Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Jicun Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yongzhou Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Learning a new language can be many things: memorizing new words, understanding foreign movies and foreign music, meeting foreigners, playing fun games, enrich our personal culture, exercising our brains, or getting a new job, but overall learning a new languages is structuring our thoughts in a new different form. Speaking a new language means thinking our communication with new structures, those structures are called language grammar, thus grammar is the soul of the language. When a student begins to study a new foreign language he or she will realize that speaking a new language is not just replacing the words in a sentence of his/her native language for the same words of the foreign language. Language is composed of thousands of words and the structures in which we place those words, those structures are the grammar. I believe that understanding those structures is more important than memorizing hundreds of words. Learning grammar is not a memory skill but a constant brain exercise because in every sentence and every thought we make we have to be structuring the words in the correct manner. I believe that grammar and its structures is the real language not just memorizing its thousands of words. At the moment when a language learner is capable of understanding grammar he/she has done it! After 15 years of learning and speaking English, sometimes I still have to review some grammar rules in order to make my English more solid. Grammar is like the trunk of a tree so it must be strong and straight; the vocabulary is like the leaves of that tree, they must be place in a specific part of the branches of the tree, we can't put the trunk on the leaves but we can put the leaves on the trunk. In those 15 years of living in a cosmopolitan environment, I have spoken with people from many countries and listened to many accents, I can tell that the foreigners that better speak English are not those with better pronunciation, or those whose native language is closer to English but the ones who better understand grammar because they structure very well the language, it becomes easier to understand them and talk to them. Sometimes when we are forming a sentence we can have the right structure of the sentence but we just don't know the word for a noun or a verb and we just simply replace it for a word in our native language and the listener will understand our message perfectly, that's because we use correct grammar, so the soul of our sentence is correct, then we can communicate in that foreign language. As an English language teacher I believe that my core mission is to make students master grammar, for me, making grammar exercises is even fun. Grammar is composed of hundreds of rules and formulas for producing language. Learning grammar will train our brains constantly, it will always push us to make some brain effort, it will challenge our ability of fluent logical operations and when we master it, it will open a lot of doors of opportunities for us in many senses: socializing with people from other countries, reading books that are not translated into our native languages, studying in foreign schools, getting a job, etc. Learning grammar can be very challenging sometimes, it's like the mathematics of the language. I believe that the very first lessons that a language student must take must be reading the very basics of grammar, I would emphasize in that part of the language before going on pronunciation, writing or speaking. That's why I have chosen this subject in the art of learning a new language, because grammar is the soul of a language.
