Teach English in Wulan JiAnyu - Xing'an Meng — Hinggan

Communication is the key to success in every aspect of life. Whether you are at the supermarket, going for a job interview, submitting a paper for school, or asking your boss for a well-deserved raise, communication is the channel you must follow to arrive at your desired goal. Fortunately, for many people, we live and work in a country where that task comes second nature to us, where we do not have to put any effort at all into our method of speaking. However, this is not the case for many, many people. For others, they must work tirelessly just to have a (what we would deem) simple conversation. They go over what they are going to say over and over again in their minds before speaking it aloud, and once they do make that effort to communicate, they will be judged by many things. Some of them will be uncontrollable, like their accent, and others will be of a more controllable nature. One of the main aspects of their speech that will be taken into account is the grammar they use. Grammar is probably any student’s least favourite part of the lesson, however, it can be one of the most imperative. Vocabulary feels more useful and can be more enjoyable to learn, but what use is knowing a plethora of words if you cannot put them into a sentence properly? Grammar lessons are the most intensive part of any language lesson and is often the part that will require the greatest amount of work to grasp, both inside and outside of the classroom. When it comes to vocabulary and understanding, whether that be understanding spoken word or written text, you can get away with knowing only a few key words in the sentence and be able to grasp its entire meaning. That is not the case with grammar. With grammar, you must know how and when to use certain tenses, and that alone poses its own set of challenges, especially if the language you are learning differs greatly from your mother tongue. Grammar involves a great deal of rules and patterns that must be learnt, i.e, where do adverbs typically get placed in a sentence? When do you use the future simple versus the future continuous? How does a sentence change when speech is being reported? These and many more rules all make up grammar. Luckily, many exercise books and study-based activities can be incorporated into lessons to help students learn these crucial points. Memorisation and repetition are the keys to success with grammar, therefore, it is extremely important to stay on top of what is learnt so that subsequent lessons will make sense because grammar, like math, builds on itself and becomes more complicated as you go along. This being said, it is also important that the teacher has a strong grasp of all of these grammatical concepts, which can actually be quite a challenge even for native speakers of the language. When you learn your first language, it is more so acquired than anything else; it is a gift given freely to you that you do not have to work to attain. You absorb this language without giving a second thought to the underlying grammar behind it. When you become a language teacher, you are responsible for learning what came so naturally to you over the years and understanding the reasoning behind why we do what we do or say what we say. If you fail in this understanding yet expect your students to excel, you are committing a crucial error. Your class cannot excel if they are taught improperly. You will deprive your class of their chance to impress people with their ability to speak English, which is a crucial part of the first impressions they will make at school, their job interviews, and many other situations they will encounter. As stated at the beginning of this paper, communication is the key to success in life, and people are and will always be judged on their quality of communication in language. If you are successful as an English teacher, you can be fulfilled and know that your students, young or old, will go on to achieve many great things in life using the skills you gave them in knowing how to produce an eloquently sounding sentence. If they are children, they can use their grammatical skills to communicate well in school with their classmates and build on what they have learned in your language classes. If they are adults, they can go on to get a job they can then use the money for to provide for their families. Either way, as long as you as a teacher learn these essential skills that you are expecting your students to grasp, you can rest assured knowing you helped someone achieve success that they can apply to their everyday life.