From the study of children's growth and children's first and second language development, it is found that there are certain laws and some crucial factors in the above development process. Therefore, these factors must always be kept in mind when teaching children English. Some principles to be discussed in this paper may be just common sense, or have been practiced by some teachers in class. Then, it also shows that these principles can not be ignored in children's English teaching. Children's ability before they start learning English is often ignored or underestimated. In fact, they already have some life experience, have their own world, are good at understanding things around them in their own way, and have learned at least one language. In addition, their enthusiasm for learning is usually very high. The level of children's cognitive development depends not only on age, but also on external stimuli that support and stimulate this development. When children's potential and existing abilities are ignored and only regarded as "empty jars", children's English teaching will be in a dilemma. The reason for this teaching dilemma is that designing tasks or activities is only from the perspective of adults and does not reflect the world of children. This situation makes it impossible for children to get close to these tasks and activities, but it doesn't mean that they can't complete such activities. Then, the challenge for teachers is that they must go into children's world and design tasks and activities suitable for children's level.
According to Gardner, people have seven different or intersecting intelligences, namely, linguistic intelligence, mathematical logic intelligence, visual/spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, body movement intelligence, interpersonal intelligence and self-intelligence. Therefore, the design of children's English classroom activities must fully consider each child's intellectual advantages, so that each child can fully participate and make continuous progress. In addition to intellectual factors, the teaching materials and auxiliary materials used in children's English teaching must achieve an appropriate balance in vision, hearing and kinesthetic sense, so that children with different advantages have the opportunity to show their strengths.
Due to the limitation of children's cognitive level, they may not realize that language is a system. Therefore, English classroom teaching needs to use topics to form the language environment of the target language. These topics should be meaningful, interesting and participatory, and should also be within the scope of children's life experience and thinking. Learning is an interactive process. When talking about children's general development, Piaget believes that the quality and quantity of social communication children accept will greatly affect their own growth and development. Vygotsky's zpd:zoneofproximaldevelopment Theory (zpd) also emphasizes the importance of high-quality interaction, such as interaction under the guidance of adults or interaction with peers who are better than themselves. Bruner compares this zpd theory to scaffolding, which shows that when children are building their own knowledge and ability, the guidance and help of others are as essential as scaffolding. Halliday also supports the idea of interaction. He believes: "The learning of mother tongue and the second and third languages is a cognitive process as well as an interactive process. Its manifestation is the constant communication between self and others. "
Communicative language teaching method takes understanding and transmitting information as its core idea, and its importance even exceeds the accuracy of language. The meaning of language is not immutable. In communication with others, we will constantly re-understand and update the meaning of language. Vygotsky once put forward a "cultural toolbox". He believes that the concept and meaning of a child's mother tongue comes from the culture to which he belongs. Different cultural backgrounds lead to different language meanings. Wells believes that cooperative dialogue can help children acquire the meaning of language and reach a common understanding. Fisher also emphasized the importance of conversation in the development of human thinking. This echoes another view of Vygotsky: the process of transforming thinking into language is very important to stimulate all-round development.
"Only through the interaction between the knowledge provided by various carriers (such as observation, listening, reading or using reference materials) and the understanding of students' language can his knowledge structure be updated. "
The important principles of discussing language meaning and cooperative dialogue should be fully embodied in the real and close-to-life tasks and activities advocated by communicative language teaching. In this real activity, students exchange ideas, solve practical problems and reach a consensus. Obviously, all students need to think. Exchange of views is not only to express objective facts; Cooperative dialogue should have real meaning and can stimulate participants' dialogue motivation. Learning is a positive cognitive development process. Children should no longer be regarded as "empty cans" waiting to be filled, but should become active explorers of language and thinking. As mentioned above, children have many abilities, which are the cornerstones of building a new building of abilities. Barnes described the argument of constructivism as follows: "Each of us must constantly understand the things around us and actively build our own world in order to achieve our learning goals." Fisher believes that paying attention to children's problem-solving activities can make them actively participate in and explore the meaning and answers of language.
For children who can actively participate in the learning process from a cognitive perspective, what they need is challenges and adventures. If a given task or activity is not challenging or adventurous, children will never be independent, and sometimes even stagnate and lose the motivation to learn. But these challenges must also be supported by teachers or classmates, and the new knowledge proposed by zpd theory must be in the area close to the child's development level, that is, the "nearest development area".
In second language learning, the importance of actively participating in the learning process is self-evident. "Task-centered teaching thought regards the learning process as a process of' learning by doing'-the development and formation of students' language system is mainly obtained through practical participation. "For many years, language has been divided into independent units-traditional structural units or grammatical units-and taught to students bit by bit. Then the students put these pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle to understand the language. However, children learning their mother tongue is not such a process. They are exposed to a vast language environment, absorb and use a complete language, and gradually understand its structure and grammar in a deeper subconscious. Lewis advocates that foreign language teaching should start from "a language fragment or a complete language composed of multiple words" to cultivate students' ability to successfully use a complete language (fragment). Tough(brumfit) also talked about the role of "system language" in classroom teaching. He believes that teachers should replace some words used by children at any time to form a new and complete language, just like mothers at home.
Regrettably, the language that most adults and children contact and practice in classroom learning is limited to the sentence level of "digestion". But in my opinion, teachers should not simplify the learning process so much, but should concretize the structured learning method and expose students to more complicated language environment. No matter how students' learning styles, preferences, abilities, comprehensive development level and language development level are, they can adapt to this learning method. In children's English teaching, teachers can make more use of stories, songs, short plays and other forms to let children contact and learn a complete language in an understandable and practical language environment. If we regard the above nine principles as the key to successful learning, then these principles should be reflected in testing and evaluation. This is also a supplement and improvement to the above principles. But unfortunately, this is not the case. Many language learning planning and development do not consider the testing process.
conclusion
Obviously, the above ten principles are not completely separated. The contents of some principles are cross-cutting. It is very important to attach importance to children's English teaching: we cultivate a comprehensive and complete person. Only based on this concept can we create the best language environment and atmosphere conducive to successful learning.