Difficulties In English Language Teaching

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I selected an eighth grade mathematics lesson named Polygons in Hong Kong to review and to identify the difficulties and challenges of teaching math in English. Before analyzing this lesson, we are supposed to know that English is not the first language of Hong Kong residents. Therefore, to a certain extent, this lesson can be regarded as the one that uses a foreign language as the medium to teach subject’s content. The teacher not only needs to teach students about the subject knowledge, but also, in this context, to help students improve their linguistic/English ability of this discipline. Specifically to this lesson, I have noticed some difficulties or challenges that teacher and students were undergoing. First of all, some advanced and math-related vocabularies were taught to students, including polygon, convex and hexagon. Here, let us take “hexagon” as the example. In this class, students were told that hexagon referred to a polygon …show more content…

This class size made me wonder if each student’s English is proficient enough to be taught in English and eventually gain a satisfying academic achievement. Thus, whether students should be divided into different classes based on their language level or academic performance, or not divide them at all. Language is completely different from other disciplines. The backwardness of other disciplines can be remedied by extra efforts. However, the lack of command of the teaching language makes students lose the learning tools and rights, which is not fair. What’s more, how to testify whether a student is capable of taking classes in the medium of a foreign language and whether a teacher is capable for teaching that should also be considered thoroughly. Content and language integrated learning still has a long way to go, and educators are supposed to take the responsibility of making efforts to develop and perfect it, and introducing it to more and more

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