Wide context

Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

/^t/Because of Hollywood movies and the popular nature of English, people are sometimes overconfident in their knowledge of the language. They think that because they understand slightly, that it will be simple to understand English fully with little study. However, people quickly find one surprising paradox. The enormous popularity of English has resulted in a gradual deterioration of the quality of the language as spoken by foreigners. Most people are able to communicate but the actual knowledge of the language is far from perfect. Moreover, the standard of teaching is drastically low in remote parts of the world mainly because of the lack of qualified teachers to meet the demands of the market. It generally seems that secondary school teachers do not do their jobs properly. They do not follow the approach to English teaching which is taught to them in training colleges, in-service courses, and which is embodied in the prescribed textbooks. The assumption is that if only teachers could be persuaded to put this approach into practice then the problem would disappear.