Being A Good Second Language Teacher - Essay Example

As for academic studying a foreign language can improve cognitive and critical thinking abilities. Knowledge of a foreign language gives an advantage in every career. Foreign language study provides the ability to gain an understanding of the country's trading partners. Many multinational corporations and nongovernmental organizations need people with foreign language abilities. Learning a language is not just learning about its pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, it is learning to see the world as the other culture sees it.

To study a language well, the teacher must have professional skills and have perfect knowledge in language. Also it is important to involve students in studying and to make the subject interesting. For language teacher is obligatory to be a good trainer in speaking and writing and know how to make his lessons easy for understanding and for learning. In order to have good knowledge in language it is necessary to understand all sciences that are connected with language studying. These are all sciences that are called Linguistics sciences and of course Country study.

Language learners must acquire a language's components such as its sound system, basic lexicon, and grammatical structure, all of which takes time and practice. Students that study modern languages need great opportunities to speak, listen, read, and write in order to develop communicative fluency, understanding of how the language is constructed, and understanding of culturally-appropriate interactions. The most important and the most interesting branch of Linguistics is Communicative Linguistics.

This branch works not only with text but also with its elements and their roles and with their functions. While studying language main practical aims are to speak fluently and to write correctly. It is impossible without learning of sound system (Phonetics). Different groups of languages have different sound systems and very often they differs a much. For example, we can take English language. There are three types of Phonetics: Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds, Auditory Phonetics is the study of the way listeners perceive sounds and Articulatory Phonetics.

Several different combinations of letters can represent one sound. For example, he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea. Also a great role has different factors that have influence on sounds. For example, duration is very important. Let's take duration of the sound [i] in words sea [si:] and see [si] where it gives the meaning to the word.The ways in which sounds and meanings are related is called Semantics. Lexical semantics is concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning of relationships among words, while phrasal semantics is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word.

Semantic properties are the components of meanings of words. For example, the semantic property "human" can be found in many words such as parent, doctor, baby, professor, widow, and aunt. Other semantic properties include animate objects, male, female, countable items and non-countable items. Also Semantics contains such parts as homonyms (different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not be spelled the same (to, two, and too), polysemous