Unit 1: The TEFL World

Some Specific Characteristics of the English Language

Fairly easy to learn

English is one of the simplest and easiest natural languages in the world.

Of course, the concept of easiness is relative, and it depends on which language a

learner knows already. However, the concept of simple is undeniable. English is a
fairly easy language to learn, understand and speak when compared to very
complex languages such as Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean and Japanese.

Latin alphabet

The English language uses the Latin alphabet, the most universal, simple and
short alphabet (only the Greek alphabet is shorter and simpler). In addition, in
English, the Latin alphabet presents its most clean form as a true alphabet with
only 26 basic letters.

Its simple inflection

Inflection is the name for the extra letter or letters added to nouns, verbs and
adjectives in their different grammatical forms, e.g. cat, cats; eat, eats; big, bigger.

English is considered a weakly inflected language when compared to, say, French
or Russian. Its nouns have only traces of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and
its regular verbs have only four forms, e.g. look, looks, looked, looking.

Even for irregular verbs, there is almost no variation in person (except the 3rd
person singular in the present tense, e.g. I eat, you eat, she eats). The English
language can indicate the relationship of words in a sentence with only the
minimum of change in their structure. There are other languages which do this
but this is a strong characteristic of English.

Its receptiveness

A major characteristic of English language is its receptiveness to accepting and

adopting words from other languages. Here are a few examples from Spanish:

alligator from el lagarto meaning the lizard

barbecue from the Chibcha word barbacoa, meaning a wooden framework for
sleeping on, or for storing meat or fish to be dried
cargo from the verb cargar, meaning to load
This is regarded as an extraordinary feature of the language. It has accepted and
adopted words from Asian, European, African, Indian, Japanese, Chinese and
other languages. And English has kept an open-door policy of accepting words
from classical languages like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.

Its (generally) fixed word order

Another strong characteristic of English language is its (generally) fixed word

order. Most English sentences (clauses) conform to the SVO word order. This
means that the Subject comes before the Verb, which comes before the Object.
Examples:

I (S) bought (V) a new computer (O).

She (S) doesn't like (V) dogs (O).
Why did you (S) do (V) that (O)?
There are other word orders in English but this is by far the most used, making it
easy for learners to grasp.

No markings on letters

There are no diacritics (a mark that is placed over, under, or through a letter in
some languages to show that the letter should be pronounced in a particular way)
such as happens, for example, in Spanish:

exá menes
muñ ó n
muñ ones
canció n

The exception is words imported from other languages, e.g. rô le and naïve from
French.

Pronunciation

The pronunciation of English words such as this, thin, clothes, thirteenth, months
inevitably causes problems for learners who do not need to use the tip of the
tongue to produce words in their own language.

Continuous tense

Many languages do not have a continuous tense form, so English learners may
make mistakes such as: I had a bath when the phone rang; instead of I was
having a bath when the phone rang.

Articles (a, an, the)

The article system is another feature of English grammar that causes some
students enormous difficulties; particularly, of course, those whose native
language does not use articles.

Phrasal verbs

A phrasal verb is an idiomatic phrase consisting of a verb and another element,

typically either an adverb, as in break down, or a preposition, for example see to,
or a combination of both, such as look down on.

These phrasal verbs are a VERY significant feature of the English language and
can cause severe difficulties for learners. Sentences such as I put it down to the
weather, or I made it up with my sister, are usually gobbledegook to beginner
non-native speakers.

Unfortunately for the English language learner, phrasal verbs are extremely
common in colloquial English language.

Non-tonal

English is a non-tonal language.

In tone languages, e.g. Chinese and Vietnamese, pitch (the degree of highness or
lowness of a tone) is used to distinguish word meaning. So, a word said with high
pitch may have a different meaning from the same word said with a low pitch.

In English, changes in pitch are used to emphasise or express emotion, not to give
a different word meaning to the sound. It is not surprising that native speakers of
tone languages often have strong accents when speaking English.

Sound and spelling

A final feature of English that is enormously problematic for non-native learners

and some native-speakers is the unpredictable correspondence between word
sound and word spelling.

