ENCOURRIGING STORIES OF
LEARNING SPOKEN ENGLISH
英语口语学习励志故事
PART TWO
1. Practice Evidences that Environment is the Key to the Achieving of English Communication Skills
（节选自John Y 长篇英语学习回忆录《英语口语---一个只面对执着的回音 ENGLISH SPEAKING-AN ECHO ONLY FROM COMMITMENT》中篇：一、《实践证明环境是获得英语口语能力的关键》）
In 1989 as a graduate student at UCLA I applied for immigration to USA based on the third category of professional & technical talent, and was successfully permitted by US Labor Department. After three years waiting on line I together with my wife and daughter had all got Green Cards and become US permanent residents.
That time I was able to communicate with Americans with no barriers. I still remembered that when having interwiew at INS LA Division, I responded to the Federal INS officer in English so fluently that he had granted us Green Card in only ten minutes. However, I had gone through over this for six years.
In 1993 my daughter Xiaoxue, in Chinese meaning Little Snow, came to the States together with her grandma. Triggered by the snow pouring when she was born I gave her an English name Sharon which stands for Snow Girl in Chinese, and also takes the name of the famous American movie star Sharon Stone. That year she was only seven and went to a primary school in Shanghai as a first year student before coming to the US.
Being separated from parents since the second year of birth, Sharon had spent all her childhood with grandma in Jiangxi aunt's home and later on in Yunnan uncle's home. Lacking English learning within Chinese education system for pre- and primary school kids Sharon didn't even recognize the simplest English letters like A, B, C upon arriving in the US., and this caused big trouble for her entering into the local school. This was because all local schools were conducting education only in native English from first grade on, and all local American students would have no problem with that.
To solve this problem we were suggested to put Sharon in International school just as all the other Chinese parents did, in which there was ESL class(English as a Second Language) and all courses were conducted in bilingual languages including Mandarin. And Sharon could transfer to normal primary school when she had improved her English well enough.
But I had come up with a decision to the contrary: not let Sharon go to International School, insdead, let her go to a normal primary school with almost all kids in class were Americans. My decision was based on two principles in educational psychology: firstly, human beings have natural ability to learn a language, secondly, the key to the succes of learning a new language is the language envirnment. I had made my mind to excercise the experiment one more time on Sharon.
To say one more time because I had tested it on Sharon's old sister Lisa six years ago when she came to the US. But that time it was compulsary.
It was during my second year at UCLA when Lisa arrived in LA together with her mother in an F2 visa. As a seven years old fresh student of first year in primary school Lisa didn't know what A,B,C meant. Unfortunately, there was no international school that Lisa could go and I had to put her in a normal American school in neibourhood for study.
After a couple of months I found surprisingly that Lisa learned English so rapidly that she could conmmunicate with her classmates absolutely without any problem. What's more, she could also speak Cantonese too, because all her Chinese classmates were from Hong Kong. They quickly became good friends and cantonese became Lisa's second foreign language, but not for me. Sometimes Lisa took her classmates home talking only in Cantonese and I couldn't even understand a single word.
The primary school of US was pury a small world of American kids. In such a world, as a little Chinese girl of eight just arrived in the US, how she would communicate with other American kids and her teachers was really hard to image. But there is one thing for sure that even Chinese college students, if being with a big crowd of noisy native American kids and listening to them, would hardly understand what they are talking about at all.
Moreover, Sharon had also to sit in classroom listening to teachers but like a dumb, and to do all the homework in English, for several hours a day and five days a week. How come could she bear such a situation？
It was indeed awkward and painful in the beginning. Sharon often complained after school that she couldn't understand what her classmates and teachers were talking about in and off class. The most painful experience was that no other kids in her class would like to communicate and play with her.
One day the master teacher of Sharon's class called me at my working site. She told me a story about Sharon today that for unknown reason Sharon jumped away from her seat and rushed out of classroom disappeared when class was on. All other classmates watched her surprisingly with no idea what had happened. More surprisingly, a few minutes later Sharon returned to the classroom and sit back at her seat carmly, just like nothing dad happened.
After school Sharon returned home. I asked her what had happened in class seriously. She answered that she could hardly bear to pee in class but didn't know how to report to the teacher in English, so she just rushed out for toilet. When I told this to her teacher she couldn't help laughing and said it had never heppened in her whole teaching career.
Even though that happened I had declined to move Sharon to international school, because I want to see if things would change and how it would when time was passing.
Sure enough, something really happened as I expected. After three months of school life Sharon was able to communicate with her American classmates freely.
Half year later, Sharon got even no patient to listen and to talk with her mother in English anymore as Lisa did before, because she felt mom's English was too poor.
One year later Sharon had entirely melt into her sister as well as American kids studying and playing together every day. That is to say Sharon had accomplished that transit from a Chinese girl to an American girl at her age of eight in only one year.
