Onsite TEFL Certificate

Problems for learners in SpainSpanish is a romantic language, spoken by up to 400 million people, however there are some major differences between spanish and english The alphabet is primarily the same so there should very few writing problems, once the student has an understanding of the alphabet, they will realize that many of the letters sound similar in both languages, however there are a handful of letters that are entirely different in english, i.e. h, j and y and the fact that there is no ñ in the english alphabet Punctuation is difficult for spanish students for many reasons, other than the fact that the english language uses quotation marks, which don’t exist in spanish, added to that, the punctuation is always at the end of the sentence/question, whereas in spanish it’s at the beginning and the end Pronunciation is a major problem for spanish speakers, generally any words beginning with s are prefixed with an e, making stereo estereo or smell esmell, and in some areas of Spain c is pronounced th, v is also a problem as it changes to b and so David becomes Dabid, or vote becomes bote, however, this change in english can sometimes make an entirely different word with an alternate meaning and can often make it difficult for someone to understand what the speaker is saying Phonology too is a cause for concern, i.e. not pronouncing the end of many words correctly so pig becomes pick or smudge becomes smush, as well as the inability to pronounce ee saying i instead, i.e. creep becomes crip, sleep becomes slip etc Grammar causes many problems for spanish speakers, very often they omit the auxiliary verb, i.e. I not know instead of I do not know as well as translating directly from spanish to english, i.e. what time is it? (english) becomes what time is? (direct translation) The tenses cause a great deal of confusion for most students of english (native english speakers included) many students use the present simple tense as opposed to progressive or future continuous i.e. he’s look at the newspaper instead of he’s looking at the newspaper As with spanish, and many other Mediterranean countries, english is derived from Latin, however, it is old english and a very formal way of speaking the language, although it may be helpful, as some of the words are similar to their spanish equivalent words, it can also be detrimental, students should not be learning english by word association but by being taught verbs, tenses, grammar and vocabulary, also as old english is such a formal way of speaking it is not a realistic way to speak especially if the students are learning the language for conversational purposes Although I previously said that there would be very few writing problems due to the similarity of the alphabet, the students will probably encounter problems due to the fact that, generally, in spanish, the word is written as it sounds, this is not the case in english, this can be problematic when writing an english word for the first time and equally when reading a word for the first time and trying to say and understand it, there are some rules with the written language, i.e. adding s/es to make a word plural 1 cat 6 cats, or adding ed to make the past participle of a word stop or stopped and adding er or est to change a word from regular, to more and finally to the most e.g. big, bigger or biggest, as with any rules these are made to be broken, although these are general rules to the english language there are always variants, i.e. 1 fish 6 fish, drive (present) driven (past) Most of us are born and raised in one country and have no true idea of other cultures only pre-conceived ideas formed from our parents/relatives, what we are taught in school, what we see on the television and what we read in the newspapers, the best thing a student can do is to think in english so as to be able to speak and understand english correctly but this is rarely possible