After reading the “ The modern Language Journal “ , I found out myself trying to begin on page one and read through the last page. I felt guilty if I didn’t do so because I was afraid of that I’ll miss something important, so I read every section and try to understand it but there are still a lot of content I can’t really understand .
As an Asia student, the section “ Native and Nonnative Speakers” catches my attention most. From my point of view. Second Language Acquisition means the process during which a person learns another language except his/her mother tongue language. Take myself for example, I’ve been in the USA for a couple of weeks. In my country, I have worked with many native speakers and most of them came form America. I had no particular listening difficulty with my American co-workers in Taiwan. However, in these two weeks, I have difficulty understanding what people are saying. The main difficulty comes from the speaker’s accent and the other difficulty comes from my listening comprehension. Once I had problem with the native speaker’s accent , I had to say “pardon me ” and asked them to slow down . There are significant differences between listening to a native speaker and listening to a non-native speaker talking. There also exist more critical differences between native speakers of American and British English. Particularly for the listener’s backgrounds, such as limited vocabulary, poor English ability and not enough listening practice opportunity will cause more communication problems.
The question I have for the class to consider is how to help non-native speakers improve their English reading, speaking , and listening abilities in an effective way , especially getting used to English speakers with different accents.
