Some analogical methods of teaching English as a second foreign language

Abstract

To teach English as a second foreign language at university levels provides the educator or professor an excellent occasion to compare the first and second languages by a series of analogical activities that not only highlight the similar forms and structures of them, but more important still, oblige students to comprehend these forms and structures without having either to rely on or depend upon their mother tongue or apprehend them through the prism of their own. In this article are compared Turkish, French and Chinese forms and structures with English through sets of analogical activities that I prepared and applied in classrooms with my Russian students studying the aforesaid languages at the University of Academgorodok near Novosibirsk in Siberia. It was my methodical experiment to bring together English/Turkish, English/French and English/Chinese as interrelated objects of study; to put into relief the interpenetrating analogical elements that these languages possess as a pedagogical approach to them in spite of their very different language families and distinctive structural and morphological features.