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English learners can find help in categories such as grammar, reading, listening, speaking and more . . .

• → https://www.thoughtco.com/esl-4133095 ⇐

• ¶   KB interviewed

  (Ana) Hi everybody, this is Ana Luiza of inglesonline.com.br – today I’m talking to Kenneth Beare, the guide of English as a second language at About.com. To access the ESL guide, go to esl.about.com. So, hi Ken! Thanks again for agreeing to give an interview…

  (Ken) Hi.    (Ana) … to Inglês Online.    (Ken) Alright! My pleasure.

  (Ana) Alright. So Ken, let’s get started. Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started in the ESL field, how it all progressed, and how you ended up doing ESL at About.com.

  (Ken) OK! Well… I didn’t start off to become an ESL teacher, but I did study a lot of languages. I studied to become an opera singer. For a matter of fact, I sang for about… professionally for about ten, fifteen years and mostly in Germany but also Austria…

  (Ana) Wow…

  (Ken) Yeah, yeah… but as you probably know, the opera business is, is… you know, it’s like any business in the Arts, it’s very difficult… And between gigs, as we called them, which mean, you know, short, a month, jobs at a given opera house, I began teaching English as a second language to, you know, help pay the rent.

  So, that’s kind of how I got into that. So I was teaching English on and off, mostly in Germany but also in New York City for about ten, fifteen years between my singing engagements. And also I was going to Conservatory, I got a second degree in Germany.

  So, anyway, long story short, eventually… you know, I was married, had a child and decided I had to get real about making a living… So I, I took a TESOL diploma from Trinity College in London, while I was teaching in Italy. My wife and I had moved down to Italy, to Livorno, which is in Tuscany, it’s just south of Piza, and I… so I, so I sort of polished up my qualifications and dug into the actual teaching profession a bit more.

  About the same time, I became interested in using computers, and this is about 1996 I guess, so back in the pre-historic days of the internet. And I was lucky enough to come across an advertisement for a company called (…) They were looking for a guide to English as a second language. And so I applied for the job, jumped through the hoops, and also because I was transitioning in my career to focus more on English teaching I took it very seriously.

  And things started there, and started off slow, but, you know, as with most things on the internet, there was exponential growth and that’s kind of how it landed. And during the course of creating materials I started also working for companies creating courses for CD-ROM, mobile phone and DVD, so I became much more focused on producing content. You know, sort of based on the lessons I had been teaching for all those years.

  (Ana) Wow, that’s a great story, I bet that’s a little known fact about you, right? An opera singer turned ESL professional.

  (Ken) There are a number of us out there…

  (Ana) Really? OK. Alright. Well, so you had a lot of experience, of international experience, right?

  (Ken) Yes, that’s right. I spent over twenty years in Europe.

  (Ana) And in your experience, which area of English presents the most difficulty for learners?

  (Ken) Well, to be perfectly honest, I think most learners have the most difficulty when they have to use English with native speakers and… that doesn’t mean their English teacher who might be a native speaker in class, that means when they visit an English-speaking country and they’re confronted with native speakers for the first time.

  It is so frustrating to have worked so hard at your English and then be confronted with people who speak in idiomatic English… And you can study all the idioms you want, but when someone’s speaking quickly, and they’re speaking in idioms, you know, talking baseball basically, in the United States… that can be extemely frustrating for students and it’s…

  A number of students told me over the year and I’ve noticed this repeatedly, they really have no problems communicating in English, or few will have problems communicating in English with other non-native speakers of English. It’s when they speak to the Brits or the Americans or the Australians that life becomes very difficult.

  (Ana) And Ken, is that because of the natural speed of the native speech, or because of the idiomatic expressions that only Americans know, or, I don’t know, the new words that appear every day?…

  (Ken) Yeah, I think that’s also due to the fact – certainly in the United States – that we… unfortunately, tend to butcher the grammar… that people…

  (Ana) I think we do that everywhere…

  (Ken) Yeah, yeah, I’m sure it’s the same in Portuguese, I mean, if you speak the language as a native, you do things also orally, you know, you break off,.. As you know, English is a very… it’s called… what is it? Time- stressed language, which, in other words means that we, you know, really focus on the content words and sort of skip over the pronouns, the helping verbs, etc.

  So for people who grow up speaking a syllabic language, for example Italian, and I’m not sure but maybe also Portuguese, where each syllable, even if it’s glossed over, is pronounced correctly… That can be very hard for the ear because they’re used to seeing the language written and expecting that… you know, they’ve learned the pronunciation rules now, and when they hear people speaking, they’re glossing over that, like [makes funny noise].

  That’s very frustrating and I’ve found over the years that just… It’s interesting on two fronts, as far as comprehension is concerned but also as far as pronunciation is concerned, and this is also a big problem… a challenge, rather, not a problem, is that once students become aware of this… this, you know, time-stressed nature of English, that you basically gloss over things and you get them to exaggerate that, their pronunciation improves immediately.

  Because they’re not worried about pronouncing every single word, but rather they’re focusing on the content words as we naturally do in

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