Chinese students can talk about how they celebrate Chinese New Year and Western students can talk about how they celebrate New Year. For example, when teaching the topic celebration, students can bring in a large variety of experiences that are related to it. Their experiences and schemata from their own culture can be used to enrich the whole group’s language learning. They will soon find out there are different cultures in the classroom. While in a multilingual class, students have different cultures within the group. They wouldn’t need to consider a lot of ethical issues to carry out their teaching activities. A teacher would only face students from one culture that he or she can teach them as a whole group for many subjects or topics. There wouldn’t be any culture shock within the group. Students from a monolingual class usually share the same culture. In essence, it would be helpful that the teacher has certain knowledge of some language background so that they would have a better understanding of students’ language difficulties.Īlso read: What it's Like to Teach English Online: An Online Teacher Reveals Her Secrets! However, it is still quite a challenge to teach beginners who don’t share any common language with us. We also have reading support to teach them phonemic awareness and reading strategies. To help them, we have the ELL support teacher who work closely with beginners and low-intermediate students to meet their specific needs. Their language difficulties are very different. For example, we have Dutch, Korean, Japanese and Spanish students. This is something I also have found challenging in an International School setting. They have to locate the difficulties for individual students and come up with the strategies what work specifically for each of them. When working in a multilingual class, teachers find it hard to clarify difficulties in a whole group. The range of difficulties can vary from pronunciation to verb tenses and from sentence structure to vocabulary. While in a multilingual class, students have no common language difficulties. A teacher can use this knowledge to deal with all the common difficulties in a whole group. Chinese language does not have verb tenses, verb phrases, plural nouns, and subject verb agreement and much more. Chinese students struggle in certain sounds and graphemes of the English phonic system. They use pinyin to adapt to the alphabet system. Some of them are considered as “lazy tongues” because in their mother tongue, Chinese, there was no alphabet system until the late 70s. For example, Chinese local students normally have problems with pronunciation. With the same first language system, their grammar problems and pronunciation difficulties would be similar. In a monolingual class, students have common difficulties. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Vickie C. Here I will use my working and study experiences to describe the pros and cons of both monolingual and multilingual classes. Whether monolingual and multilingual, they both have their advantages and disadvantages. The teacher has to remind them to not use their mother tongue constantly during class time. The classes are multilingual classes where students come from different cultures and English is the common language for them to communicate with their teachers and classmates.īy contrast, English classes in local schools and universities in China are considered to be monolingual classes since the students use their first language, Chinese, to communicate. I have been working in international school setting for over 13 years. A monolingual class is a class where all the learners speak the same first language. Multilingual Groups: What You Need To KnowĪ multilingual class is a class where the learners speak a variety of first languages.
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