Is teaching English really difficult?
Teaching English as a foreign language in some non English speaking countries is difficult due to some reasons. There have been controversies for centuries among linguistics and teachers about finding the most effective way to teach language.
There are two approaches, the teacher centered and student centered. Some experts believe that student centered is superior but some language teachers are not sure about this since they find that teacher centered is better when the teacher taught beginner students who know nothing about the language.
Teacher should explain language features, generic structure, agreements and other components. In this condition, it is almost impossible to practice student centered when the students don't have schemata or background knowledge. In this level, students are guided to achieve at least two language competences which is called receptive skills like reading and listening.
However, when the students are on the intermediate level, then, student centered is believed to be better because students will understand the lesson very well when they are getting involved or actively immersed into situation in which they have to practice productive skill like writing and speaking.
In the old era, the most well known method was called audio-lingual. By using this method, teachers had students to pronounce some words continuously. This method was then known as behaviorism in which students were immersed into making repetition of some words and sentences without considering the importance of the content.
Another well known method was grammar method where students were trained to understand a set of language rules like tenses. Some experts believed however that this method had still some weaknesses because teachers should have trained their students to become active language users instead of language experts.
The constructionist believe that teachers should able to construct or scaffold their students' brain in order to learn language effectively. Once the students' brain reconstructed they can make a very big progress in learning language.
Nowadays, another new method is found. The name is post method in which the experts combine all methods into a new method called communicative language teaching or known as CLT. In this strategy, teacher brings the real condition into the classroom. For instance, teacher brings the conversation which happens in the market into a classroom where students act as if they were a seller and a buyer. However, the classroom remains unreal.
The CLT is then considered to have some weaknesses due to the argument that the classroom is not real so then the experts show the teachers about another strategy which is then called contextual teaching and learning or CTL in which students practice English in the classroom by using the real content taken from their real live at school instead of bringing the real live into the classroom. In practice, the teacher should also learn other disciplines like biology, physics, mathematics, and many more and teach these disciplines in English. Thus, the learning process will be contextual.
Teaching English, or foreign language is more challenging now because the language teachers have to learn and teach content by using English instead of teaching language rules or grammar with limited or no meaningful content.