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Why is Hong Kong English not considered as a proper form of English?

Out of all the different varieties of English, the earliest varieties of English, namely British and American, still seem to have the highest status in the world and being taken as a model for English as an Second Language (ESL) learners to this very day. However, English has also branched out into other native varieties such as Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, etc, as well as non-native varieties such as Singaporean and Indian. But when English spreads into Asia, it seems as though English can hardly integrate with the Asian languages. As such, Chinese English is often labelled as ‘Chinglish’, Hong Kong English as ‘Honglish’, Japanese English as ‘Japanglish’, and so on. But does that mean these Asian varieties of English can never develop into a nativised form like Singaporean English or Indian English? At present, even though English is an official language of Hong Kong, English does not seem to be a language that Hong Kong people regard as a huge part of their cultural identity, as the daily primary language of use at work and home is Cantonese. So the question is, if our English proficiency has a direct correlation with our association with a particular culture, does that mean Hong Kong English can never become nativised unless we incorporate English culture into our daily lives?

Whenever we are being evaluated of our English proficiencies, we are often judged harshly in each and every way, from grammar to accentuation to conversational tone, style, formality, etc, as English is the international language through which foreigners communicate with us. But what makes Hong Kong English sound so improper that people would not accept it as a proper form of English? First of all, the sound system of Cantonese is fairly limited, and we do not have different forms of a word such as adding ‘ed’ for past tense or ‘s’ for plural, etc. Hence, whenever we make such grammar mistakes, people tend to treat it as improper, as if we are too lazy to add those particles to the ends of those words. But why do these things matter so much if we are still able to get our message across to the listener? After all, it is just a social impression that we generate, and yet, it is something that people judge us by.

Perhaps the first thing that we should ask ourselves is that if language is just an impression, then why does impression matter? For instance, impression is when you go to work and get yourself dressed properly. Impression is when you present yourself well when you first greet somebody. Impression is when you show good table manners when you have a meal with somebody, and so on. So if the secret to learning a language is in generating an impression, then should this be something that we focus more on, rather than the technicalities of speaking a language? This may sound absurd, but if we were to imagine that this were the method of attaining proficiency in a certain variety of English, such as the Queen’s English in the UK, how would it be taught? I can imagine the teacher giving instructions such as “In order to attain this English accent, you have to have your head held high. Real high.”

So if learning a language were entirely abstract, what would it mean for students who are pursuing their English studies in a non-native English speaking country? Would students be hopeless if they learn English from a non-native speaker? For one thing, we must be aware that there are still other countries where English is commonly used, even though the sound system still more or less adheres to that of the local dialect, such as in India and Singapore. So if people from such nations can be proud of their English variety, why can’t we be? We may be criticised in terms of tense and mispronunciation, but if we never use or practice it enough, our form of English can never develop. Nonetheless, the popularity of a language boils down to the extent we associate ourselves with the language’s culture, as language and culture are often interwined. So can English be more than just a workplace language in Hong Kong? If the answer is that language and culture cannot be separated, and that speaking another language will make us become more like someone from another culture, such as following another set of beliefs and value system, then maybe speaking a foreign language can only go so far in becoming a small part of a local language’s culture.

What is the most effective way of learning English as an ESL learner?

As English as a Second language (ESL) learners, we tend to hear a lot from people around us that we should read a lot of English books when we are small, in order to become fluent in English. As the term for ‘studying’ in Chinese is ‘讀書’, which means ‘to read a book’, it undeniably makes a lot of sense that studying should always be revolved around ‘the book’. So even when parents would really like to send their children overseas to study in an English-speaking environment, the Chinese term ‘讀書’ still seems to tell us that we should always stick to a book whenever we study, as if it is the ideal, traditional way of doing it. But if that is the case, does it mean that we should always spend a lot more time reading a book whenever we study? Or is studying so much more than that?

