Compared with mathematics teaching, American public education pays more attention to mother tongue (English) teaching. Students should have at least one hour of mother tongue study every day from entering K grade (kindergarten grade) to graduating from high school. Even in college, there are still compulsory courses in English for freshmen and sophomores. If you fail in the unified examination after completion, the university still can't graduate, and you have to retake the exam or take other English lessons. Many universities regard stereotyped English writing as one of the postgraduate entrance examinations. If students fail, they will not be admitted as graduate students.

The main parts of American mother tongue teaching can be roughly divided into reading, writing, literature appreciation, old English and oral expression. At present, 37 States in the United States have formulated curriculum standards and unified examinations for mother tongue teaching according to the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act. Therefore, the content of mother tongue teaching in schools at all levels in China is basically the same.

The main task of mother tongue teaching in primary schools is to cultivate students' reading ability and basic writing ability. In reading ability, lower grades emphasize spelling teaching more. The United States does not teach international phonetic symbols, and the most basic reading ability begins with teaching students pinyin. The basic principle of spelling is to teach students some basic rules of the relationship between spelling and pronunciation in English (American English), so that students can read an English word when they see it. Or, if you think of a word, you can spell it regularly. In addition, by learning basic pronunciation rules, students can concentrate on learning a lot of words. For example,

The pronunciation of "at" is a short vowel, and the teacher teaches at the same time in one class: at, bat, cat, fat, at, mat, pat,

Ask students to learn the meaning of words with the same pronunciation, such as rat rat and sat. In addition, they can read the same regular chats or planes when they see them.

After the second grade of primary school, students have mastered about 5,000 to 6,000 English words through this pinyin teaching method, and it is no longer a problem to read some simple children's books. Interestingly, the teaching method of "English as a second language" in the United States is also aimed at this. New immigrants who don't know English at all can master the same number of English words in about two years after coming to the United States, and can basically read ordinary English books. Reflecting on English education in China, because we spend too much time learning grammar, students have studied dumb English for ten years, with few English words and almost no ordinary English books. )

Because the first grade of primary school is a crucial year to cultivate pinyin reading ability, if students pass pinyin reading ability, they will learn to write paragraph articles from the second grade of primary school. In the second and third grades of primary school, students don't need to write the whole article, just paragraphs. It is enough to write a paragraph that can tell a story or explain a fact.

At the same time, students will be trained in reading comprehension. Reading comprehension training in primary school can be roughly divided into two stages. After pinyin reading, the first stage is decoding and.

Comprehension (decoding and understanding). Decoding is the most primitive stage. Students must be able to read every word in the sentence correctly and know the meaning of each word. However, knowing the meaning of each word does not necessarily mean understanding the meaning of the whole sentence, let alone saying the meaning of a paragraph or an article. So "understanding" is to train students to understand the meaning of sentences or articles. The training of comprehension includes the understanding of sentence structure, the mastery of knowledge, the understanding of context and the mastery of reading clues. Every step involves very professional reading development theory and corresponding teaching methods. Therefore, even though English teachers in primary schools all over the United States use different textbooks, what they do in class is basically the same, because they all received the same training in reading teaching methods during their teacher license training. This stage should be completed in the second grade of primary school.

The second stage is the requirements of application, synthesis and evaluation. At this stage, students promote reading to a higher level and begin to cultivate critical thinking. In terms of "application", students must be able to find the information they need through reading and then apply it to some aspects. For example, students can bake a cake by themselves, add different materials and adjust the temperature of the oven. In the aspect of "synthesis", students must be able to find all kinds of information in reading, then filter out the useful parts for themselves and make a correct judgment. For example, if you travel from A to B, you can join a train group or a plane group, and the things you see, the price, the hotel and the itinerary are different. Students must be able to find the most suitable tour group according to certain conditions (such as how much money) through analysis and synthesis after reading all the materials. In the aspect of "evaluation", students must be able to evaluate the quality of the articles read or the information obtained from them according to their own evaluation principles or objective evaluation principles.

In middle school, although students need to read more, because reading skills have been trained in primary school, the focus of mother tongue education lies in the writing training of stereotyped writing, literary appreciation, the continuous development of old English and oral English.

Eight-part essay writing training has been done from the first day of writing articles in senior primary schools to the last English class in universities. This is the most important part of American mother tongue education. In the past, TOEFL and other English tests for foreigners did not require writing (that is, eight-part essay writing). As a result, when China students come to the United States to study in universities, the biggest headache for university teachers is that China students can't write eight-part essay. At present, under the strong pressure of universities at all levels in the United States, the College Examinations Committee is finally forced to take eight-part essay writing as a compulsory part of the new TOEFL test, GRE test and even s at test.

The eight-part essay in American English has two main parts. Firstly, it is stipulated that the types of articles can only be the following: narrative (narrative); Explanatory article (explanatory text); Authoritative argumentative essay; Comparative argumentative essay; Analytical argumentative essay; Refuting argumentative essays; Appraisal argumentative essay. Therefore, students are not allowed to write other styles (such as poetry; Script; Novel; Practical writing; Prose, etc. )

Introduction paragraph at the beginning:

1. Export the background (you can only open it in the following ways: story style; Interrogative type; Narration; Rhetorical question; Explain the background of the article)

2. Write all the arguments of the author in one sentence.

Middle section: 1. For each argument, use a topic sentence and make it clear at the beginning of the paragraph.

2. If it is argumentative, use examples and analytical reasoning to demonstrate. If it is a narrative, it shows contradictory organization, development and climax in the middle section.

3. If it is an argumentative essay, the final focus should be after the analysis of each argument.

End paragraph: 1. If it is a narrative, it shows the solution of contradictions and highlights the theme.

2. If it is an argumentative essay, summarize the author's main arguments again and put forward the practice.

The eight-part essay in senior high school requires at least five paragraphs with at least eight sentences in each paragraph.

Literature appreciation mainly requires students to have a deeper understanding of writers in a certain historical era. This includes the writer's life and writing experience; The style and writing characteristics of the writer's works; The way writers shape characters and environments; The writer's arrangement of the plot; Humanistic spirit reflected by the theme of the work. In addition, works in different literary forms are also under study. For example, what are the characteristics of poetry? What's so special about the poems of different poets, different times and different countries? What role do rhetoric and special sentence patterns play in the works? Are the contents of literary appreciation discussion. Students start reading original novels from the first day of junior high school, and the required works are usually stipulated by the state education departments. Recently, the state unified examination even added the examination of required works.

American middle school mother tongue textbooks are usually hardcover, often with thousands of pages, which are very heavy. Some put the articles of the same style together according to the style to study; Some are compiled by selecting representative articles according to the writer's situation. However, because each writer can only choose one or two short stories in the textbook, teachers usually ask students to read the author's representative works after class, such as novels or original poems. So the combined reading volume is still quite large.