person in question. They are not used where the
meaning is obvious from the context, e.g. I
must wash (my) hair tonight.
Adverbs
usually
come before the verb. Verbs of sense – look, sound, smell, hear and taste – are
always followed by adverbs, not adjectives, hence: That flute sounds
wonderfully; He looks sadly.
General
points
Avoid
too much teacher-centred work, as Koreans often feel inhibited when interacting
with the teacher. Do not expect too much eye contact with the teacher as this
is considered rude in Korean culture. Koreans are more limited than English
speakers in their use of body language and facial expressions when speaking in
public, as it is not considered acceptable to be over-expressive.
‘What most Europeans
see as openness, expressiveness and articulateness is seen as effusiveness and
verbosity in the Korean culture.’ (Michael Swan and Bernard Smith,
Learner English).
We
would welcome comments on the above article, especially from Korean
speakers. We would also like general
feedback. Please let us know if a
similar article to the above would be useful for EFL teachers of other language
groups.
Educare March 2006
This article is kindly offered by Educare, a newsletter
covering major TCK issues published by EUROTCK.
Educare is published 4 times a year (Jan, March, June, Sept)
and covers a wide range of third culture issues from preparation of
children for cross-cultural living to re-entry to the passport
country, boarding to home schooling and much more.
It is available free of charge on request from Eurotck.net.