Learning English as a Second Language Essay

1036 Words Jan 20th, 2009 5 Pages
English is an international language which is used officially all around the world. Anybody who wants to make connections with the world we live in should learn English. I had English language classes in my secondary and high school years. I also took some private English learning courses throughout summers in my country, Turkey. However, I could not improve my English effectively as all Turkish students in Turkey. I fully agree that English will be learned most efficiently in the boundaries of an English-speaking country not in the home country because of some cases. Therefore, I came here, USA, to learn English better after graduation from my university. First, English is dealt with all the time while staying in an English-speaking …show more content…
Neither was I able to get their points, nor could they understand me. The reasons were that my Turkish English teachers are not the experts in pronunciation and there is no class focusing on speaking at state schools in Turkey. An experiment was performed by Major et al. about speaking and listening problems for international people. Four groups of one hundred listeners, whose native languages were Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and American English, heard brief lectures presented in English by speakers with different native languages and answered questions based on the lectures. The results indicated that both native and nonnative listeners scored significantly lower on listening comprehension tests when they listened to nonnative speakers of English, and Chinese group scored significantly lower when listening to speakers who shared their native language. Only Spanish group did well when they listened to their native speaker (174). This experiment showed that learning English from a nonnative speaker may cause troubles in both listening and speaking parts of English. Additionally, I lacked of ability on word choice for the first couple of months in the USA. For example, I was using adjective “too” for positive circumstances ” instead of “very” or “so”, and I used to say “according to me” instead of “in my