Whenever people ask me why my English seems so fluent or why I have a native English accent, people tend to get the impression that I must have studied English in a foreign country at a very young age, as if I never needed to spend much effort in studying English, like the language was spoon-fed to me entirely. However, even though I had the privilege to study in an English-speaking environment at the age of 7, it actually took me a lot of time for me to develop an interest in books. In fact, it wasn’t until my senior years of high school when I became very interested in reading books as a hobby, such as Sophie’s World and books by Steven Hawkings. As I was brought up in a family where hardly anyone had the privilege to finish school and knew much about education, it just always occurred to me that homework was more of a chore than anything else, even though I always tried my best to finish them. So the question is, if you had the privilege to attain fluency in an English-speaking environment at a young age, does it mean that you can get away with reading books?

While language fluency may be a God-given gift bestowed upon us, language proficiency may still be something that one needs to earn through studying hard, especially by reading books. But at the same time, one can be very proficient in English, while fluency can still be a struggle. So what is it that we should focus more on when we study? First of all, we should know that fluency comes from interacting with people because by definition, it is the ability to speak or write a language well. In other words, it is essential to have fluency in order to communicate well with others. However, a person may still be lacking in proficiency even if they have fluency, if they lack a certain level of vocabulary. So is reading books an essential thing for ESL learners to improve in English? Or is practicing English conversation a better option for developing both fluency and proficiency?

The reality is that all education systems tend to have a ‘good student model’ that expects students to do well on tests and exams. However, in order to avoid rote-learning and to put our knowledge to good practical use, we must constantly stay connected with people around us. Thus, we can have all the proficiency we can attain in a language, but if we do not have adequate fluency, we may still fail to communicate with others. On the other hand, having great fluency to a native level can make a person feel prideful and forget about the importance of learning from books because at times, we may not be immersed in an environment where there are bright minds or teachers who know how to instill wisdom unto their students. So what is the most effective way of learning English as an ESL learner? It may be a difficult question as each and every one of us prefers a different learning style, but if we can look at all the learning styles as a colourful spectrum that is fun and appealing to explore, we may get closer to finding the answer within ourselves.

Should code-mixing be seen a sign of language deficiency or rather… a skill?

As English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, whenever we speak in English and inadvertently switch to speaking in our mother-tongue language, people tend to get the impression that it is as a result of us not being able to express ourselves in English. But what about code-mixing (an academic term that means the speaker inserts words from a foreign language into their mother tongue conversation)? According to education experts, code-mixing is often regarded as a bad habit or even ‘language pollution’ because it is understandably ridiculous that students are not to be encouraged to speak or write in dual languages in tests or exams. However, an interesting phenomenon is that Hong Kong local primary and secondary school students are having such a habit of code-mixing in their Chinese oral exams. So the question is, if the environment of Hong Kong is conducive to code-mixing in the Hong Kong Cantonese language, should code-mixing be promoted as an important characteristic of the language, such that we should even take it further for development?

Most Hong Kong people would say that code-mixing is just a necessity, which is as a result of attaining communicative efficiency in speech. If we take a look at some research papers written by scholars, such as the one here by Patrick Chu from Chinese University of Hong Kong, the “principle of economy” has been shown to be the major reason behind the choice of using English words over Chinese words, due to a lower number of syllables in English. However, there are also cases where both the Chinese word and English word have the same number of syllables, or where the English word has a higher number of syllables than the Chinese counterpart. This means that English has either a strong influence over Chinese or there just isn’t an equivalent word in Chinese that can express the same thing in English. But one thing that has to remain true for code-mixing to happen or exist is that a foreign language must have gained a certain degree of acceptance in the local culture’s dialect.

But why do we not ever consider code-mixing as a legitimate kind of language? First of all, the speaker remains in the same language medium as though nothing much is changed. Secondly, the syntax and grammar adheres to that of the mother-tongue language, making the foreign language appear more of something like a salad dressing, than it is really being integrated with the mother-tongue language. So unless we code-switch inter-sententially (an academic term that means the speaker switches from speaking sentences from their mother tongue language into a foreign language, and then back and forth) and utilise more expressions from the foreign language, the speaker might just appear pretentious when he or she only uses common English expressions for code-mixing, such as “I mean”, “I prefer”, “basically”, “generally”, “I suppose”, etc. In fact, the recent fake ABC phenomenon in Hong Kong is an exemplar of how code-mixing using common expressions in English can be exploited for the sake of displaying a high social status, rather than utilizing the foreign language’s vocabulary to explain a complicated concept, along with inferring a genuine sense of integration with the foreign language’s culture.

