Challenges faced by School Students while learning English as a Second language in Sri Lanka

Learning English as a foreign language is a challenging task students have to pay attention to the language skills such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Many students identified that learning English has always been a difficult and tedious process even though, many efforts have been taken to facilitate English language learning, the failure on the part of students to achieve the desired level of proficiency, substantiates the fact there are many challenges that hinder the process of learning English.

Here are some challenges faced by school students while learning English as a second language.

• Lack of English teachers.
• Lack of parents’ support and low education level of parents.
• Lack of motivation and encouragement.
• Less opportunity to practice English outside the classroom
• Speaking is completely ignored in the classroom
• Unavailability of private English classes

Learning English in an effective manner is very important in our country, Sri Lanka. hence, we must find ways to overcome the problems of learning English.

There are so many possible solutions for how to overcome English learning barriers such as,

• Fulfill vacancies of English teachers.
• Add new methods in the learning process
• Get out of from comfort zone.
• Enacting the stories.
• Teaching through conversation
• Teaching through word games.
• Provide creative assignments.
• Help from the multimedia

Successful learning does not only involve the active participation of the students but also the teachers’ role is equally important. Therefore, when recruiting English teachers focus must be given not only to testing their educational qualifications but also to their English proficiency level must be tested.