How can you teach your children this way if their English pronunciation is not correct?

Over the years I have been engaged in English enlightenment education, I have heard parents say this most often:

1. Without standard pronunciation and speaking Chinglish, how dare I say that I am good at English? I don’t dare to teach my children by myself. If any sentence is not taught to a standard, the child’s spoken language will be distorted.

2. In my hometown dialect, "n and l" are indistinguishable, and "h and f" are indistinguishable. People laugh at me when I speak Chinese. My English expression is even more incomprehensible to Chinese people and foreigners. How dare I tutor a child.

3. My child thinks my English pronunciation is too crude and doesn’t want to learn from me. I can’t help him.

Nowadays, more and more children speak fluent English, and public account headlines often talk about pronunciation. For example, "The English pronunciation of a child from a celebrity family is as good as that of a native speaker", " When a certain celebrity speaks in English, his pronunciation is too vulgar." These articles often do not pay attention to whether other people's language expression is fluent and authentic, but only focus on pronunciation. As a result, many people now feel that their English is not good because they cannot speak with an elegant London accent or a casual American accent. Then place your wishes on your children, hoping that they can make up for your shortcomings and realize your wishes.

Does poor English pronunciation really mean poor English?

Can’t we communicate if our pronunciation is not standard?

The reason given by many English enlightenment products now is: English is for communication. As long as the communication is smooth, pronunciation is not a problem at all.

Some theories believe that this is a disease that must be treated: poor English pronunciation affects children's future English learning, and it is easy to cause spelling errors due to inaccurate listening. Poor performance in exams will undermine their self-confidence, which will create a vicious cycle in the long run. Children will be less likely to speak English and learn English, and their grades will get worse and worse.

How to define non-standard pronunciation

Having a special accent

When learning English, many people always compare their own pronunciation with standard British pronunciation. The pronunciation is more noble, because the British pronunciation can easily make people think of the royal family and aristocrats, and arouse the knightly gentleman complex in some hearts. In fact, "Royal English", which is related to nobility, is spoken by only about 3 people in the UK.

Let us use the following picture to see what accents there are in English:

English Accent Map, From: Anglotopia.net

So many accents English has its own characteristics. can highlight the personality of the speaker. From this point of view, we don’t need to worry about our inaccurate pronunciation of English.

If this is not enough to make you relax, let’s see, when you muster up the courage to help foreigners in English, add: "Sorry my English is not good." Foreign friends must Will be surprised and say: "Your English is good. That's your Second language". Look, how tolerant our foreign friends are to the English we speak. Even though we have accents, we can still communicate happily.

In fact, we are very tolerant of foreign friends speaking Chinese. When they say "Hello" with a strong foreign accent, will you correct their pronunciation? Some foreign celebrities come to China to participate in events and introduce themselves in Chinese. No matter how bad their Chinese is, everyone will still think, wow! He actually speaks Chinese, so attentive!

It seems that non-standard English pronunciation is not as important as we think. Such non-standards will not affect our communication.

Incorrect meaning

Will non-standard English pronunciation lead to incorrect meaning in English? Let’s first take a look at an example that happened to me: I remember I did a female friend a big favor before. To express her gratitude, she said to me in slightly shy English: “Fank you!” I was confused at that time and thought to myself Why are you still laughing and scolding me? (I can only express my feelings here) But I was embarrassed to ask directly, so I simply said jokingly: "I am a woman too, haha." My friend burst into laughter and I was confused. It took her a long time before she said out of breath, "What I just said was 'Fank you'." In order to let me hear her more clearly, she deliberately slowed down her speech. I said dumbfounded: "It should be Thank you." Now it was my friend's turn to be confused: "We said the same thing."

Just like the friend I just mentioned, she was born in southern Fujian. Due to the lack of native phonemes, she was unable to distinguish the difference between the th sound /θ/ in English and her own /f/ sound. Korean also has this problem. There is no pronunciation of f/f/ in Korean. Interestingly, when Koreans speak English, they will also pronounce f?/f/? as p?/p/. If pronunciation is mixed up, one word will often be spoken as another. This will result in unclear expression of meaning, which will lead to a situation where Chinese people do not understand and foreigners do not understand.

The lack of native phonemes is the root cause of non-standard pronunciation. The non-standard pronunciation caused by the lack of native language factors will affect communication, which is what we need to pay special attention to.

Is it impossible to tutor children in English without the mother tongue factor?

Of course not.

Effective input

Usually we can use English songs and ballads to help children increase effective input, just like when we used Chinese children’s songs for language enlightenment when we were young, the popular rhymes can always make children faster Remember and easy to say. "The linguistic genius of babies". Speaker Patricia Kuhl has experimentally demonstrated that babies around the world can distinguish all sounds in all languages, regardless of the country or language in which they are tested. It can be seen that children's ability to distinguish phonemes is stronger than that of adults. We don't have to worry about the lack of native phonemes having any impact on them, because providing an effective English environment in a timely manner can allow them to easily remember the phonemes contained in English. After your child is relatively familiar with English and is interested in it, try playing a small game of clapping and singing with your child. It is both fun and allows your child to speak English. You can achieve multiple things with one stone, so why not do it.

There are many effective input methods. Parents, you can refer to my other article "Does your child have to surround himself with foreigners to learn English?" 》Find more detailed methods, or you can find the answer from our applet.

Self-improvement

If you parents really feel that your pronunciation is not good and want to improve yourself, become a role model for your children, or become a companion for your children to learn, I am here to tell you Amway's website - FORVO:

This is the world's largest word pronunciation and translation dictionary. Here you can find all languages ??uploaded by native speakers. Here you will find millions of words with native pronunciation in 306 languages. Each user can record the pronunciation of his or her native language or dialect, and the location of your native language will be displayed, supporting multi-person recording. Everyone can learn the corresponding English pronunciation according to their own preferences.

I can also teach you a little method that I have used before. We can search the letter pronunciation and mouth shape comparison pictures on the Internet, and look in the mirror to see whether our mouth shape is the same as the mouth shape in the picture. There are also pronunciation teaching videos online. Parents can let their children act as teachers to help you correct your pronunciation after repeated practice.

After reading this article, I wonder if parents are still struggling with the issue of English pronunciation. I hope that everyone can correctly view the importance of English pronunciation in English learning and create a positive and happy English learning atmosphere in the family. Spend time with your kids in English easily and efficiently.