So should code-mixing be encouraged for those who lack cultural literacy in a foreign language? No matter what, we should realize that code-mixing should also involve proper pronunciation of English words because unlike loan words, which are borrowed and taken from a foreign language and became fully integrated into the mother tongue language, code-mixing should follow the sound system of the foreign language entirely. Eg. ‘Sha lup’ should be pronounced as ‘shut up’, ‘cervix’ as ‘service’, ‘peen’ as ‘print’, ‘fan’ as ‘friend’, etc. The same applies for English words that are integrated into the Cantonese sound system rather than the original English pronunciation such as ‘tay屎’ (taste), ‘high卡屎’ (high class), ‘穿屎’ (twins), ‘煙科屘唇’ (information), etc. Hence, code-mixing is actually not such an easy skill because the speaker requires a certain degree of literacy in the foreign language in order to attain proper pronunciation of the foreign words. So shouldn’t code-mixing be seen as an improvement or enhancement of your mother tongue language as it requires some skill to be done properly? As for now, people don’t tend to see it that way, but maybe some day when the world is globalised to a much greater extent, they will.

Why does English sound like an upper class language for ESL learners?

When it comes to learning the English language, it seems as though it is not only the difficulty of it that creates a barrier for people, but also there seems to be the notion of social class attached to the language, as many people have varying degrees of proficiency and speak in different tones and accents, generating different social impressions, with some considered as more prestigious than others. Even among our own friends and relatives, we may often hear English words inserted within their conversation, as if uttering them can help display a person’s social class and intellect. But for our mother tongue Chinese language, it seems as though the notion of social class is not so conspicuous to the point where people would want to acquire a certain accent in order to achieve a similar effect. So if English is the only language that provides me the opportunity to enter a world of social hierarchy, does that mean I am never able to raise my social class if I am not able to speak English well?

The reality of speaking English is that most people can already tell a lot about you from the way you speak it, such as where you have lived before, what kind of culture you grew up with, or even what kind of house you live in! But for our native language Chinese, it is not as noticeable because unlike English, we do not have vowels that can sound very different, depending on where a person comes from. For example, the vowel ‘a’ in ‘awesome’ sounds very different in American English than it is pronounced in British English. In fact, the vowels in English are the most difficult to master for ESL learners. However, English does allow people to have a lot of room for mistakes or mispronunciation, which is why most people can still understand you if you only have a basic grasp of English.

But isn’t it really awesome that English is so accommodating that we don’t have to make the effort to speak so standardly most of the time? When foreigners learn our mother tongue language Cantonese, it’s so much more difficult for them because it’s either they get the pronunciations correct or incorrect, with almost no room in between for mistakes that are acceptable. Even for people who are living on the same continent as us, such as people from mainland China, Cantonese is still very difficult for them because of the number of tones in Cantonese – nine compared to four in Mandarin. What makes it even more difficult is that Cantonese has these abrupt consonants at the end of a character called stops (入聲) or checked syllables. In essence, it’s as if we do not much room for outsiders to learn our language, as mispronunciations in Cantonese, such as pronouncing the tone of a character wrong, can result in words having a different meaning, leading to misunderstandings for the listener. So let us imagine for a while that if English were a language like Cantonese, how much more frustrated would we be when we are learning it?

But after all, once we have grown up and got ourselves to working life, it’s extremely difficult to allocate time to learn something unless we have to. Apart from the major factor of difficulty, learning a language also involves a person’s inclination, such as emotional attachment and cultural preferences, as people often find it much easier to talk comfortably and make jokes in their native tongue than in a foreign language. Moreover, language constitutes a huge part of our identity, and even if there are class differences between languages, we may just find it a lot more natural to talk in a language that belongs to us than any other language. In the end, speaking a language is about being true to who we are at heart, and not trying to speak another language just for the sake of displaying to others your social status. But how shall we nurture the young people of our current generation to survive in this world that is becoming increasingly globalized and multicultural? Perhaps we can take it a step at a time, like climbing a ladder…

Why do we need to pay so much attention to the sounds in English as ESL learners?

