Teaching ESL

I have learned a very important lesson since I have started teaching ESL. I now can fully understand why they consider English to be such a difficult language to learn. Not only do we have funny ways of pronouncing words, and crazy rules like "i after e except after c" but we also have words in our language that by definition mean one thing, but can be used completely out of context. A prime example of this came when I was trying to explain to some students what a wagon was. I had shown them a picture and then explained what they are used for, and then lo and behold, we get into the text and the story is using the word wagon as a "wagon-cart" meaning a hot dog stand. And I was like, (stop reading now if you don't like foul-language) "son of a bitch". Its hard enough to try and learn a foreign language, never mind when that said language starts using words in ways that one would never expect if you did not speak English natively. I have gotten a new appreciation for anyone trying to learn English, because it is very very difficult to do.

Another thing in regards to ESL and English is the fact that in Korea you will see things in English, but it will not be grammatically correct. For example, we got an ad for the DMZ tours, and it was rife with grammatical errors, like failing to put a "s" on certain words or by leaving out articles where they need to be. So its very tough for a Korean student trying to learn English when he or she sees things written in English in their own country, but they are done incorrectly.

Another interesting thing is that our Korean students have no troubles pronouncing English words, but have a difficult remembering them or understanding the definition of it. I attribute this success in pronunciation to the fact that they are not use to the rules of English that make a native-speaker question how a word is pronounced. For example, when looking at the word phone, one might expect it would begin with an "f", but the Koreans do not have that predisposed notion, and therefore just pronounce it as they would see it or write it as it sounds. It is just something that I see here that is so strange to me, yet interesting at the same time.