ESL School

. . . are a few tips. If your students are monolingual then it is easier to make a contrastive analysis, diagnose the problems and find solutions. The first step is to identify the errors. Be careful not to assume that all errors stem from mother tongue interference. Try to identify the most common ones and give these priority. The errors can be classified by type: pronunciation, structural, lexical. For pronunciation look at individual sounds (phonemes): errors might be happening because a specific sound in English does not occur in the mother tongue. In this case the students need to be helped first to actually hear the sound, then they need to be shown how the sound is formed and then given lots of practice in using it. Stress patterns at word and sentence level could be another phonological challenge and intonation patterns should be examined too. Students will find it easier to produce correct pronunciation of sounds if they know the phonemic alphabet as, unfortunately, English spelling often hinders pronunciation— the classic example is the many different pronunciations possible for “-ough”: cough, although, through, bough, rough, etc.

Structural errors occur most often because the student tries to impose the mother tongue patterns on to the target language: this might be word order, use of tenses, difficulty with articles and many more. One again to you need first to identify the most common problems and then you can highlight the ways in which English differs.

With vocabulary you might find a problem with “false friends” or it might be that the mother tongue uses certain expressions that the students translate literally but the expression does not exists in English. An example that comes to mind is a student who used the more colorful expression “blood-guilty” for the English “murderer”. Some words in English such make/do, say/tell cause confusion because their literal translation into other languages suggests different uses.

I’m sorry but there is no quick fix here. It would be helpful if you could give each student a personal analysis so that each one can work on their specific difficulties. I suggest also that you produce worksheets for common problems. I hope this is of some use!

Bye for now,

Patricia.