This is the 1081st original English enlightenment article shared by [Soft Power English]. In the previous article, some people compared education to sowing rice. If you want to achieve a bumper harvest in autumn, you cannot do without the hard work of spring plowing, weeding, fer

This is the 1081st original English enlightenment article shared by [Soft Power English].

written in the previous

Some people compare education to sowing rice. If you want to get a bumper harvest in autumn, you cannot do without the hard work of spring plowing, weeding, fertilizing, pesticide, watering and harvesting. Laziness and slackness in any link will lead to production reduction and even no harvest.

Some people also compare education to planting trees. You must have at least 10 years of patience to harvest a towering tree.

These metaphors are vivid and vivid, but rice only has a one-year life cycle and planting trees only takes 10 years. For a family, educating people can bring you a lifetime of gain.

The Chinese nation has always attached importance to family education . In ancient times, Meng’s mother moved three times, and now there is Liang Qichao Nine sons in a family are all talented. Today, English still occupies a dominant voice in the world. China's development and growth not only requires the support of neighboring countries, but also the understanding of European and American people.

In this context, we still need to learn English well, so that more people can understand China and understand China's national policy for peaceful rise, rather than regard China's development as a threat.

As an organic part of family education, English enlightenment needs to be started from an early age, focusing on breakthroughs in listening and speaking abilities, which is also in line with the laws of children's language development.

01

enlightenment bottleneck

Due to the blessing of advanced technology and rich resources, English enlightenment is much easier now than before. Parents who have poor English foundation can use point reading pen , AI intelligent learning machine, various English enlightenment apps, etc., which can not only improve children's interest in learning English, but also improve their English level.

However, the blessing of technology is not omnipotent. When a child’s English enlightenment reaches a certain stage, he will still encounter various situations. Miao Dad divides these enlightenment bottlenecks into three types based on the real cases he has encountered in these years.

first, listen without saying it.

In the process of English enlightenment, the most common situation is that when parents or (online) foreign teachers communicate with their children in English, the children can either understand it, but do not answer. Either you understand, but answer in Chinese.

This situation needs to be viewed in two ways. First, it may be a normal period of silence in language. According to the theory of the famous American linguist carrashen (Krashen) , children's language development roughly goes through four stages: language silence period , language imitation period, language explosion period and language maturity period.

Carathan found that when children learn their native language, they always go through a "listening" process for about one year, and then they speak the first word.

At this stage, parents should not be anxious. They should continue to work hard, increase the amount of listening input, and wait for the flowers to bloom.

Secondly, it may be that children are enlightened in English late, and are influenced by the strong influence of Chinese, so they are more repulsive to English. This requires parents to use their brains to increase parent-child interactions and cultivate their children's interest in learning English.

second, only words are popping up.

The second feature of the bottleneck period of English enlightenment is that there is no problem with children's listening input, but when they are oral output, they will only jump into individual English words for a long time. When we were young, we only spoke single words, such as: father, mom, milk, eating, etc.

If you have learned Miao Dad’s English Enlightenment TPR flash card, you may occasionally say TPR short sentences for the action. This is already valuable, after all, you can say two or three words.

However, neither a single word nor a TPR action phrase is a coherent four-line expression. Like listening, it is difficult to make substantial breakthroughs without targeted training.

Third, unable to do so.

It is undeniable that in terms of family English enlightenment, many parents also drove ducks to put them on the shelves and crossed the river by feeling the stones. As the child's English level continues to improve, the parents do not continue to recharge, but continue to earn their money. Little do we know that the difficulty of English enlightenment materials now has long reached the difficulty of our junior high school years.

Especially parents of "deaf and dumb English" are increasingly unable to train their children to listen and speak English, and even become a laughing stock for their children.

I have had this situation. I remember that my child had already been familiar with many content and expressions because he watched a lot of English cartoons. I couldn't understand the individual expressions she said, which made my father, who was a majoring in college English, feel ashamed.

02

Bather's experience

In Miao's more than 1,000 original articles on English enlightenment in English, I have shared my family's practical experience many times. Today I mainly share the experience of another experienced father, and use it to help babies in the bottleneck period of enlightenment to break through the fog and find directions.

