In the summer of 2016, 6-year-old Joy He Zhiya and her elder brother left their home in New York for the mountain area of Longlin County in South China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, to experience a different life.

They lived at a host family and ate and worked together with the family members. They found that many local children wanted to learn English in order to be able to communicate with them, but there was no English teacher.

The pair returned to Mowo Village in Longlin County during the summer vacation the following year, and taught both their and the Mowo Hope Primary School’s first ever English class.

To sustain their voluntary English teaching after returning to the United States, Joy continued her English class online. In four years, her students have increased from several in Mowo Village to hundreds in Guangxi, and ultimately to tens of thousands of children from 12 countries including China, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Mexico.

Her teaching videos have been played more than 10 million times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in school classes being suspended. Joy, along with her brother, launched the “JoyLand School” online English study program, and established a JoyLand Foundation. In two months, the foundation received donations totaling US$26,000.

From her four-year online teaching experience, Joy has noticed some major challenges that Chinese children have in learning English, including difficulties in pronunciation and listening comprehension, accurate expression in simple words, and first language interference.

She took these problems to her English teacher. With help, Joy borrowed heaps of English learning books from the library, made various teaching aids, and initiated a teaching method of her own.

Joy then turned to her mother, a linguistics professor at the State University of New York, as well as the latter’s colleagues and friends, for a scientific and systematic teaching plan. A second language acquisition professor worked out a curriculum while a linguist and an expert on children’s emotional cognition designed a “10-minute effective shadowing” presentation.

“JoyLand School” now has three courses. They are daily shadowing, including everyday conversation; hobbies English, including learning English through drawing and DIY; and scene English, including visits to schools, survival in the wild and making cookies. The courses cover 500 core words, 800 local expressions and more than 300 scene dialogues.

The 10-year-old Chinese American girl is now determined to spread her English study program even wider.

(Xinhua)