Why do we need to pay so much attention to the sounds in English as ESL (English as a Second Language) learners? When learning English, it seems as though much emphasis is placed on the spoken form of the language, unlike learning Chinese, where a lot of emphasis is placed on the written form of the language. Especially for those of us who are native Hong Kongers, we would not even study the spoken form of our mother tongue language Cantonese at all, but rather we would spend a lot of time practice writing out every new Chinese character that we learn in our exercise books for homework every week, starting from kindergarten. However, English seems to be very different as there is also the study of phonics and IPA (International Alphabet), where sounds are broken down into smaller categories, such as the English vowel ‘i’ being separated into the long I (i:) sound and the short I (i) sound. So for a word such as ‘income’, we would still need to practice pronouncing it with the short ‘i’ sound instead of the long ‘i’ sound, even though the listener may only hear a slight difference and may not treat it as a mistake at all. So the question is, why do we still need to spend so much time perfecting the sounds in English?

Some people say that learning English is like learning how to play an instrument. With so many different accents to choose from, it’s almost as if we’re picking up a specific instrument to play with when we are practicing English. Even when we are practicing English writing, we still need to stick to the one type of musical language for the specific instrument that we’ve chosen, as each variety of English has its own unique written form. However, English is very interesting because there are many of those who can be incredibly good at speaking but not at writing. Yet, we still tend to admire those who are good at speaking a lot more than those who are good at writing, just like a singer performing on stage draws a lot more immediate attention than the songwriter who wrote the song. But in Chinese, it seems as though people tend to be a lot more impressed by your ability to write. Especially for a Chinese language like Cantonese, where the written language is entirely separate from its spoken form, it requires a lot of time and great dedication to improve your skill in it. So if you tell someone that you know Cantonese, it might just mean you have an ability to speak it.

So if we know that English is so different and that sounds are more important when learning it, why aren’t we making the effort to practice them? Well, perhaps the world is now changing in a way that people don’t tend to communicate as much verbally anymore, as messengers like Whatsapp and WeChat allow people to communicate much more efficiently and conveniently. Even though there are countless resources for learning English on the internet, we are now living in an age where people are not as aware of each other’s speech sounds anymore as most of us prefer texting, compared to the past when there was no internet and people had to communicate face-to-face or by phone call all the time. So for a place like Hong Kong, even though the mother tongue policy has had a huge effect on people’s English proficiencies, people’s native language proficiencies are actually also declining due to people relying more on the internet for communication nowadays. In fact, a recent study has shown that Cantonese people nowadays use a lot less Chinese idioms in expressing themselves than they did in the past because experts believe that such expressions tend to require a real life environment to induce them.

Nevertheless, to us Chinese ESL learners, the sounds of the English language catches our ears because compared to Chinese, English has so many different accents and there can be so much variation even for native English speakers who are living in the same country. While I was studying for a bachelor’s degree in Language and Translation at a university in Hong Kong, there was a subject called Sociolinguistics where I studied the characteristics of different English dialects, which denoted different socioeconomic classes. For example, in New York City, there once was a linguist called Labov who did research on New Yorkers and found out that the ‘r’ pronunciation was a prestigious trait, and that middle and lower classes liked to utter this sound in their dialogue, such as for the phrase ‘fourth floor’, in order to mimic a higher social class. However, in a Chinese community like Hong Kong, even though there has been a recent trend called the ‘Fake ABC’ where the situation is similar, people are mimicking the higher class through a method called ‘code-mixing’. ie. The local university students and graduates in Hong Kong like to mimic American Born Chinese people by incorporating English words into their Cantonese dialogue, in order to sound like they are of a higher social class. But have we taken an appropriate attitude towards learning the sounds of English, apart from imitating them in order to sound cool? 🙂

Why should we ‘immerse’ ourselves in learning English as ESL learners?

