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Logically, the advantages of children learning English are unique, coupled with so many high-quality resources now.
Why is there still a situation where you can't learn well? Even if we don't talk about our own children, we ourselves used to be very troubled by English when we were in school.
Scholars have studied it, and the reason is very simple.
The common "word + grammar" teaching method is in the set of models
Many people talk about this problem when they talk about "English uselessness".
Nine years of compulsory education at least ensured that we had three or four years to learn English, but only learned:
”How are you? I’m fine thank you and you? ”
Gradually, everyone felt that it was better to waste time to learn that little, than to learn a craft.
Why is there a bug in the classroom that "memorizes words and memorizes grammar"?
Let's look at three sentences:
The brothers of my parents were four. ）
Your marrying me is desired by me. ）
The fact that Harry could be brought by you causes me to be so glad. ）
There is no grammatical error in these three sentences, but as soon as we use Chinese to read them in literal translation, it is awkward.
Because it is a set of "word + grammar" models, we will definitely write it as:
I had four uncles. ）
I want you to marry me. ）
I'm so glad you could bring Harry. ）
If we only learn words and grammar, we will make sentences in such a rigid way.
But when translated literally in our own language, we will find that it is not right.
In addition, there is a lot of "middle ground" between words and grammar.
We've memorized a lot of phrases, take care of, put up with.
But few people will tell us that these phrases are also limited in their use, such as:
Holding one's horses can't use the past tense, "She held one's horses."
Therefore, we can make it clear that for foreign language learning, words and grammar alone are not enough to truly master a language.
The environment is much more important than age
Since 2003, Chen Lu and others at the City University of New York in the United States have launched a three-year follow-up survey on the English learning of 10 native Chinese speakers from China to the United States. When the 10 arrived in the United States, the youngest was 5 years old and the oldest was 16 years old.
Chen Lu hopes to use this survey to find differences in age-induced learning behaviors and learning outcomes.
The first question in the survey was whether the learners preferred to speak English or Chinese.
Three months after arriving in the United States, everyone's answer was in Chinese, but twelve months later:
The answers of children who are younger (5 to 8 years old) who go to the United States have become English;
The answers of the older children (12 to 16 years old) who went to the United States are still Chinese;
The two 9-year-olds in the middle of the age replied that the two languages were similar.
This result may seem to suggest that age determines everything, but it may not be the case because learners of different ages behave differently.
For example, children who go abroad have more English-speaking friends around them, and they usually watch "Batman", "Super Soldier", and "Pokémon", which is no different from American children of the same age.
But children who come to the United States after the age of 12 are surrounded by Chinese-speaking friends and watch Chinese news and movies.
Therefore, whether you like to speak Chinese or English has something to do with how well you adapt to American society and whether you have made English-speaking friends.
It is not so much age that determines the success or failure of foreign language learning, but rather that age only changes the environment in which the second language is acquired, and the environment is the fundamental reason for determining the learning effect.
This is also the same reason why we want our children to like English, we need to show them the original animation and the original picture book.
One can invisibly increase the amount of input, and the other is to enhance the convergence psychology in this process.
In a study of German acquisition by Jürgen Meiser and others at the University of Hamburg in Germany, they compared the group that "resonated with the Germans and made German friends" (the group of integrated aspirations) and the group that "thought it did not matter if they had a bad relationship with the Germans" (the group of isolated aspirations), and found that the former took less time to correctly master German grammar.
After I came out to work, I also contacted many people with good English scores in the college entrance examination, but when you let them watch picture books and listen to the original English animation, they all said that they couldn't do it, let alone communicate with foreigners.
Here I have to say that my aunt, because of the working environment before, thirty-something people were forced to learn English, from not knowing anything to communicating fluently with foreigners to selling things.
Of course, if you ask my aunt any grammar questions, she will certainly not know what to ask, but this does not prevent her from learning and using English.
Coupled with the fact that there are foreigners communicating with her every day, in the process, she gets practice and improve.
Whenever I think about it, I have to sigh that the environmental factor is really strong.
In fact, many people who say that children's English enlightenment cannot continue is a problem.
When the child finds that the language is not used around and has no place to use, the enthusiasm will be much worse than before, and they will not be willing to spend time like before.
At this time, we only need to find small partners for them and find favorite hobbies, which is a good way.
Everyone has their own area of English that they are good at
Although there is very little research in this area, there should be many mothers who feel that my children love to speak English, but the grammar is not good. Some children are very good at reading, but they don't like to talk.
In the field of second language acquisition, few people will study the question of "area of expertise".
Because as soon as you say, "You are not suitable for this", it may immediately extinguish people's enthusiasm for learning.
This kind of speech is discriminatory and biased, but it is also real.
After testing students for adaptability in 1981, Wesche divided the learners into groups with high adaptability in language analysis and strong memory, and then divided each group of students into two groups, using "grammar-centered pedagogy" and "memorization-centered pedagogy" to teach.
The results found that learners who matched the teaching methods and adaptability had better grades and higher motivation to learn.
Another interesting result in the study of adaptability is that there is also a relationship between adaptability and age.
Bridget Harly of the University of Toronto conducted an adaptability test on memory and grammatical analysis for native English speakers who studied French under the immersion pedagogy (the teaching method of teaching all course content in a foreign language). The results showed that the correlation between memory and French grades was significant for students who had adopted this learning method from the first grade of primary school, while the correlation between their grammar analysis ability and French grades was significant for students who had only started to use this method from the seventh grade (equivalent to the first grade of junior high school).
Therefore, we will find that some children love to speak but do not pay much attention to grammar and writing, if at this time we insist that children focus on grammar, it is easy for children to be bored with learning and do not like it.
Then our solution should become, increase the amount of input, listen more and see more, and correct the child's incorrect use method over time.
If you are a child who likes to read, likes to write, and likes grammar, then you forced to speak will also cause a feeling of bad English, but the article can write you beautifully, and the grammar multiple choice questions can be correct at a high rate.
"Listening, speaking, reading and writing" children may only account for a part of it in the end, don't care too much about the child's inability to develop in all directions, because this is a very normal phenomenon.
At last
Learning languages is the most important thing to have a stable state of mind, because in the process of learning, there are too many moments that are easy for people to want to give up.
But we don't need to be too discouraged about this, after all, learning a language is a very complicated and long process.
Think about it, we know the Mandarin we are speaking, we don't have to get a perfect score on the exam to master the language.
In the English enlightenment, we can make children like a language, not hating or rejecting it is enough to let them continue to learn and achieve good results.