Listening first
When children learn their mother tongue, they start with listening. They become familiar with the sounds of the language, accumulate enough listening vocabulary, and then expand to reading and writing skills. The acquisition of English is similar to that of the mother tongue. It is not too late to start with listening and then learn to read and write.
Moreover, English is a pinyin language, and the spelling and pronunciation of words are closely related. Therefore, listening first can lay a solid foundation for the development of other skills later.
Therefore, children's English enlightenment-especially at the entry and early stages-should listen to a lot and listen repeatedly. Get the necessary input from listening to acquire new vocabulary and knowledge.
Interest comes first
Acquire unconsciously
English enlightenment emphasizes acquisition, not learning. The so-called acquisition is to acquire knowledge in a pleasant state and unconsciously.
What are children most interested in? fairy tales? Plane or train? Adventure story? As a parent, you must know the best. Please choose topics that interest your child and materials of appropriate difficulty, so that the child can immerse himself in a state of joy. This way, the absorption efficiency is definitely the highest: it allows the child to not only improve his cognitive level, but also to absorb it imperceptibly. absorb new languages.
The input content must be understandable
Unintelligible sounds are pure noise, and our brains will naturally "filter" them out. Imagine that you are "educated" in the audio of a foreign language (such as Icelandic) that you don't understand at all, and you are read a book written in Icelandic (lack of interactive environment). No matter how long you are "educated", you will not be able to speak it. Icelandic, right?
Similarly, the input given to children must be understandable - in layman's terms, "don't be afraid of translation". Since we cannot provide children with an interactive native language environment, we must accept the fact that English is a foreign language and a second language. We must boldly translate and explain so that children can understand the input content. Sounds that can be understood through translation and explanation are meaningful content for children, so it makes sense to increase the amount of input.
Strictly control the difficulty
Step by step progression
Select input materials for children. The situation that can obtain the highest efficiency is to enable children to master the existing level Basically, you can acquire a small amount of new knowledge and new language every day. The knowledge you have learned and the new knowledge are repeated in a spiral. And this is the significance of using graded reading materials. I have written a lot of articles about graded readers before, because through personal experience, we have truly realized that language teaching experts have helped us prepare meals according to difficulty, and we only need to follow the graded readers to unlock them level by level. As long as you persist, your child's progress will be visible and tangible.
Therefore, in the primary stage of English enlightenment, we must pay attention to the significance of graded reading. It is okay to use several sets as supplements for children who "don't have enough to eat", but at least at the beginning, you must choose a set of excellent main graded reading books and stick to it on this basis. Children can naturally and smoothly improve their learning difficulty and ability in this step-by-step learning process.
Make full use of fragmented time
Multiple means of three-dimensional "baking"
In addition to setting aside a fixed time every day to listen to and read graded books together, parents , you can also play audio with understandable content to your children on the way to school, when traveling in the car, or when your children are playing. At the same time, we can also use resources such as cartoons and mini-games to allow children to learn while having fun and review while having fun. In short, foreign languages ??require a lot of input. When the amount increases, vocabulary is not a problem, pronunciation is not a problem, and spoken language will not be a problem.
Hold on! persist in!
Many parents report that the method seems to be correct, but after persisting for a period of time, it has no effect. I want to say: Dear parents, foreign language is actually the easiest subject, because as long as the method is correct and you stick to it, it will definitely be effective. Every child has silent periods, some long and some short. We need to respect their period of silence. Just like the mother tongue, babies cannot speak for a long time! But we have to believe that the child is actually making progress silently every day, and one day he will make rapid progress as soon as he opens his mouth.
So, as long as the method is appropriate, please continue to persist silently! It’s not that we persevere when we see hope; it’s that we persevere that leads to hope!