For the sake of easy reading, I divided this dad’s experience into 3 points to share.

first, sentence pattern accumulation.

Children only know how to jump into words or phrases, but the sentences cannot keep up. They are all sentence patterns, and they cannot improve even if they become foreign teachers. At least 200 sentence patterns are required to accumulate, and grammar is integrated into sentence patterns, including adverbial time, adverbial place and adverbial reason, etc., and add it to oral communication, and the sentences will immediately become longer.

How to accumulate English sentence patterns? Write 3 sentences every day, search online by yourself, and force yourself to take the initiative to learn. 3 sentences are 3 sentence patterns, and there are 90 sentence patterns in one month. It is amazing to teach the child and interact with the child.

Second, scene training.

The second way to deal with the bottleneck period of children's English enlightenment is scenario-based training. The so-called scenario-based training is to cultivate children's habit of using English anytime and anywhere.

Take "Miao Dad English Enlightenment TPR Flash Card" as an example. Any flash card represents a life scene. For example: Brush your teeth. You can extend this topic and turn it into a complete sentence first.

Mom: After eating breakfast, you must brush your teeth. Do you know why? After breakfast, you must brush your teeth. Do you know why?

Child: My teeth will get rotten if I don't do it regularly.

If I brush my teeth regularly, my teeth will rot.

Of course, because the child's cognition is limited, the parents will say that the scenes he is not familiar with will expand them to the scenes he is familiar with and interested in. For example, we saw an old man flying kites with his children, so I asked:

What can u see? What is she doing? Who is she flying kites with?Is she happy?

Ask questions from different angles and guide the child to speak English. Whether the child is right or wrong, it is very important to first cultivate the child's habit of speaking English.

3, theme activity.

Use English to do some thematic activities with your children every day, which is an important and effective way to break through the bottleneck of English listening and speaking. When my child is happiest every day, he plays games with me and does handicrafts.

Theme activities we have played together include:

Pictionary, English riddles, English games--Simon says, English handmade (English crafts), etc.

Among them, you draw me, I guess it is a family of three that mobilizes.The child's mother takes an A4 paper with a drawing of daily necessities or TPR movements, and lifts it over the child's head. I speak and do the movements based on the content of the drawing. The child guesses words, or short sentences based on the English and movements I speak.

Prepare 5 to 10 A4 papers, and after one round is completed, the roles will be exchanged. You can set some small prizes. Children can guess a word and get a small reward.

03

Jewish method

According to the passage, Jewish has this custom: when a child is young, the mother will open the "Bible", drip honey on it, and let the child lick it. This is how Jews use to cultivate children's habit of loving reading since childhood.

Harvard has a documentary "The Learning People", which compares the learning methods of people in different regions:
Asians: Reciting + Calculation Power.
British and Americans: Communication and discussion.
Jews: Question-based learning.

Jewish children come home, and their parents don’t ask: What did you learn today? Instead, ask: What questions did you ask today? They believe that only by thinking deeply can we ask questions.

Be good at thinking and dare to ask questions, and is the source of innovative thinking. Because Asians attach importance to memorization and calculation ability, when they are in English enlightenment, parents still use the traditional educational model to urge their children to memorize words and translate texts, but they lack thinking and asking questions.

Therefore, when helping children break through the bottleneck of listening and speaking in English, we should learn the Jewish question-based learning method, while improving children's language expression ability, stimulate children's curiosity and cultivate children's innovative thinking.

In other words, English enlightenment cannot be limited to the training of language expression skills, but uses language as a tool to train children's courage to ask questions, and even the spirit of daring to challenge authority.

[ Author introduction ] Miao Dad, " Fan Deng New Parents Coach", professional English Enlightenment Education Promoter, headline "Creator of Quality Education Field", Weibo "English Enlightenment Super Talk Host", share family English Enlightenment Knowledge and Experience every day. 27 years of high school English teaching experience, 14 years of practical experience in family English enlightenment education.