Why should we ‘immerse’ ourselves in learning English as ESL (English as a Second Language) learners? The concept of ‘immersion’ may seem strange and foreign to those grew up under the Asian education system, as the traditional way of learning has always been through a cognitive and written approach, like the way we learn Mathematics or Science by memorising facts and figures from textbooks and practicing what we know by doing written exercises. In addition, Chinese itself is quite a cognitive type of language, as all of us spend a lot of time every week practice writing out every new Chinese character that we learn in class in our exercise books, as if knowing the written form of a character is a very important in helping us understand and remember the character, which it is indeed. So the question is, since most of us Chinese ESL learners are so used to the cognitive and written approach of learning, shouldn’t this also be the most suitable method for us in learning English?

When it comes to learning a foreign language, experts say that the best way is through immersion, which means that you will most likely have to place yourself in a foreign country where everyone speaks the language. However, even when we are just practicing speaking English in class, most of us are still very afraid, as if immersion to us is like diving into a pool of water. In addition, immersing ourselves to speak English like a native English speaker may mean that we have to lose our own cultural identity, in order to truly speak and sound like one. After all, as ESL learners, shouldn’t our native language be the primary language that we speak? Also, why should we bother so much about sounding like a native speaker, especially when it means being just like a foreign person?

So as a former ESL learner who has now reached a native level in English, what do I have to say about ‘diving into the pool of water’ when it comes to learning a foreign language? After having seen other ESL learners who have had the same opportunities as me in immersing themselves in an English-speaking environment, it seems as though it is not easy for an ESL learner to bother climbing out of the pool once they have immersed themselves into it. While I was studying Translation at a university in Hong Kong, my classmates used to have commented that I sounded like an ABC when I spoke English, even though I still spoke Cantonese with them daily. But what about those who don’t speak their native language anymore? Not only would they sound like outsiders, but also what would their parents think of them? This may be the one danger that a person needs to be aware of when immersing himself to learn a foreign language.

In linguistics, there is even a theory or hypothesis called Sapir-Whorf, which is that the language that a person speaks determines the way they perceive reality, or the language that one speaks determine the way they think, feel, and act, which means your whole brain could be ‘rewired’ as a result of learning a foreign language. At the greatest extent, a person may even lose touch with the habits, cultural traditions, and world views of their own native language, which could mean that they have become an entirely ‘different’ person. Nonetheless, immersion is the most effective way in learning a foreign language because it trains all four areas of our language capacities – listening, speaking, writing, and reading. But perhaps there is still a way to stay conscious of who we are as a cultural being, which is by keeping our heads out of the water by learning how to swim during the immersion process.

Why do we need to put on our thinking caps as ESL learners?

Why do we need to put on our thinking caps when we are learning English as ESL (English as a Second Language) learners? For many of us ESL learners, it seems as though all kinds of English grammar rules and vocabulary need to be explained to us before our brains can retain a decent memory of them. To understand an English word, especially a long one, it can be very difficult for us, as English is unlike Chinese, which is a pictorial language. For example, how can we know what the word “prosperous” means by just looking at it? Even worse, when we read an English book, it can take us a considerable amount of time to understand what is happening, as we have little or no English language environment to refer to. So the question is, are all of us ESL learners really stuck at relying on our English teacher to explain things to us?

If we look at famous figures like Bruce Lee in the past, we can probably pick up a quote such as “Don’t think, feel.” Even though Bruce Lee was not a linguist, there is certainly some correlation between martial arts and language, as language is also an art. So if we were to apply his learning philosophy to English learning, what would be the result? On one hand, it can still be very difficult to feel what a word means by just looking at it, as English letters are nothing but a bunch of ‘雞腸’ (meaning chicken intestines in Cantonese, like a bunch of meaningless curly lines) to us. But on the other hand, the method of ‘feeling’ to understand a language makes a lot of sense because language is form of human expression. However, without a native English speaking environment, how are we able to feel what a word means, especially when the word is not commonly used, or may only have a slight difference with another word that is much simpler and easier to utter?

