2002 Set 1
Tips for language learners
A language week is going to be organized by the English society in our school. It aims to raise students’ interest to learn English by providing various means to deal with their problems. In view of that, our group decided to produce a video to advice students some practical ways of learning English in four aspects, they are reading, writing, listening and pronunciation. In this essay, I will state the ways we collect information, the content of the video, as well as the arrangement of information in the video.
To gather information, we asked our schoolmates and friends for common difficulties in learning English, and interviewed our teachers, parents, and elder schoolmates for solutions. Besides, we got some tips about learning English from the Internet. In addition, some opinions are based on our experience since we have learnt English for over fifteen years
The content of the video
In the video, difficulties on learning English will be presented. For reading, most students find that their reading speed is slow. They always do not understand some complex sentences or difficult words, thus they cannot get hold of the theme or meaning of what they read.
For writing, students have difficulties on expressing their view in English. Many students find that they are lack of diction. They only can make a sentence with simple meaning. Besides, they do not know the skills and styles of writing in English properly, thus they can not construct a sentence or an essay beautifully.
For listening, most students are afraid to listen to native speakers of English. They usually can not catch all the points when people speak in English, but only some simple words. They also cannot get the tone of native speakers, and receive their messages slowly.
Receiving messages in English slowly also leads to a problem in pronunciation, which is giving response to others in English slowly. Another problem in this aspect is that students cannot distinguish the difference between the words with similar phonemes. Besides, some students are too shy to speak in English, they only can speak in English by giving a single word, but not a whole sentence. Therefore, they seldom communicate with others in English.
There are some reasons for the problems that we found. Students' mother tongue is Chinese, but not English. They are not familiar in using English as they lack the chance to practice it. In view of the problem of mother tongue, they usually think in terms of Chinese and take much time to translate them into English, thus they have a slow response in listening and speaking English. Moreover, students cannot recognize the way to pronounce each word in English, so that it makes them embarrassed as they think others would laugh at their wrong pronunciation. Worse still, they confuse with the sentence structure of Chinese and that of English, so that they cannot read and write in English fluently.
In light of the above problems, some practical ways of learning English will be submitted in the video. Skills of using English can be gained from our daily life. For example, by watching TV programs in English Channel or listening to English songs with lyrics, students can learn the tone of how the foreigners speak English.
Students also can participate in the Speech Festival or drama, in order to build up confidence in expressing themselves in English. Apart from extra curricular activities, students should read newspaper aloud every day, it can help them to distinguish words with similar phonemes. They also should look up words in the dictionary when come across some difficulty words, it can help them to improve reading and writing skills by increasing their size of vocabulary.
The arrangement of information
To present the above information interestingly, we will state the common difficulties of learning English in form of drama. It can raise students’ much awareness since the situation in the drama students usually come across. Some interviews of teachers and schoolmates will follow the presentation of drama in the video. Since teachers are more familiar with the students’ process of learning English, they can suggest some feasibe methods of improving English standard. Throughout the video, English subtitles will be provided. Students can get hold of the information of learning English more easily.
All the things mentioned above are the information included in the project of ‘Tips for language learners’.