Advantages And Disadvantages Of Learning English As It Is Taught Nowadays

Darwin Valderrama

Advantages and disadvantages of learning English as it is taught nowadays.
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.”
-Henry Brooks Adams-Teachers always have been supposed to be a guide for learners who need their help. In
fact, they have the responsibility to provide lots of knowledge for their students to be better
persons. Becauseof that responsibility, teachers -especially language ones- have to give
students all the tools they will require to enter a new culture in order to fulfill the purpose
above said; that is, teachershave to show learners ‘the social conventions, ideologies,
cultural expectations’, among other aspects ‘of the English-speaking community’ (Llurda
2004). These things have to be accompanied andcomplemented by accurate linguistic
skills. Nevertheless, what may occur if one of those themes is missing?

On one hand, the excessive teaching of a culture, either American or British, is not goodat all. Learning a language from the customs of any country makes the student acquire a
second language but not learn it, inasmuch as the lack of grammar issues does not let him
know the syntacticstructures of what he is communicating. It is important to make sense
about this problem in some cases when a person thinks that travelling to an Englishspeaking country is the best system to speakthat language fast.

On the other hand, what happens if teachers are not qualified to inculcate culture
properly? These kinds of teachers are just able to explain different, but not less important,pieces of language such as linguistics or grammar. Up to this point, a student will enhance
and strengthen his abilities to create a sentence in a correct way or will be able to identify
and use asit should be the phonemes of the language he is learning. The only single
difficulty is the ignorance of pragmatic differences among foreign cultures. To avoid this
disregard, it is necessary to...