Factors that Contribute to Success in Learning English
Keyue Tang
Mr. Harris
There is an increasingly prevalent trend that more and more people learn a second language for purpose of studying or working aboard. However, most learners find it is very difficulty to learn a new language, and sometimes they find, through a long-term hard study, they can’t meet requirements of going abroad. So what are the most important factors that can help people learn a new language? Depending on different personality, experience and background, different people may have different opinions. In my opinion, the most significant factors are a good language learning environment, perseverance and appropriate language learning skills.
A good language learning environment can provide people ideal conditions under which people learned their first language. Normally Chinese students have learned English, through remembering vocabulary and grammars, since they were in junior high school. So when they decide to go to college abroad, it is almost six years for them to use a new language proficiently. However, they still need to go to some professional language schools when they are required to pass some language tests such as IELTS, in case that they fail to meet requirement. The most important reason which leads to the problem is they don’t have a good language learning environment. So what is a good language environment? It is a complex learning environment which is provided the conditions under which people learn their first language. As Coelho points out, teachers are required to provide a language learning which follow students’ current stage, support a great quantities of contextual language, offer opportunities to interact with foreigners, and correct students’ errors immediately(1-2). So it is not the learning environment, such as what Chinese people do, which just includes some vocabulary and reading articles, far beyond people’s current stage, and has few listening and speaking practice, even no interaction with the language users in the classroom. As a result, learners just spend most time on doing inefficient learning, and can’t master a new language well. So providing a good language learning environment can help people learn effectively and successfully.
Moreover, perseverance can motive learners until they succeed. Many students, for instance, feel it is hard to learn English well because they are lack of language learning environment. However, when they go abroad and enroll in English-language private school in an English-speaking country, they feel it is not much easier to study abroad than to study domestically because there are still many difficulties needed to face, such as cultural differences between their own language and English, when studying deeper. Finally, they give up. So it is very important to study with perseverance. It can create a constant purpose toward language learning, then motive people and help people overcome difficulties until they succeed. In addition, learning a second language is a long-term process. If people insist on it every day, people will master it one day. But if people just study it for a short time and then give up, people will gain nothing in the end. Therefore people should stick to learn a new language every day and make a timetable to manage daily learning tasks and targets in order to motive them until they learn it well. So people need to be patient and persistent for language learning.