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.

Mongolian Spelling, Punctuation and Vocabulary

- The Mongolian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet similar to Russian
- The Mongolian alphabet has 35 letters
- The “direction of writing is from left to right in vertical columns running from top to bottom” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org)
- Mongolian spelling “is generally simple, because most words are spelled like they sound” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org)
- Mongolian vocabulary has “picked up a great many loan words from Old Turkic, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese” (www.transparent.com)
- More modern vocabulary has roots in Russian, Chinese and English
- New words are often “formed by translating foreign terms into new words formed with Mongolian roots” (www.transparent.com)

Mongolian Grammar

-The Mongolian word order is "subject-object-verb." To say, "I am going to the store" in Mongolian would be simply, "I store go” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org)
-There are no definite articles and the language “makes very little distinction between nouns and adjectives” (www.wikipedia.org)
-There are also no prepositions
-Mongolian nouns “have case, meaning that they change form to indicate their role in a sentence” (www.wikipedia.org)
-Eight cases exist including “nominative (marks the subject of a verb), genitive (possessive), dative (indicates the noun to whom something is given),
accusative(marks the direct object of the transitive verb), ablative (marks motion away from something), instrumental (noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action), comitative ( also called associative, it denotes companionship), and directional (indicates motion to a location)” (www.wikipedia.org)
-Mongolian nouns do not have gender
-One distinctive aspect of the Mongolian language is called vowel harmony
-Vowel harmony is “common in Turkish and Manchurian” (www.linguamongolia.co)
-The concept of vowel harmony “means that a word can only contain either back vowels (a, o, u) or front vowels (e, ö, ü), but not both at the same time, with the exception only of a certain limited amount of words” (www.linguamongolia.co)
-“I” is neutral and “can therefore occur in both front and back voweled words”
(www.linguamongolia.co)
-Vowel harmony “affects two sets of letters, γ/q and g/k, with the former being only in back-voweled words and the latter only in front-voweled words”
(www.linguamongolia.co)
-Mongolian is an agglutinative language where “words are often formed from simple roots combined with suffixes that extend or change the meaning” (www.wikipedia.org)

Mongolian Phonology

-The Mongolian language has both long and short vowel sounds, “but long vowel sounds only occur in the first syllable of a word” (www.wikipedia.org)
-There are fourteen vowels in the Mongolian language: seven short and seven long
-The distinction “ between long and short vowels is critical, since their use is
closely tied to the meaning of words: tos is "grease, oil," while toos is "dust” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org)
-The letter “r” is never used to begin a word
-The letter "f" is used only in foreign loan words and is often changed to "p."
-Word pronunciation can be challenging since many Mongolian words are very long,with a lot of vowels
-Letter pronunciation “isn't very difficult, since Mongolian uses sounds that are not unfamiliar to speakers of most other languages” (www.wikipedia.org)
-One difficult sound is “the "h" in Romanized Mongolian (often Romanized as "kh").In the Cyrillic alphabet, this character is written as x and indicates a sound that does not exist in modern English” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org)
-The “kh” sound “survived Old English and in Scottish English ("loch"), and can be found in German, Arabic, Turkish and a number of other modern languages” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org)
-It is similar to the “German pronunciation of "ch" in nacht,like the sound you make when gargling or clearing your throat” (www.koreanhistoryproject.org)

LISTEN TO THIS VIDEO TO HEAR THE PRONUNCIATION OF THE MONGOLIAN LANGUAGE

Special Events in Mongolia

MONGOLIAN HOLIDAYS

New Years Day - January 1st
Tsagaan Tsar (Lunar New Year)- early February depending on phases of the moon
International Woman’s Day - March 8th
Mother and Child Day – June 1
Naadam (National Games) - July 11th - 13th
Independence Day - November 26th

MONGOLIAN BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONS

Birthdays in Mongolia are very important when a child turns one. There is always a congratulation banquet held on this special day. After a person’s first birthday all birthday banquets are held on the first day of the first lunar month, along with the Spring Festival. Due to superstition, there are no banquets for one's 13th, 25th, 37th or 49th birthday. Ages 61, 73 and 85 are extra-special birthdays, and traditional holds that when an adult turns this age, their children must send party invitations to family and friends before the big banquet.




MONGOLIAN CELEBRATIONS

Naadam is the most important celebration in Mongolia. It is a three day event and is known as “the three games of men”.The games are Mongolian wrestling, horseracing and archery and are held throughout the country during the summer holidays.



Tsagaan Tsar is a festival where “On the morning of the New Year traditionally the head of the family goes outside and walks in a direction which is prescribed in a book of Buddhist astrology. During New Years day itself, the children honour their senior relatives. They start with their parents and then following the rules of genealogical seniority the other relatives, presenting them an amount of white food or pastry. White and blue scarves, khadag, are presented to the most honoured" (www.wikipedia.com).