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It is not always easy for people who lives in a country with wide range of dialects to learn a second language, especially a language with totally different source and system. The English education system varies dramatically from the late 1980 till now in China, as the first batch of children who get the chance to touch modern English learning in Chinese schools, I sincerely feel that there’s still fundamental misunderstanding on how to teach basic English for beginners in our schools, I shall share my views about Phonetic teaching as a beginning here. 1.Phonics or international phonetic system. In recent years, the Phonics teaching heat is spread all over the country, it is said the new teaching method is more advanced and scientific compared to the old one. How we teach Phonetics 20 years ago? Students with zero English foundation were taught with the International Phonetic Chart (we call it KK or IPA as well), then we gradually learn how to look up those simple but basic words from dictionary and figure out the pronunciation by its sound-mark (e.g. good /ɡʊd/ ). However, nowadays English learners in China start to abandon this method by using Phonics system directly, I find the system could be less usefully if the student has zero accumulation of vocabulary or reading experience. Students constantly feel confused by the phonics rules because they expect a more standard and 100% stable rule for pronunciation, which clearly the Phonics system cannot provide. As a bilingual teacher we should understand the eagerness and sensitivity of those beginners, they can easily feel frustrated if they feel the rule is too changeable. (this happens more often on Chinese students , they prefer the method with standard textbook and rules for the ease of offline review). Hence, I personally recommend to combine those two methods in which the zero foundation students will be taught with International Phonetic Chart as a foundation of Phonetics then we try phonics as a supplement as their vocabulary volume accumulates. 2.Common mistake of Chinglish pronunciation. As a native language speaker, we should respect the ones who try to communicate even with an accent. The accent can be everywhere but to which extent that we should correct them and should all Chinese or India or Japanese sound like Americans? Per my teaching experience, Chinese students still wish to have a more authentic accent (American or British), they can be highly tolerant if you regularly correct their pronunciation error (here means the true error but not the accent differences). However, some of the Chinglish accent could be quite stubborn, such as the /r/ sound is commonly pronounced as /l/ sound and the plosive sound is constantly ended with an extra /i/ or /ɚ/ sound. What’s more, the intonation and tones can be another serious problem for higher level students. The teaching experience from my side is to encourage students to be more involved in a pure English communication environment, try to mimic the accent and intonation as much as possible or they can just pretend themselves as the speakers, the more creative the method is the more they will gain. The mentioned is just my shallow opinion on Chinese students learning English and what are the unique teaching problems when teaching Chinese students. Hope this version can be further developed as my teaching skill improves.