Perhaps one way of looking at this is to ask ourselves to ‘put on our eating cap’ when we eat a meal. Even though there may not be such a phrase in English, I would define it as being able to have an appreciation for different kinds of food. For example, when we’re so used to eating a certain type of dish, we would probably want to change to eating another type of dish to develop our taste for food. So if we were to look at English words as different types of dishes, we can probably better satisfy the appetite of our brain if we know how to use different vocabulary for expressing the same meaning in our conversation. Eg. Kind, nice, benevolent, and generous, for describing people of good character. However, we can also lose our appreciation for simpler words if we try to use too much advanced vocabulary all the time, and we can end up sounding pretentious and snobby. Likewise with food, in order to maintain the appreciation for expensive foods, one must also try the cheaper foods.

When it comes to learning a second language, there is certainly a level of difficulty involved. But have we ever thought that the process of learning can be enjoyable as well? We may not be taught such a method of learning while studying under our education systems, as most systems focus on the end goal of doing well in the exams. Even if we attain a decent grade in an exam, our teacher might still say to us that there is still room for improvement. So with other people’s expectations set so high on us all the time, how can we ever truly grasp the joy of learning? Therefore, whenever we face enormous pressure in our studies, we would probably want to put on our eating cap, playing cap, doodling cap, or whatever cap one can think of, in order to escape reality for a while. But let’s not forget that we should put away any irrelevant caps when we are back in study mode…

Why is English pronunciation important for ESL learners?

Why is English pronunciation important for ESL (English as a Second Language) learners? For ESL learners, there seems to be many words that are very difficult to pronounce, and even when we pronounce them correctly, we may not get the word stress on the right syllable in an English word. Eg. Hamburger is a word that Hong Kong children like to pronounce with a stress on the second syllable, instead of the first syllable. However, when I was studying for a bachelor’s degree in Language and Translation in Hong Kong, a linguistics professor once said that certain Chinese style of English are beginning to be accepted due to popular use, such as omitting the ‘s’ in verbs that follow a third person pronoun, and that eventually, ‘Chinese English’ (note: don’t confuse this with Chinglish) will become nativized and have its own set of grammar rules and vocabulary, just like Singaporean English. So the question is, what is the correct model for learning English pronunciation?

To answer this question, I would like to share an experience from my childhood with everyone because surprisingly, I can still recall vividly an English conversation that I had with a Canadian flight attendant on the airplane when I first flew to Canada from Hong Kong at the age of 7. As a child, I was often quite lazy to get things for myself, but I remember there was one time my mom said to me on the airplane that I should order the apple juice by myself. So after she taught me how to order it in English, I said to the flight attendant, “Apple juice with no eyes”, which I mispronounced ‘ice’ as ‘eyes’. Then the flight attendant giggled and said ‘No eyes?’ I didn’t know how to respond to her question and looked absolutely innocent, but then she smiled in a friendly way and passed me the cup of apple juice.

So as you can see, before I even attended school in Canada, I already had the privilege of being corrected in English. Even though the flight attendant corrected my English in a friendly manner, I am pretty sure that pronunciation in this case seemed very important because it could affect the meaning of a word entirely. But what about cases where mispronunciation does not really affect the meaning of a word, such as omitting an ‘s’ at the end of a verb that follows a third person pronoun? This seems to be a mistake that only an English teacher would tell you, but not from someone who you talk to casually in daily life. After all, it’s not such a cute mistake like ‘no eyes’, is it? 🙂

So to what extent should we care about pronunciation in English? If it does not affect the meaning of what I am saying or as long as another person understands what I am saying, should I even care about proper pronunciation? But perhaps, we should think about how we look at foreigners when they speak our native language improperly, especially when they are also Asians, looking just like us, but from a nearby country. The reality is that we are also often quite harsh towards outsiders who speak our native language, as it is the other way around. Therefore, if our native language contains a sound that is also available in the English language, we should definitely make the effort to utter the sound when we pronounce an English word. Otherwise, we can probably pronounce ‘language’ as ‘langage’, which was actually consistently being heard throughout the lectures given by the linguistics professor I met at university…

Why do we easily get affected by our mother-tongue language as ESL learners?

Why do we easily get affected by our mother-tongue language as ESL (English as a Second Language) learners? The short answer to this question is that if we are learning a language spoken by a different ethnic group, it is almost as if we are trying to speak a language of a different species if we were in the animal kingdom. ie. If I were a cat species, how can I get myself to talk like a pig species? However, whenever we come across people like ABC’s (American Born Chinese) who are able to speak English like a native speaker, we can feel like we are not competent enough, as if our own species can even be better than us. So the question is, is it actually a normal phenomenon when our English expressions are being affected by our mother-tongue language?

