English as a Second Language

To plan an English Lesson is pretty easy. It's the act of performing the plan to reach your aim that is a challenge, especially when you're teaching the language to foreign adults. The motivation may exist, enabling the students to focus on the lessons intuitively but, their capability to adapt to the lessons is what we, as teachers, should fill in. It may come as odd that I, a Filipina, would be teaching adults to study English. Let's put that issue behind us and carry on, shall we? Besides, Tagalog is a language that is pretty dead to me unless I talk to the ancients of the family. 

These past few days teaching adults the English grammar, have been great an experience worthy of note! Most of the times I am able to achieve my aims, that being a good thing -- aims of which are to: 1. Get the students to understand the vocabulary; part of speech; form, and phonemics, and 2. To get the students to understand the difference between the spoken and the written English.

My mentor haｓ praised my ability to plan in detail, adding that the materials I create are student-friendly. "It would be a pity," he advice, "if you are not able to complete your lessons! Keep in mind the time limit and also forget about adding unnecessary techniques of teaching."

Techniques of teaching! As much as I want to share with you guys the techniques of teaching, I would rather not since I paid for the lessons! Instead I will share some of the types of grammar I've learnt. Admittedly, I have never heard of the terms and names of the tenses structures until last week:

 

Tenses:

·         Simple past, simple present, simple future

·         Past perfect tense, present perfect tense, future perfect tense

·         Past continuous, present continuous, future continuous 

·         Past Conditional, Present Conditional, and Future Conditional

 

It's stressful trying to catch up to facts you've never been taught: like I've said many times before, I never learned grammar in English classes. We, as native (assuming that English is my native language) speakers of English are not obligated to learn the English collocation and its lexicon, mainly for the reason that it is used for survival. How ironic is it that the very people who need to learn the language for survival are the people who are and yet does not understand.

I've become aware that foreigners, who have trouble learning the English grammar, have never learnt their national language's grammar.

The English language is linear as compared to other foreign languages like Japan and the Philippines where the word functions, according to the English grammar, are all over the place. In the case of the Japanese language, its sentences does not need the use of articles.1 The lack of 'articles' in the Japanese language makes it difficult to directly translate into English: the Japanese language mostly uses prepositions. Should the Japanese understand this gap, they are most likely to be able to use English without confusion.

 I strongly believe that for an individual to learn another language, he or she must master his first language. Filipinos should do too. I really hope that people do not see this as a form of criticism as much as a wise advice, being that most Filipinos seem to want to stick to the national language.

 I have read some Filipino stories and articles and I have wondered if they are grammatically correct for there are so many ways to make the same sentence and still have the same effect on the readers. And in some cases, Filipinos use words that are only found in their respective towns/villages, but not in other Islands. If the Filipino language is truly a national language, why can't we dictate the main rules?

For example: When speaking or writing in Tagalog, do not use another dialect! Unless it's a novel and you have glossaries in the last pages!

I am skeptic that the general people understand their own national language because they have a hard time adapting to another language. It should be easy!

 

Check in point: Filipino English teachers! Most teachers of the English language that I've come to know in the Philippines, barely knew what they are teaching to their students! How do I know? I know through their recurring mistakes and their habit of misusing verbs, prepositions, and at times, adjectives!

Pinoy call center employees. They may understand what is spoken to them, but they themselves cannot form the words to make sense though, most often than not, the problem lay on their pronunciation.

In general, Filipinos are better speakers of English than Americans. I speak of Filipinos who actually studied the language. The question is: should we remain loyal to our use of consonants and vowels or should we adapt to either the British or the American version when speaking their language? I would say that choosing either one would work because anyway, both the English and the American styles of speech are global.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then another thing comes to mind: Is the Tagalog language stable enough a foundation to learn another foreign language? That my friends is for you to find out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, what do you think?

 

 

 

 

 

 1 Articles are functions that is specific to the noun: a, an, and the.