My perspective is a little different because my wife and I have hosted 13
high school exchange students with varying languages and understanding of
English who have lived with us for a year while attending the school I teach
in
All of them have had some exposure to English in their home schools and
"know" that all their instruction here will be in English but they still run
into predictable problems. IF they have basic sentence structure and tenses
down the major problem is additional vocabulary, i.e. what is the thing
called in English when I already know the German word for it. If they don't
know the concept (or could not state the concept) in their native language
then it is not a language problem per se.
we had a Chinese girl last year. When I was discussing the classes I was
scheduling for her she initially complained that she was primarily here to
learn English and thought she should take all English courses. I told her
that all these courses were going to be English courses for her and it would
do her more good to be able to talk about history and math and art and
computers in English than to take literature courses and other courses
within the English department.
For our motivated exchange students they are usually functioning as
honor roll students by Thanksgiving even though they still meet the
occasional misunderstanding.
Jim Braunsdorf
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