Democracia en Grecia

The Difficulty to Learn English as a Second Language

The United States is a country of immigrants and not all of them have English as their native language. According to the U.S. Census Bureau “English is the language most spoken by people in the United States…and it is the language used in nearly all government functions.” Learning English is the best way to fit in to this society, to get a better job, to achieve a higher education, and to find new friends. As a foreign student who moved to this county five years ago, I wonder what is the perspective of foreign students who are learning English. The purpose of this study is to answer the following questions: What is the hardest skill to improve when learning English? How difficult is for a foreign student to learn English?

The method used for this study was a seven questions survey, which was distributed among foreign students who attend Gateway Community College to learn English, specifically students who are taken the course ESL 178-Advance Reading and Writing. Fifteen students filled out the survey of which ten are females and five are males. Their ages are: (12) twenty to thirty five years old, (3) thirty five years or more, (0) twenty years or less. The native languages of these students are as follow: (7) Spanish, (4) Arabic, (1) Portuguese, (1) Ukraine, (1) French and (1) Chinese. The period of time that these students have been taken classes at Gateway Community College are: (13) more than one year, (1) six months to one year, and (1) less than six months.

From the survey distributed to fifteen students, the majority of them are young adults. M most of them are attending Gateway Community College to study English as a second language one year or more, and the reason for this could be the desire to get a better job, achieve a higher level of education, etc. The first objective of this study is to determine the hardest skill to improve when learning English. For forty six percent of students the hardest skill to learn is grammar, for forty percent of them is pronunciation and for thirteen percent is vocabulary. The English alphabet has 26 roman letters, and its grammar article system, verb grammar and word order are particularly the hardest points to achieve when learning English. The Frankfurt International School lists many differences between English and other most spoken languages, for example “…Arab learners have problems with genitive constructions such as the boy's dog. In Arabic this would be expressed as Dog the boy, which is how such constructions may be conveyed into English.” and “Spanish has a strong correspondence between the sound of a word and its spelling. The irregularity of English in this respect causes predictable problems when Spanish learners write a word they first meet in spoken language or say a word first met in written language.” The fact that grammar is the hardest skill to learn it is influenced by the fact of how the English language differs from the student’s native language.

The second objective of this research is to determine the grade of difficulty for foreign students when learning English. For forty seven percent the grade of difficulty is normal, for thirty three percent is difficult, for thirteen percent is not difficult, and for seven percent is very difficult. These results tell us that even though to learn a new language implies to adapt to a new grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary system, for foreign students the level of difficulty when learning English is normal. Additionally, students were ask to mentioned other steps they are taking to improve their English skills; the results are as follow: thirty three percent watch movies or channels in this language, thirty percent prefers to speak with other English speakers, twenty seven percent read a book or newspapers, and ten percent listen to radio, songs, etc.  The best way to improve a language is practice; students prefer to watch movies and speak with English speakers because they want to learn about the culture of this country and by instance to be part of this society.

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