How to help your child speak confidently and fluently in English?
Children are the best learners and its true that they start incredibly young in terms of imbibing good learning habits. With respect to their cognitive development and language learning, they start observing and mimicking their care-takers at 18 months. Thus, learning starts young in the toddler phase and it can be easily termed the right time to “start ‘em young!” at learning English.
All parents take an active interest in their children’s education, be it sports, arts or even learning to speak in fluent English. In our earlier blog, we have seen how learning English has its peculiar requirements when its comes to Indians learning English as a second language (ESL). Tapping on the pulse of proactive parents, we can see the rise of online English speaking courses in India for kids as young as 3 years of age!
Enrolling your child to an online spoken English class is great, but what all should parents look out for when it comes to inculcating good learning practices for their children? In today’s blog, we will be discussing on few tips to help children speak confidently and fluently in English.
Tips to raise children who speak fluent English with confidence
As we know, children imbibe habits, both good and bad, at a very young age. Hence, if we guide them towards healthy learning behaviors, it can benefit them immensely in the long run. Let’s see few simple practices that parents can execute for helping with conducive learning.
Treat them uniquely- Every child is unique and what may work with one need not be true for the other. Children like adults have their own personality traits. As parents, its imperative to see what learning technique can best benefit your child’s needs rather than forcing them to learn by what has been working usually for the others. A bit of trial, error, immense observation skills and a lot of patience will be required before identifying the one true winning strategy.
Encourage them- Learning is an enormous curve with its own twists and turns. Parents should be cheerleaders and task-masters when the situation calls for it. Research shows that active involvement by parents with situational reinforcements plays a significant role in their cognitive skill development.
Make it fun- Kids thrive on fun and hence mixing learning with fun is a win-win scenario when it comes to learning. Games like Scrabble, Pictionary or watching movies, cartoons will keep them engaged while learning new words, practicing pronunciations and learning sentence constructions.
Elocutions and rebuttals- Practicing spoken English in the form of basic conversations is a good English speaking exercise for children. Competitive yet playful communication building exercise like elocution recitals, debates, rebuttals, speeches etc are engaging ways to hone conversation skills in children.
How will an online English speaking course help?
Online English speaking classes for kids are rising by the 100s as we type this. Before we discuss on the benefits of enrolling to an online English course, we recommend that you peruse through an earlier blog where we have covered the shortlisting framework as well as different ways to take private English lessons.
Online English speaking courses will help your children get trained in public speaking. Public speaking is a crucial skill-set for each individual, both young and old. Guided spoken English practice with a certified online English tutor will enable children to speak fluently and confidently.
Online English classes will also ensure that children will overcome their shy nature or hesitancy to speak before strangers through consistent practice. This is important since the most fluent individuals are tongue-tied when it comes to speaking before strangers or large crowds. More so, public speaking skills also require considerable work in other areas such as.
- 1) Enunciations and emphatic pauses
- 2) Ability to articulate
- 3) Presentation skills
- 4) Vocabulary building
- 5) Ability to engage the audience
- 6) Research on the topic
- 7) A well phrased and contextual speech
An English teacher in online lessons works on each of these areas, identifies improvement areas and trains the child to speak confidently. As we said earlier, the earlier we start training children, better the outcomes in terms of language development.
What other ways have helped your children improve their English communication skills? Let us know in the comments below.
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