Teach English in Moudao Zhen - Enshi Tujiazu Miaozu Zizhizhou

Why is it so easy to acquire our first language, yet such a struggle to master a second? I think the mindset we have when learning a second language is part of what makes acquisition difficult. We have a cultural concept that learning a 2nd language is hard and speaking like a native is nearly impossible. Native speakers, on the other hand, never feel this pressure regarding their own language. Our native language is the first way we learn to interact with those around us. Most of us are fully immersed in our mother tongue through family, friends, school, movies and books. For those learning a second language, it is very difficult to replicate this depth of immersion even if they live in the country of the language they’re studying. For this reason encouraging student participation is so crucial. I believe both confidence and motivation play a big role in acquisition. Young native speakers are motivated to learn because they want to communicate with those around them and be included. Those learning a second language abroad are also seeking to integrate into society and usually have a strong desire to express themselves fluently among their peers and colleagues. Before starting to talk, ideas form in our minds, then words come to express these ideas in a way that people will understand. A native expresses his ideas directly, whereas a non-native tends to pass his ideas through a filter; that filter being his own language. Therefore, second language learners who translate ideas before expressing them put out twice the effort to say something that a native speaker would. I, myself, am also a second language learner. My bilingual journey started at the age of twelve with the Spanish classes provided by my middle school in Cleveland, Ohio. Two years later my parents moved to Costa Rica. Being in an environment where I suddenly had to use my second language on a daily basis for school and later on work, completely changed how I was learning Spanish. I bought grammar books, dictionaries, verb books, novels and anything I could get my hands on. When I didn’t have a person to practice with, I practiced with myself out loud. At school, I made so many mistakes while speaking that I eventually decided to keep quiet. Partly out of shame, but also to learn and really pay attention to how the people spoke around me. Full immersion and necessity were what helped me become a fluent speaker. With English, on the other hand, I was really confident and everything came easily. Anytime “new” vocabulary was introduced I almost always recognized it from movies or could discern the meaning through context. I aced spelling tests because I was already familiar with the words from having read lots of books. Pronunciation didn’t give me any anxiety and when I was corrected it didn’t affect my confidence level in any way. I noticed, while teaching English in Cambodia, that my best students exhibited similar traits. They had voluntarily exposed themselves to (authentic) English books, movies and music. They could even recite complicated lines from Disney movies and tell their own jokes. They were enthusiastic learners who were willing to experiment and get creative with English. When a native speaker starts learning at a young age, their peers all have relatively the same language level. For non-natives living abroad, their peers are usually masters of the language they are trying to speak and don’t always have the time or patience to help them improve. My adult students studying in their home countries have commented that while practicing with other language students was helpful, the other students tended to have the same problems they did and found talking with a native to be more beneficial. On the contrary, native speakers grow up speaking to other native speakers and are therefore able to advance quickly. For this reason, it doesn’t take many years for native speakers to get a good grasp of their language. Many adult students are under a lot of pressure to learn English quickly and often have deeply ingrained bad grammar habits that are difficult to overcome due to the way they learned English and the way they speak their native language. For example, most of my Brazilian students have problems with pronouncing the ‘r’ at the beginning of a word. This is because in Portuguese the first ‘r’ has a ‘huh’ sound. So, they naturally want to pronounce words like ‘restaurant’ as “hestaurant”. Getting over these types of bad habits is another hurdle for 2nd language learners. Another tendency that 2nd language students have in common is translating what they hear through their 1st language. Natives think about what they want to say, whereas non-natives think about how to say what they want to say. Learning to think in a 2nd language is probably the biggest challenge for most, but once this is achieved, I believe the student is not far from becoming a fluent speaker of their desired 2nd language. In conclusion, I believe that mastering a 2nd language is a battle for the majority because they don’t have access to the same natural learning environment that native speakers do. If 2nd language learners could replicate the type of learning conditions that 1st language learners are exposed to, they would probably acquire their 2nd language much more successfully.