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the learning process and accessible to the components and parts of the language in a
virtual classroom.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
Based on the outcome of the teaching experience with these particular
Chinese learners, it was demonstrated that these learners often face difficulties
learning English as a foreign language due to the different dialects they can speak,
distance environment as well as the type of activities implemented in class which are
most likely to work best with upper intermediate and advanced learners only.
As an illustration, the main areas of difficulty a Chinese learner often faces are;
sounds, vowel problems like ship/sheep, word pairs like chick/cheek, tongue twisters
which were concentrated on in some of the units to improve the learners’
pronunciation of letters, words and sentences to make their English sound more
natural and comprehensible to the listener. Not only that, but they also encounter
difficulties with consonant clusters since Chinese lack initial consonant clusters,
therefore, learners pronounce words like small /smɑːl/ as simall /sɪmɑːl/.
Consequently, stress can be another obstacle for these learners as well as intonation
regarding the fact that they can sound a little flat sometimes due to their low self-
esteem in speaking the target language which can affect the meaning of what they are
trying to say. Moreover, it was emphasized that Communicative Language Teaching
(CLT), as well as some of the elements of Task-Based Instruction (TBI), in terms of
producing authentic language, would work best with these learners regarding the fact
that both languages are entirely different when it comes to the flow of speech and
especially writing, therefore, becomes very frustrating and difficult for these learners
to produce and master the language. It was also evident that Chinese is considered to