Language Barrier

TESOL Thesis Statement:

The language barrier is the problem of communicating with someone when you do not speak the same language. Different cultural background of people cause the barrier, and when an English native speaker and an ESL teacher teaching together, there are a lot of special moments.

I worked in an English teaching institution to teach Chinese kids together with Foreign teachers who were English native speaker. There was a rule that teachers should speak English the full time to provide a full-English environment. So if students couldn’t understand, try to use body language or other ways to let them understand.

In one lesson, we should teach how to answer a general question. Things went well, but the cultural barrier came when I teaching the following dialogue:

- Aren’t you cold?

- No, I am not.

It’s not easy to explain to Chinese pupils why we answer ‘No’. In Chinese, people answer questions based on the question itself, but English speakers answer based on the fact.

Finally, I used body language to tell them how to anwer the question, and played games to strengthen the tip. It took time, but finally they knew how to answer these kinds of questions.

As L2 learners, it’s difficult to acquire the talking rules which are different from their first language. If I explain in Chiese, they might get confused when they see another similar question. So just as TESOL provided, teachers can use multical materials to teach. For the cultural barrier, teachers could show more videos or TV shows from America, England to show their actual life with daily talks, so students will understand the difference.

Language is the tool of communication, especially cross cultural communication. According to the connectionism concept, although language can be described by rules, it does not necessarily follow that language use is a product of rule application (Gasser 1990). Hence for better teaching outcome, I would like to provide more English cultural pieces, such as news releases, broadcast, TV shows in class to create an English environment with local English input.