Tang Haoming, Class 12, Senior 1, Shenzhen Xin’an Middle School Instructed by Tang Ying

Last week, we had an oral English class on some English learning methods that I had never heard before, which gave me a deeper understanding of English learning.

The class was very well organized. First of all, the teacher said, “You think it is very hard to learn so many new words in a unit, right? Today I have a very good way to help you learn new words happily and easily without forgetting, do you want to learn it?”

My classmates and I said “Yes” and we were eager to learn. Then, she introduced the title of the lesson: How to learn the new words of a unit by applying the strategy “structured reviewing.”

Our teacher Ms.Tang began to tell us her method of learning new words. The common problem is that we often memorize isolated words from the word list, but we don’t know how to use them, resulting in incorrect Chinglish sentences.

She listed the differences between us and native speakers who speak and write English by language chunks rather than word by word.

After that, Tang taught us how to use the strategy named “structured reviewing” based on the theory of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve to learn five or four or three sentences every day without forgetting. In this way, we can greatly improve our learning abilities and efficiency by learning and reviewing sentences with new words every day instead of memorizing isolated words from the word list.

Finally, Tang talked about frequently-used words and taught us a way on how to learn the new words from a unit in our textbook.

She picked out the frequently -used word “frightened” as an example to tell us how to learn it. First, she asked us to read the word together. After we read it, she emphasized that we should pay attention to pronounce the [d] at the end of this word.

Then, she showed us how to spell it according to its syllables and told us to pay attention that “gh” is silent in the word. Next, she guided us to learn the words “fright, frighten, frightening” according to its word family. By this means, we learned many words together.