It is often impossible for learners of English to predict the spelling of an English

word they first encounter in speech, or the pronunciation of an English word
they first encounter in writing.

In fact, the majority of English words do conform to spelling patterns. The

difficulty for the learner, however, is that the words which don't conform are
some of the most common words in the language, and thus the ones that learners
encounter first. For example:

Words containing ough: thought, although, rough,

Words which have the same sound but different spellings: ate, eight; hear,
here; their, there
Words with silent letters, not pronounced: know, could, hour
Words that look exactly the same but must be pronounced differently: read
(present tense), read (past tense); present (a gift), present (to give to); close
(near); close (to shut)

Examples of key differences in some languages compared to

English

*Here are some general observations:

Spanish EFL Students

1. Gender and articles: In Spanish, all nouns have gender, whereas we just
use a, an, and the no matter the gender:
a boy: un niñ o; a girl: una niñ a
the boy: el niñ o; the girl: la niñ a
Also, there is no equivalent in Spanish for it that we use for inanimate objects.
Note that there are situations where we do not insert articles but these will
usually be inserted in Spanish. Their article for the is underlined in these
examples:
Cars are a hassle: Los coches son una molestia.
Mr. Smith is here: El Sr. Smith está aquí.
2. Relationship between sound and spelling:In Spanish, words are spelled as
they sound and vice versa. In English, there is little correlation between sound
and spelling.
3. Vowel sounds: Spanish has fewer vowel sounds than English. The length of
the vowel sound in Spanish is not so important when distinguishing between
words; there is little distinction between short and long vowel sounds. In
English, however, there are many more vowel sounds and the length of the vowel
sound is very important.
Thus, Spanish learners have a lot of difficulty in first distinguishing differences in
vowel sounds and then producing them. This results in confusion when hearing
and pronouncing many groups of words, for example:
ship/sheep
fool/full
cat/cut
beat/bit
4. Consonant sounds: Spanish-native speakers frequently confuse the
consonants v and b in English, and the first sounds in words beginning with y as
in yacht and j as in jeep with ch as in cheap. Some speakers also have difficulty
with sounds at the end of words such as thing/think.
5. The s sound: Spanish words do not start with an s sound. As a result, they
often add an e sound to English words beginning with the s sound, resulting in
utterances such as I come from Espainand I went to eschool in Barcelona.
6. Consonant clusters: These are groups of consonants which have no
intervening vowel, e.g. split. These are much more common in English than in
Spanish. Sometimes they may add in a vowel sound or an extra syllable when
tackling these, e.g. ad-vance-ed. In addition, sometimes they ‘swallow’ sounds
when faced with a cluster, e.g. next becomes nes.
Remember: A syllable is a part of a word that is pronounced with one
uninterrupted sound.
7. Syllable-timed and stress-timed languages: Spanish is a syllable-timed
language, where an equal amount of time is given for each syllable when
syllables are expressed. On the other hand, English is a stress-timed language
where stresses tend to occur at regular intervals and unstressed syllables are
squashed in between the stresses to maintain the regular beat of the stress.
So, what does this mean? It means that many Spanish learners have difficulty in
mirroring the combination of stress, pitch and rhythm required to project the
exact meaning of their utterance in English. That is, their flattened, slightly
robotic-like and evened-out syllable-timed speech in English makes it difficult for
native English speakers/listeners to grasp the important words in the sentence.
A popular example used to demonstrate this difference in TEFL classes is:
The Beatles were bigger than Elvis: English, stress –timed, stress bolded
The / Beat / les / were / big / ger / than / El / vis: Spanish, syllable-timed, each
syllable in each slash pronounced in an equal timing
Overcoming this flat-sounding intonation is very important, particularly in
formal and important situations in English, where clarity and stressing a point
are paramount.
8. Pronouns often omitted: When speaking Spanish, native speakers of Spanish
will often drop the pronoun subject unless they're stressing it to avoid
ambiguity, because whom they're referring to, e.g. you/they/he is normally clear
from the Spanish verb conjugation.
So, this can transfer across to English. You may find Spanish speakers making
expressions such as:
Came with me to the train station, when they mean He/She came with me to the
train station.
Is Carlos here? Yes. Is here.
9. Word order: In English, the word order in everyday statements is generally:
subject, verb, object. In Spanish, though, more variations are allowed:
Here are three variations of the same meaning: Carlos wrote the letter.
Carlos escribió la carta. (subject, verb, object; very common in Spanish and the
same order as in English)
Escribió Carlos la carta. (verb, subject, object; very common in Spanish
but not used in everyday English)
La carta la escribió Carlos (object, object pronoun, verb, subject; not as common
as the two above but it is used.)
The opportunities for making errors in the word order of everyday statements in
English, due to the influence of their native language, are self-evident.
10. Prepositions: English has many prepositions, much more than many other
languages. Most English prepositions have multiple meanings. In addition, many
are monosyllabic and are thus difficult to pick up in rapid speech.
Also, non-native speakers cannot depend on prepositional knowledge from their
first language. For example, the Spanish por could be expressed in English by the
prepositions by, for, during and through. You can see the potential for error
when they are attempting to use English prepositions.
11. Adjectives: In English, an adjective generally comes before a noun but in
Spanish it generally comes after the noun. But there are Spanish adjectives which
come before the noun. And note that Spanish adjectives have gender and also
have plural forms with plural nouns.
12. Possessive apostrophe: In English, we express possession in one of two
ways. We use the possessive apostrophe: the boy’s book, or
the of construction: The wellbeing of the refugees is paramount. Spanish uses
only the of construction.
The possessive apostrophe is probably the greatest challenge for all native-
English writers, so you can imagine how difficult this will be for Spanish learners.

