Methods for children to learn English in primary school

A friend left a message in the background: My younger brother is in 6th grade and his English is very poor. I don’t know how to tutor him? At the primary school stage, children are not under great pressure to learn subjects, have relatively sufficient time, and can combine English with real life. To truly learn through play, you can start with the following five steps. The first step: Listen to a lot of English sounds in daily life, so that children can hear a lot of English sounds, which is to help children create an immersive English world. Let children absorb English unconsciously in life and build up their perception of the English language. Just like children learning their mother tongue, before they can speak it, they need to hear a lot of the sounds of this language, and it is the most common and commonly used sound in life. To create a living environment for hearing English, the sooner you start, the better. Regarding what materials to listen to, you need to pay attention to two points: 1. Children should be interested: What cartoons do children usually like to watch and what aspects are they interested in? Find the English version of the corresponding content, such as English cartoons, animations, etc., so that children can Starting from your interest, you can gradually create your own English world. 2. Comprehensible input: that is, immersive English content for children to hear and see. It should not be too difficult, otherwise all the sounds they hear will be noise, and the effect will definitely not be good. Of course, it is not required that children can understand 100% of the content. As long as the children can combine the picture and sound effects in the process of listening and watching, they can understand more than 70%. The content recommended here is, of course, animations and picture books. Find the corresponding sound and picture materials according to the points of interest of the children, listen and watch them every day, and form a habit. Step 2: Speak. Speak here does not require the child to be able to speak English freely, as long as the child is willing to follow the animation and make English sounds. Even if what you say is wrong, even if you don\’t know him, it doesn\’t matter, just speak. Just like our children learning their mother tongue, in the beginning they only need to imitate some sounds. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know what they are talking about and they don’t know the words. The key to this step is to speak English. As for what to say and how you say it, you can temporarily ignore it. There is no need to pay too much attention to the child\’s pronunciation, let alone correct the grammar. It is important to encourage children to imitate the English sounds they hear every day. Generally speaking, only the first step can help children create an immersive English environment. With a lot of listening every day, it is natural for children to speak. Step 3: Phonics Phonics refers to the way in which words are pronounced according to their spelling rules. In phonics, each letter or letter combination has its own specific pronunciation rules according to which the word can be pronounced accurately. This has the same logic as children learning Chinese Pinyin, paving the way for subsequent reading. Children have accumulated a lot of English sound impressions through a lot of listening and speaking in the early stage. After learning phonics, they can turn these sounds into words they can recognize. From listening and watching, gradually transition to reading text. Step 4: Read a lot. At this stage, children can start reading English picture books that they are interested in. The reading here is different from watching animations or even picture books. This is where the child actually picks up a book and starts reading. When encountering new words, he or she can use their own words.Then use the spelling rules to decode and solve the problem of new words. And with the improvement of ability, there will be requirements for reading materials and understanding of information, which require reading speed, depth and breadth. Reading speed is easy to understand, which means you can read faster and faster; depth means understanding more and more deeply, knowing many meanings behind the author; breadth means reading continuously and exploring more possibilities. Step 5: Write. With the accumulation and precipitation in the previous four steps, you can try to write a diary in English and write out what you want to say in English. You do not seek to write more accurately, but you need to practice writing. The key is to do the first four steps well, without interruption, and continue in daily life and study, and then do some writing exercises and combine input and output. Of course, there are many ways to write, it can be a diary, it can be English text message communication between children and parents, or other methods. No need to set limits, just trust your kids. In short, through the above five steps, we can help primary school students create a good English learning environment and improve their English proficiency. In this process, it is necessary to pay attention to children\’s interests and perceptual abilities to make English learning more natural and easy.