Academicia a n I n t e r n a t I o n a L

PREVIOUS DISADVANTAGES OF TEACHING ENGLISH 
In the prior studies by Australian scholars, different Asian students studying in Australia were 
found to have gained improper English in their home countries due to many reasons as follows 
(Sawir, 2005): 

Lessons were mainly devoted to English Grammar rather than communicative competence; 

The activities in the classroom were not balanced 
–
most of the tasks covered grammar and 
writing skills; 

There were few who could speak English freely even among teachers; 

There was little or no opportunity to use English outside the classroom; 

Language was perceived as a subject not a live language which is constantly changing; 

Too much grammatical awareness. 
These issues in Asian countries caused serious problems with socialization and academic success 
in the English speaking environment. The reason is that their listening skills were inadequate to 
understand native users of English, including peers and professors at universities. Also they had 
academic writing skill shortages for not having practiced much in the country of origin. Oral 
communications impacted on participation negatively as most of the students interviewed were 
ashamed of their own speaking skills and hesitant about making some mistake. Furthermore, 
these all were exacerbated by a huge need to read additionally, which is time-consuming, since 
the students were having difficulties in understanding what they listened (Sawir, 2005).
Thus international students all over the world were having unsolved difficulties or problems (for 
example Robertson et el., 2000; Hellsten, 2002; Bayley et al., 2002; Borland and Pearce, 2002; 
Mulligan and Kirkpatrick, 2000; Hellsten and Prescott, 2002; Wong, 2004), which were the 
major language problems according to Robertson et al. (2000). While the research by Wong 
(2004) which used interviews with international students showed that most students were 
straining to become active learners, mostly due to didactic and teacher-centered environment 
with less classroom conversation in their home countries, Hellsten (2002) points out that this 
difficulty was derived from strong focus on grammar, which as Hellsten and Prescott (2004) 
concludes caused them to feel inadequate in spoken English, which led to passivity in the 

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ISSN: 2249-7137 Vol. 10 Issue 2, February 2020 Impact Factor: SJIF 2020 = 7.13 
South Asian Academic Research Journals 
http://www.saarj.com
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classroom. However, these studies provide valuable data by describing the problems, origins of 
those problems were successfully linked to prior learning by Sawir (2005)
While factors influencing second language acquisition were found to be social context of 
learning, cultural beliefs, status of the target language, motivation, beliefs and anxiety by 
Ramirez (1995) as well as Judith Rochecouste and her team members in the final report of 2010 
(Addressing the ongoing English language growth of international students) and , previous 
studies also state that language and learning process factors (such as language distance, native 
language proficiency, diverse needs and goals, role models, support, learning styles, motivation 
and classroom interaction) were found to the success in learning a language (Walqui et al., 
2000).