Throughout history, we have seen how countries have tried to preserve their own local culture by preventing the invasion of foreign values and culture. So if culture and language cannot be separated, what happens when English words try to enter the brain? Well, the brain reacts the same way a country does when it senses a security problem, then drives away all that is associated with foreign culture in it. In other words, if an English word were a foreign person entering the brain to find a place to settle down, the brain would yell out something like “Here comes an intruder!” or “Let’s put him in custody for 3 days!” Then maybe the person (English word) will be executed afterwards.

So from the perspective of culture, the brain may already have a defense mechanism that guards against foreign cultures by making sure that its local culture stays well-intact and remains predominant. So how can we speak English like a foreign person if we do not even have the culture and lifestyles of a foreign person? This is why experts say that the best way to learn a language is through immersing yourself in a real life language environment. Yet, most of us still hit a brick wall in our language learning process because we are so used to the lifestyles and culture from our mother tongue language. We may still continue to improve ourselves in vocabulary knowledge of a foreign language, but never be able to reach the fluency of a foreign language’s native speaker.

So how should we feel about ourselves whenever we leave a hint of our mother tongue language when we speak English? For one thing, our brain has a natural response to different cultures other than our own, and even if we try hard to memorise words, our utterances are nonetheless indicative of where we come from. Even though we still tend to admire native English speakers very much, we should never forget that we also have our own heritage to be proud of and to be admired by foreigners. We may try to sound like native English speakers through various methods such as learning IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), but have we completely forgotten what colour we are on the inside? 🙂

Why is it important to practice spelling English words correctly for ESL learners?

Why is it important to practice spelling English words correctly for ESL (English as a Second Language) learners? With so much technology that can do word corrections automatically for us when we type, will we ever need to learn how to spell words with a pen or pencil anymore? Also, as schools nowadays use the Ipad for student’s homework and even allow students to use laptops during lessons to do classwork, it seems as though it is rendering the learning of English spelling and handwriting useless. So the question is, is there a need to learn how to spell English words with a pen or pencil anymore?

If I started off by saying that “Studies have shown that people with strong spelling skills have better cognition.” or “It has been shown that people with stronger spelling skills are smarter.”, you would probably think that I’m explaining nothing of my own and just copied and pasted the information here from somewhere on the internet. So if I use the analogy of spelling words with a keyboard instead of a pen or pencil is like using a fork compared to using chopsticks for a meal, wouldn’t you think it is so much more vivid? In other words, a person who only knows how to use a fork could be missing out on many things that the person with the chopsticks has. For example, you can have much more control and be able to grab food gently without pinching through them, you can widen your chopsticks for grabbing or delivering much more food into your mouth, you can use the chopsticks like a pair of scissors to cut food into half or proportions, and so much more!

However, since we have transitioned into the Information era, most people now prefer a keyboard instead of a real pen or pencil because the former is just so much more convenient than the latter. With the back button on our keyboard, we can undo things that we’ve written and don’t need an eraser. Or with just the click of a button, we can erase everything on our screen without throwing away paper and being unenvironmentally friendly. So what is the use of stationery anymore? Should we throw them into trash after we graduate from school? While ‘yes’ is most likely the answer in everyone’s minds, I would actually say ‘no’.

So how is the pen or pencil better than a keyboard? The keyboard may be convenient, but it is actually very limited compared to the pen or pencil. With a stroke of the pen or pencil, you can write each and every letter of an English word in any shape and style that you like, but also the way you write each and every word can tell something about your soul, spirit, and character – the living, breathing being inside of you. As you keep on practicing writing with the pen or pencil, you may even find that the spelling of words is more like an art to be appreciated than it is chore, as opposed to using the keyboard that can only jot down words for you in a mechanical way, without transferring a slight imprint of your soul and spirit. Practice writing passages even – you may even begin to realize that there is much more real knowledge to search for in your brain with the pen or pencil than with the keyboard and the computer, or even the internet.