Programming Supports and Solutions for Teachers of Mongolian ESL Students

- One way for Mongolian ELLs to practice intonation is to encourage them to record themselves asking a question, and then record a native English speaker asking the same question – it often helps ESL students to hear a recording of what they should do
- To help Mongolian ESL students remember the word order of English sentences, multilingual charts and posters around the classroom are constant reminders of how a sentence should be constructed – if a student gets confused, they can look at the wall and see the correct way
- Multilingual charts and diagrams are also a great way to help Mongolian ESL students remember articles and prepositions – It can be fun to assign the making of a poster that depicts various prepositions to ESL students, and then proudly display these posters
- Allowing ESL students to write in both languages is a great idea that will certainly help Mongolian students with a limited academic background improve skills in both languages
- A fun way to teach Mongolian ESL students the conditional tense is to give them a fake hundred dollar bill and ask them what they would buy – daily activities and support will help them to learn this tense
- To encourage Mongolian ESL students to be more talkative, take baby steps in class, and make sure they feel relaxed in the classroom by providing them with the option of speaking – never force them to speak
- Encourage quiet Mongolian students to work with other students cooperatively so they become accustomed to working with others in class
- Encourage the class to do research on various superstitions from around the world, and explain that many people accept them as truth
- Allow Mongolian students with a limited educational background to use a dictionary, to develop their first language along with English
- Contact students’ parents and brief them on the similarities and differences between Mongolian and Canadian culture
- Have Mongolian students make a poster board of important Mongolian figures and landmarks, and proudly display it to let the class know that all cultures are beautiful and accepted in the classroom

Aspects of Mongolian Culture that May Challenge an ESL Learner

I can anticipate many areas of Mongolian culture that may cause challenges/conflicts for an ESL/ELD learner, especially in the areas of religion, gender roles, hospitality, and superstitions. I can speak from personal experience because in my last teaching semester I had two Mongolian students in my class. These two students had a difficult time acclimatizing to Canadian culture because like many Mongolians, these two students were very quiet people. When they came to Canada, they realized that everyone was always looking at them, expecting them to say something. This introversion can be extremely challenging for Mongolian ESL students because it might hinder their acculturation process and prevent them from making friends in school. This reserved demeanor may also hinder the language acquisition progress of many Mongolian ELLs who are too shy to take risks with oral communication. The nomadic way of life that many Mongolians are used to may also pose a challenge for ESL learners because many Mongolian children are taken out of school early by their parents to help farm, and never learn to read. Being an ESL student without any previous academic life could certainly be a difficult adjustment.
Mongolian ESL students may also be challenged by their unique belief in superstitions. These students may face ridicule and a lack of understanding from fellow students when practicing superstitious actions like never stepping on the threshold of someone else’s house, or believing that evil will follow when milk is spilled. Facing alienation due to differing cultural backgrounds will certainly be detrimental to an ESL student’s educational progress. Mongolian students may also be challenged by their differing practices regarding hospitality because in Mongolia, if a friend invites another out to dinner, or to the movies, they believe that it is their duty to pay. In Canada, however, this is not usually the case, and a Mongolian ESL student could face embarrassment when they go out to dinner with friends without any money.
Mongolian ESL students may have trouble adjusting to opposing beliefs regarding gender roles, and ideas about women. It is common for Mongolian men to believe that women have smaller brains, and are therefore less intelligent than men are. In fact, I ran into some hostility at the beginning of the school year with my two Mongolian students because they did not want their teacher to be a woman. Mongolian students may have a difficult time working in classroom cooperative groups with females, and this could result in unexpected behaviour.
Because many Mongolians are Lamastic Buddhists, ESL students may have a difficult time practising their religion in Canada due to a lack of resources. It could be very difficult for an ESL student to find a Buddhist temple, or a Lama in a time of need. Many Canadian students are also unfamiliar with Eastern religions, and as a result might reject a Mongolian ESL student because of his/her religion. It is unjust and just plain awful when ESL students must face rejection and alienation when they are in a new country, learning a new language.

Some Difficulties that Mongolian Students Might Have Learning English

I can anticipate a few areas of difficulty that a Mongolian ESL student might have. To begin with, a Mongolian student learning English might find the rules of grammar challenging due to the drastic differences between Mongolian grammar and English grammar. Many theorists claim that Mongolian grammar is much easier to learn than English grammar. For starters, in Mongolian, “there are only three tenses (past, present, and future) as opposed to the past, present, future and conditional tenses of English” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org). This difference between the two languages could be a challenge for a Mongolian ESL student because it means that they would have to learn the conditional tense, which is complex and requires higher order thinking skills. Mongolian grammar is also absent of prepositions and articles, “making sentence structure much simpler than English” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org). Mongolian students are sure to struggle with the two foreign concepts of prepositions and articles because there are a lot of “rules” to learn, and almost as many exceptions to the rule that cause confusion. In my experience as an educator, these are the two areas that many ESL students find the most difficult to master.
Mongolian ESL students may also become confused by the subject-verb-object word order of English because Mongolian syntax reverses the order with subject-object-verb being correct. Mongolian students learning English may also have trouble with writing and spelling because they are required to learn a completely new alphabet, a new way of writing. Pronunciation may also be a challenge to Mongolians learning English because “pronunciation differs so radically from the Indo-European languages partly because some Mongolian words are very long” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org). The usage of double vowels is present in both Mongolian and English, but Mongolian ESL students may have difficulty pronouncing words with double vowels that require one “to pronounce the vowels as separate syllables” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org) as in words like cooperation, skiing, continuum, and radii. Mongolian students might be inclined to pronounce words like these with fewer syllables because when a Mongolian word has a double vowel, it means that the vowel is simply stressed, not separated into two syllables.
One final difficulty that may arise for a Mongolian student learning English relates to the differences in intonation between the two languages. Mongolians generally speak in an even tone without inflection. When speaking English, however, there are many instances that a person’s voice should rise or fall in pitch. It may be difficult for Mongolian ELLs to get accustomed to raising their pitch at the end of a question, as a result.