Teach English in QiaojiAng Zhen - Huaihua Shi

Nowadays, many people in Krygyzstan want to learn English. In order to enter university or find a better job. However, the learners here face some difficulties in learning. First of all, teaching hours of English in local school is not enough. English is a third language here, the secondary language is Russian. So the hours available for teaching English is not much in local school generally. For example, some school may just provide one hour of English lesson per week. Parent think that the learning hours provided by school is not enough, as a result, they send their children to private language center, in order to have extra English class. But the income of people is not high here, not every family can afford the tuition fee for language center, for poor family, they cannot do so. Financial condition of schools causes challenge to learners. In Kyrgyzstan, the salary for teachers is not high, good English teachers may not work at schools of Kyrgyzstan, they may teach in language center or in other countries like Russia. In rural area, the situation is worse, good teachers may go to city for teaching. So, learners in school do not have enough learning hour, and they may not be taught by good teachers. There are not many good English books published in Kyrgyzstan, it is also expensive for them to buy books published by England or America. However, access to internet is easy and not expensive, just the learners need to know which web site can help them, and how they can use the computer to learn English. In Krygyzstan, Russian is the secondary language and trade language. Since Kyrgyzstan was ruled by Soviet Union, so Kyrgyzstan is deeply influenced by Russian. The package of foods, most of the popular films, cartoons are in Russian. The grammar and concept of Russian is quite different from English, during learning English, they may mix up somethings with Russian. For example, in English, we say “I open the door.”, the order of words represents which one is subject and object. But in Russian, the word is subject or object is identified by the case of word, they can say something like “Open the door I” if they translate the word directly from Russian without rearrange the words properly. They need to change the habit in speaking Russian while speaking English. Kyrgyz (primary language of Kyrgyzstan) and Russian are languages that can be pronounced by how it is written, so English is difficult for them in pronouncing and reading at the beginning. As Krygyz is also a kind of language with multiple syllable. So they can identify the syllable easily. If they have knowledge of phonetic symbols and using dictionary, they can catch up pronouncing easily. Shame culture also effects the learners here, especially those for adult learners for business English. For example, if a group of teachers come for English conversation training, if some of them are in lower level, they may not speak anything, as they are afraid other teachers know their English level, teachers among themselves, are also competitor to each other in career. So it is important to grouping the teachers of similar level together, let them talk freely in the group As a result, the main difficulties of learners in Kyrgyzstan are teaching resources and influence from Russian and Kyrgyz. Better teacher resources, use of internet learning and learning of phonetic alphabets can help the learners. They may be shame to speak English, some grouping and rearrangement of class can be helpful.