I carefully summed up the pits that parents often encounter, and found that many problems can be avoided as long as I have enough information and do my homework. Therefore, my team and I decided to start doing this very meaningful thing-to evaluate the mainstream English institutions for children in the market and provide reference for parents to choose institutions. We also gave ourselves a nice name-Truth Jun. ..
In the preparation of the evaluation, we spent a lot of time collecting the list and detailed information of mainstream institutions, classifying and comparing their information, collecting more than 500 parent questionnaires on the Internet, and interviewing key parents.
In the first issue, Papa Xiong evaluated the most concerned online youth 1 for 1 organization VIPKID and whale foreign teachers in small classes. I will compare the two institutions from six dimensions: curriculum, teachers, fixed mode, effect, service and price that parents are most concerned about.
1, course:
What is the curriculum of an institution? First of all, you will have a very intuitive feeling from the courseware.
The course of VIPKID can be said to be completely in line with their slogan "Let children love to learn and dare to speak". The goal of the course is to stimulate children's interest in English and make them dare to speak. Therefore, their courseware is quite "childlike", with bright colors and beautiful pictures, and all kinds of cute cartoon characters are very attractive to children.
In addition, there are many exercises to fill in the blanks with words and sentence patterns, as well as conversation exercises. It can be seen that their teaching and research team has studied many domestic English enlightenment textbooks, because the teaching logic is to read short sentences and ballads, repeat words and sentence patterns with high frequency, and then strengthen the memory of words and sentence patterns through practice. This way of learning can really make children gain something in a 25-minute class. I have seen the "growth video" sent by parents who signed up for VIPKID in the circle of friends. After about 20 classes, the frequency of children's opening in class really increased, and they no longer cooperated with the teacher and became able to follow the words under the guidance of the teacher.
But in the interview with parents, we found some unexpected things.
Parents with children between the ages of 4 and 8 have a good overall evaluation of the course and think it is both interesting and practical. Children prefer to attend classes, and the frequency of expression in class has also become higher;
However, parents of children over 8 years old think that the real class time is only about 15 minutes after deducting the warm-up time and greetings from teachers and children, and the knowledge learned is limited; In the course arrangement, one unit has 12 lessons, and lessons No.5 and 1 1 are test lessons. The learning of new knowledge points is basically arranged in 1 lesson, and lessons 2, 3 and 4 are all about reviewing the knowledge in 1 lesson through exercises and games, thus helping children pass lesson 5. Therefore, after 12 class, the children only learned new knowledge points in two classes.
Compared with the courseware of VIPKID, the courseware of whale foreign teacher training is somewhat monotonous. The background of the courseware is almost uniform blue border with white shading, and there is no redundant red, yellow, green and purple. Cartoon painting is also simple and rough, even for the courseware of children's enlightenment class, it is also a fairly satisfactory PPT courseware.
But if you look at the contents of the courseware carefully, you will find their highlights. The core of whale course content is text inquiry and topic discussion.
For example:
G3B level Unit4 The first class begins with a topic, "What kind of choice is good for us?" Let the children think. Then I entered the study of the text. In formal text learning, there are many open-ended questions related to the theme of the course, and the teacher will guide two students to think and discuss.
This topic-oriented curriculum design is obviously testing children. Parents who participated in the interview generally reported that the whale course was more difficult than other children's English classes they had studied before. A class lasts for 50 minutes, including background introduction and genre analysis for 5 minutes, reading comprehension for 10 minutes, topic discussion for 25 minutes, word learning for 5 minutes and writing practice for 5 minutes. A class contains a lot of information. At this stage of children's first class, in order to obtain the expected learning effect, it is necessary to prepare for the preview in advance and review it in time after class.
VIPKID has a class for 25 minutes, singing or reading children's songs for 5 minutes, reading dialogues or short stories for 10 minutes, and then doing exercises such as filling in the blanks for 5 minutes. The last 5 minutes are handled flexibly according to the child's learning situation. Most of the time in a class is spent on "repetition".