English is so important, how to educate children?

At this year’s National Two Sessions, Mr. Li Guangyu, a representative of the National People’s Congress, suggested that “the college entrance examination cancel the English subject and change the compulsory English courses for primary and secondary school students into elective courses.” The reason is: students spend too much time learning English; The cost is huge; college entrance examination-oriented English learning leads to a serious waste of resources. As soon as this statement came out, many parents immediately agreed and applauded. I don\’t think so. Before I had children, I also thought about this idea and thought that English learning was not important for children. Because in my impression, learning English is a very painful thing, and I don’t want my children to have an unhappy childhood. It was not until I had children that I began to pay attention to parent-child reading and parent-child education, and gradually realized how important learning English well is to broaden children\’s horizons and make them fall in love with learning. There is a sentence in \”English Enlightenment You Can\’t Miss\” by Anne Huahua that particularly touched me: The important thing about parent-child reading is not what to read, nor how many words and syntax they learn, but to make the children like English books and have the desire to learn through reading. Learn about the outside world. This motivation will not only promote children\’s English learning, but also provide children with a broad vision, and vision often determines a child\’s future height more than knowledge. With the development of the Internet, the trend of globalization is increasing day by day. At present, more than 90% of the latest knowledge and information in the world are written in English, and the status of English will only increase from the trend. will weaken. Rich and farsighted parents are trying their best to let their children learn English. For example, Huang Lei’s daughter Duoduo attended a high-priced bilingual kindergarten since she was a child and developed fluent English. At the age of 8, she participated in the translation of the classic picture book \”Letter from Santa Claus\”. At the age of 9, he wrote all-English scripts on his own. If we ordinary people are still cheering for the cancellation of the English subject in the college entrance examination and do not provide English enlightenment to our children as early as possible, then when the children grow up, they will lose more opportunities to change their own destiny, and the gap between them and the rich class will It will also get bigger and bigger. We are afraid of learning English because we think learning English is boring and painful. However, if we can seize the sensitive period of children\’s language learning and master the correct English enlightenment methods, learning English will definitely be a happy thing for children! According to Montessori\’s discussion of the sensitive period of children, children enter the sensitive period of language learning from the age of 1.5 to 2.5 years old. The ability to master language is very strong before the age of 7, but will decline rapidly after the age of 7 (as shown below). Excerpted from a TED video on infant language learning. Of course, this does not mean that adults cannot learn English well. It just means that language learning is most efficient and effective before the age of 7. So how can parents provide English enlightenment education to young children? Combining the theories in Anne Flowers\’ book with my own personal experience, I think the most important thing is to do the following three things: sharpen your ears a lot. Human beings learn language starting from listening. Think about how young children can learn it before they are 3 years old. Being able to master the basic vocabulary of the mother tongue is based on listening to a lot of mother tongue. Therefore, before formally learning English, children must listen to a lot of English. This is to sharpen their ears. One of the most common methods is to listen to childrenA large number of English children\’s songs to cultivate children\’s sense of English rhythm and language. In this regard, the Weesing series and the Mother Goose nursery rhyme series are highly recommended. Children over 3 years old can also watch the original English animations. Here we strongly recommend the four animations Peppa Pig, Maisy, Leepfrog, and Dora. In addition, if parents are good at English, they can also read simple English picture books to their children. For example, \”Goodnight Moon\”, \”The very hungry caterpillar\”, \”Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?\” and \”Goognight Gloria\”. Phonics After listening to English children\’s songs or animations for a while to sharpen our ears, we can start learning Phonics. Phonics (natural phonics) is similar to Chinese Pinyin and is a method for children in the United States and many English-speaking countries to learn their native language. We all know that when learning Chinese characters, after learning Pinyin, even if we encounter a word we don’t know, we can spell out the pronunciation through Pinyin and connect it in sentences and articles, and we will know what it means. The same is true for English. As long as we learn the spelling rules of Phonics, when we see an unknown English word, we can quickly spell out the pronunciation. On the basis of sharpening our ears and combining the context and context, it is not difficult for us to guess the meaning of these English words. Phonics generally follows the learning rule of \”letter sounds – letter combination sounds – words – simple sentences – whole sentences\”. For example, after mastering the common pronunciations of the letters C, A, and T in words, when we see CAT, we can spell out the correct pronunciation of C-A-T. Combined with the foundation of listening, it is easy to know that this is \”cat\” mean. If you still don’t understand, you can watch the following video: sight words high-frequency word Phonics learns vocabulary by combining the three dimensions of pronunciation, spelling and meaning. It can solve 75% of the words in English, and the other 25% of the vocabulary is irregular. The pronunciation does not conform to the spelling rules of Phonics. Therefore, in addition to learning the spelling rules of Phonics, we also need to master another magic weapon: sight words, as the name suggests, are \”words that can be recognized at a glance\”, also called high-frequency words, common words or overall recognition words. Sight words account for up to 75% of children\’s books. Children can read more fluently if they know these high-frequency words. Therefore, before letting your children read on their own, be sure to learn Sight Words. The most common sight words have 220 words, see the table below: In the primary reading, mastering these words means that out of every 10 words, 7-8 are known, and then combined with Phonics and pictures to guess The meaning of the remaining words can roughly understand the content of a book. For example, the familiar picture book The veryhungry caterpillar, in a short paragraph of 101 words, sight words appear 63 times, accounting for a high proportion of 62%. All in all, the most important thing for children to learn English well is to sharpen their ears a lot, learn natural spelling, and learn high-frequency words.