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1 Introduction
1.1 Background
As is known to all, globalization has not only promoted the flow of factors like capital and technology but also motivated the development and learning of foreign languages. It is quite essential to learn a foreign language in order to seize the initiative in cross-cultural communication. Among various foreign languages, English functions as a common international language in the trend of globalization. In China, people of all ages have been learning English to adapt themselves to the trend. Even children are encouraged to learn English in their spare time. English teachers for children are trained to improve their teaching ability since children cannot focus their attention on learning in spite of their vast ability to absorb new knowledge. In order to enhance children’s memory of new vocabularies, English teachers for children always use various kinds of teaching methods like game teaching method and music teaching method to present new vocabularies to children in a vivid and lively way.
1.2 Significance of this study
Teaching vocabulary in English, as one of the teaching methods, aims at cultivating children’s ability of using new vocabularies through creating a pure English listening environment. Nowadays, a variety of English training institutions recruit students under the slogan of all-English teaching, providing pure language learning environment for your children. Indeed, children’s listening and oral proficiency can be improved through a pure English teaching environment which can help children learn more from less. However, there are still some disadvantages in such teaching method. Due to children’s limited vocabulary, sometimes they cannot completely understand the new knowledge. This will easily cause their confusion about knowledge. What’s worse, the quality of English classes cannot be guaranteed. Should the method of teaching in English be applied to children’s English learning? This paper will focus on the analysis of advantages and disadvantages of teaching in English in children’s
English vocabulary study on the basis of an experiment. It aims at finding the appropriate teaching method for children’s English vocabulary study to improve the quality of children’s English classes.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Advantages of Teaching in English
According to Gao Yi (2011), English is a necessary and fundamental course. When learning a foreign language, people always listen and speak before they can read and write. For language learners, a good language acquisition environment is an essential condition to learn a second language. In addition, English thinking is the basis of expressing oneself in fluent English (Cook, 2002). Under the environment of teaching in English, students can learn to express themselves in English thinking mode. As an important teaching method, teaching in English provides students with rich opportunities to listen and speak so that students can gradually develop their language sense (Richards, 2005). After developing language sense, language learners can blurt out English conversations without thinking about complex structure and sentences. This is the process of perfecting English thinking mode which can strengthen students’ memory and enrich their imagination (Pecci, 2000). For English learners, there is another thinking mode named bilingual thinking mode. Bilingual thinking mode consists of Chinese thinking system and English thinking system, which are functionally coordinate (Chen, 2009). With bilingual thinking mode, English learners do not need complex translation system while speaking the target language. For children, their Chinese thinking system is deficient, thus a translation system will add more difficulty to their English learning. They tend to understand English in a simple way which is typically represented by bilingual thinking mode.