Teach English in Gaodu Zhen - Jincheng Shi

When one pictures a classroom of young children learning English as a foreign language, the basics come to mind: grammar exercise worksheets, new vocabulary on the board, the teacher drilling pronunciation and intonation and leading students into group activities. But when one thinks about the way a child develops their very first language, the exact opposite of this structured learning comes to mind. No child sits down in a classroom setting in order to learn language for the first time—they acquire it organically, by listening to their parents and following the examples of the language heard around them. One important facet of early childhood language learning for nearly all of us is the use of stories. No matter situation they are told in, stories are a vital step for language-learning in the early days of childhood. And although children learning a second language is a completely different situation than a child acquiring their mother tongue, stories have an important role in the language-learning classroom: a conduit for developing receptive skills, acquiring language orally, and exciting children to keep learning by sparking their curiosity about the world and developing their emotional intelligence. The act of storytelling is also a key way to establish report between students and teacher. A teacher who is practiced in storytelling will act more as an entertainer than an instructor, illustrating emotional points and key moments through the use of intonation, pacing, and gesture. Not only is this an excellent way to capture the students’ attention and imagination, but it also establishes the teacher as a positive, exciting role in the classroom and can spur children to want to develop their English more. Storytelling itself is a kind of magic, with children being transported into far-off worlds and allowing them to peer into the minds of wacky characters, but it also is a key tool to ready children to become familiar with the more subtle aspects of language. For example, though it is likely that children will eventually encounter specific, targeted lessons on intonation, stress, and gesture, storytelling is a vehicle that can show all of these important aspects of language without making them feel as though they’re being burdened with another traditional lesson. When they eventually come to have these lessons, the information will not be coming to them for the first time because they will have experienced it organically, in a storytelling setting. Additionally, children don’t have to know every word of a story in order to understand the gist. This is an important realization to come to for the development of receptive skills; before beginning the story, a teacher can pre-teach vocabulary by writing it on the board, and try to illustrate what the children won’t be able to understand through their voice, gestures, and visual aids. This is another way in which what could be a boring, routine listening task becomes a dynamic classroom experience—children are attuned to want to listen to stories, and will not necessarily recognize such an activity as another laborious step down the path of developing their education. However, care must be taken in the selection of stories—no matter what the teacher thinks, if the students aren’t interested in the subject matter of a story, the story will not be effective! It is important that the teacher knows the difficulty level of their students and what their interests are before selecting stories to be read aloud. The use of stories in the English classroom is also an excellent opportunity for cross-cultural exchange, as the teacher can share stories from their childhood in an English-speaking country and the children can respond with favorite stories of theirs from their country. This is another excellent way to establish rapport and trust between students and teachers, as the children will see that even an adult still has more to learn, and is learning from them as the children are learning from their teacher.