The Application Of Picture-aided English Teaching In Primary Schools

These days the fever of learning English as young as possible has swept all over China. With the forced tendency, the government finally decided to establish English course in elementary schools in 2001. Interest in teaching and researching of English to younger learners has been steadily growing.As primary school English teachers, we of course use a variety of teaching aids to improve our teaching. Teaching aids can help make pupils'learning more active and interactive. Now when talking about the teaching aids, we found many educators are full of enthusiasm about the so-called high-Tec assisted teaching, such as computers and internet although they are not always necessary and available in our teaching. The traditional teaching materials and techniques,such as blackboard, chalk, pictures seem to be ignored. In fact, a good teacher should know how to use the simplest teaching material to teach well. This paper intents to draw attention to picture-aids. Because of characteristics of children's psychology, pictures of course draw pupils'attention and arouse their interest of leaning easily. They bring hours of pleasure for both learning and teaching. Pictures are objective, authentic and easy to build language situations. To a great extent many language teaching methods, like Direct Method, Situational Language Teaching and Communicative Language Teaching, are all implemented through visual aids, including pictures. Furthermore, the goal of teaching a language is to develop the communicative competence which is put forward by the famous linguist, Hymes. The most important goal of teaching English for primary school is to arouse students'interest of learning English and make them have confidence in speaking in English, which is required in the National English Curriculum for primary schools in China. With use of pictures, these teaching tasks can be organized well and practiced pleasantly, and teaching objectives will be achieved. Therefore, how to use pictures for communicative language teaching is a valuable question for discussion that is met by the English teachers who are teaching in primary schools.Pictures are simple, cheap, interesting, flexible, and easy to build language situations. They provide rich and colorful teaching activities. They are easy to prepare and store as well. As long as we know how to use them effectively, our teaching will be successful in many aspects. This research is based on the ideas of the experts concerned and through practical experiments and theoretical analyses, explore why and how to use pictures effectively for developing students'"four skills"of English. It will also discuss how to find, adapt and store pictures to improve the use of this teaching aid.