Difficulties in English Learning - Essay Example

One of the difficulties experienced by the learners is the inability to determine the right verb to express a certain idea. It is extremely difficult for them to decide on the type of tense that is supposed to be used in relation to the time the action took place. The action could have taken place in the past, in the present, or in the future. This calls for use of different tenses such as the past, present, or future tenses when describing the actions (Miendt 200). The learners are hence unable to correctly use them due to their inexperience in the use and meaning. The difficulty can be avoided by extensive reading in order for a learner to get used to tenses, as well as, continuous practice and use of English in everyday life.
The other difficulty is the poor formation of the verb string. There are some sentences that have a complicated structure. For example, a single string may comprise auxiliaries and principles, as well as, a modal verb. The learners are unable to collect the parts of the string and put them in the correct order. This makes the learners use them incorrectly thereby distorting the meaning. Multi-word verbs also pose great difficulties to the learners. These difficulties present themselves both in grammatical form and lexical meaning. Due to the fact that the verbs have more than one meaning, the learners have difficulty in interpreting the meaning where the same phrase is used in different contexts. These challenges can be overcome by the use of simple sentences that are easy to understand, as well as, making sure the learners understand the various meanings of each verb (Leech 11).
b) Specific difficulties in English pronunciation
The Chinese learners have difficulty in pronouncing English words correctly, as well as, reading English texts. This is because the Chinese words are not made up of letters as in the case of English where there are alphabets. The Chinese also have difficulty in stress and intonation. Since certain English phonemes do not exist in Chinese, it becomes difficult to pronounce these words properly, as the difference in meaning is often distinguished by the pitch of the phoneme sound in the Chinese language. It is important to note that phoneme sounds in English are used to give a different meaning to the sound (Llurda 102).
The Chinese have fewer vowels than English. This, therefore, makes it difficult for them to pronounce words such as sheep, eat or it, fool or deer among others. The learners mostly shorten the words into one vowel hence unable to bring out the meaning clearly. The Chinese also have difficulties in differentiating [l]and [r] in their pronunciations. They, therefore misspell words such as love, rice, the road among others (Richard 99).
The learners also have difficulties pronouncing the final consonants in English. They add an extra vowel or fail to pronounce the consonant (Davis 106). This is because this feature is not common in Chinese. A good example is words such as hill or hall that are spelled without double [ll] and instead spelled with a drawn-out [l].
In conclusion, it is clear that English language learners are faced with several difficulties. These difficulties have been identified and learners are being assisted on how to pronounce them correctly. Read More