Teach English in Beiwu Zhen - Beijing

Problem for learners in korea koreans encountered many obstacles on their journey towards learning the English as a second language. Some of those problems were due to differences on language, consonants and vowels, sentence and word structure, cultural influence, foreign language ability against mental and spiritual maturity and inconsistency between expectations and reality. koreans do not use Roman alphabet instead they use purely phonetics. Their language is called ?Hangeul? which consists of forty characters. This matter created confusions to the learners of English when they encountered words with special spelling such as word that contains silent letters and give them difficulty in reading and pronouncing the word. korean consonants are voiceless except when vowel will be added after the consonant then it will become voiced. Whereas English has pairs of voiced and voiceless consonants thus students find it difficult to identify the voiced from the voiceless in English language, so they tend to add vowel after the consonant to make it voiced. There are some consonants in English alphabets that don?t have korean counterparts thus students has difficulty in reading and pronouncing the word that contains the consonants such as \c, f, q, v, w, x, y and z/. Though korean language has a \y/ but this will only appear when paired with a vowel and considered as part of the vowel group. korean syllable formation is consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), with a consonant in the initial position, while in English it is common to have two or three consecutive consonants in the initial position. Thus learners have difficulty in reading, spelling and even pronouncing the word. In korean language, the word order in constructing a sentence is subject-object-verb (SVO) while in English the word order is subject-verb-object (SVO). In some cases, there?s a tendency that learners will construct the English sentence similar to that of the korean word order and the sentence will become grammatically incorrect. Learners in korea finds English learning to be both enriching and frustrating due to cultural difference. korean students tend to express their opinion in a general and indirect way, even if they are asked to communicate their ideas. This is because koreans have been trained to think and express indirectly so as to avoid offending others. When korean students notice some interesting cultural principles in the word order of some idiomatic noun phrases and refer to the same concepts, they produce phrases that differ from the usual English word order because they use the approach of the native language and apply to English. ?2 Page 2 When translating their thoughts into English, korean learners feel frustrated not only because of the absolute difficulty of learning English but also because of the gap between their English ability to their mental and spiritual maturity. They may unable to properly express their ideas and thoughts in English that made the students feel uneasy and disappointed, leading to further loss of interest and self-confidence in learning English. Compared to other subjects, the process of learning English will takes more time and effort to reach the proficiency level. When students started to learn English, most of them, if not all, are aiming for unrealistic goals such as getting a grade of ?A? and able to excel the subject in just few months. When they?re not able to attain their goal, students feel disappointed and may lead to loosing their interest and self-confidence.