Chinese EFL Students

1. Different writing systems: A major difference is that the Chinese languages
use a logographic system, whereas English uses an alphabetic system. Some
Chinese learners may be fully au fait with pinyin, a system of writing Mandarin
Chinese which uses the Latin alphabet. However, pinyin is a phonetic system and
so the sound to letter correspondence differs in various areas.
2. Lack of cognates: Lack of cognates is a second major difference. Cognates are
words which share an historical origin, which makes the learning of some words
in a new language easier to grasp.
Although we majored above on the differences for a Spanish native learning
English, one of the great advantages is that there are many cognates Spanish
natives can lean on to help them guess the meaning of English words. But
Chinese learners do not have this advantage.
In addition, there are very few borrowed words from English in the Chinese
lexicon (vocabulary).
3. Syllable-timed and stress-timed languages: The third major difference is
that, similar to Spanish, Mandarin is a syllable-timed language whereas English is
a stress-timed language. Thus, Chinese learners also have difficulty in mirroring
the combination of stress, pitch and rhythm required to project the exact
meaning of their utterance in English.
4. Uninflected language: Although we have said earlier that English is,
generally, a weakly inflected language compared to some other languages, it does
convey much meaning by using auxiliary words (often called ‘helping verbs’) and
verb inflections (changes to the verb structure): is/are/were,
eat/eats/ate/eaten, etc.
In contrast to this, Chinese is an uninflected language which conveys meaning via
its word order, context and adverbials.
5. Consonant sounds: In Mandarin, there are only three consonant sounds
which can be used at the end of a syllable. Chinese speakers thus have great
difficulty with the pronunciation of any English words that end with any sound
outside of the three they are familiar with and, as a result, the final consonant is
often omitted.
6. Some other common difficulties:
 Distinguishing the difference between l and r, and so they may
mispronounce rake and rice as lake and lice.
 Getting to grips with unfamiliar sounds, e.g. v, so that very may become wery
 Pronouncing each syllable in an English word too clearly (because Chinese is
a monosyllabic language where each character has only one syllable)
 Placing adverbial phrases of time and place at the end of a sentence as these
are never placed at the end of a sentence in Chinese
 Confusing personal pronouns, e.g. he and she, because these words have the
same pronunciation in Chinese
 Omitting the verb to be before an adjective, e.g. He sad, and omitting articles
as these don’t exist in Chinese