How Parents Can Help in ESL Practice

How can a parent help an ESL teacher to facilitate the quality of English learning of their children, which was always debatable, has now become more controversial? Some people assert that parents should give their children enough space or even leave them alone to have them develop without restriction, as they believe children need their room to grow up and experience something new. However, from my perspective, parents’ involvements are considerably crucial for ESL children’s development. To better articulate my reasoning, the relevant arguments will be elaborated as follow.

This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Mingzhao C. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.

The Importance of English

First and foremost, parents should be aware of the significance of learning English. To be more exact, parents’ perspective concerning how important for a student to learn English would influence their children’s learning attitude to a great extent since parents are usually the ones that their children look up to. Therefore, as a parent, one should attach importance to English learning by constantly conveying the concept that learning English is significant for both self-cultivating and future development.

Also Read: What It’s Like Teaching Kindergarten in Thailand - My Personal Story

Support

Moreover, parents should always be involved in encouraging and praising their children for learning English instead of leaving them alone to grow up by themselves as their children sometimes lack motivation when achieving a new goal. Specifically speaking, one can tell their children that the job they’ve done, such as English writing, English presentation and so on, is being appreciated. More importantly, being specific about what you are going to praise since it will be way more convincing and genuine than non-specific encouragement such as” you were doing a good job!”. In that case, children would know that your appreciation and encouragement genuinely come from your heart.

Guidance

Further, one can also use encouragement as a light that guides the children in the right way for the sake of cultivating a good habit. To be more specific, children are tended to repeat the behavior that praised frequently by their parents. Since it is so, one can consciously praise some better behaviors to facilitate their children to get rid of the bad behaviors and form good habits. For instance, one can praise his/her child for paraphrasing the English words in English instead of directly translate it to the child’s mother language. In this way, a better learning behavior that always trying to paraphrase the English rather than directly translate it will gradually form.

Also Read: The Importance of a Teacher in Early Childhood Education

Help in Preparation

Also, parents’ involvement can be presented to assist their children for the preparation for English learning. Exactly speaking, parents can also serve as supervisors to their children for ensuring children are well-prepared for English learning in every stage, which includes sparing time for companying children to do homework, providing extra learning materials when necessary, always showing the willingness of tutoring their assignment and being a good listener to give ear to what they have been experienced for today’s English learning or school life. Further, there are ways can also indirectly benefit the learning quality of ESL children, which include encouraging them to exercise regularly, eat healthy food and sleep early to keep themselves energetic.

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In a nutshell, form what has been mentioned above, one can reasonably conclude that it is vital for parents to engage in their children’s English learning rather than leave them alone for purpose of better improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their English learning.

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