Abstract: Nursery rhymes have some specific features and properties. They can introduce a simple story structure and provide short and simple texts which can be remembered easily. They are fun for young learners because they rhyme, easy to follow and easy to remember. At the moment when they are entertained, they can also develop their language skills. In this paper, the writer is going to study why teachers’ choice of nursery rhymes can help young learners develop listening and articulation, phonological awareness and word recognition skills. 1. Introduction Young language learners are introduced to the mysteries of a foreign language. They need to learn the language and develop their language skills. This occurs as they interact with and are guided by teachers. It is believed that teachers’ choice of reading nursery rhymes to young language learners is a powerful way of introducing them to early learning experience that has been identified as making a difference in later success in reading and writing. Nursery rhymes contain what will be fun for young learners because they rhyme, easy to follow and easy to remember. A great many language skills are learned when they are exposed to nursery rhymes. In this paper, the writer is going to study why teachers’ choice of nursery rhymes can help young learners develop listening and articulation, phonological awareness and word recognition skills which are closely related to how well and successfully they read in later years’ language learning. 2. Listening and Articulation Skills Nursery rhymes in a language for children have been passed down for generations and they have some specific features and properties. They introduce young learners to a story structure in a most basic form and provide them with short, simple texts which can be easily remembered. Learners can be entertained by the rhythmic property. However, they are a lot more than entertainment. They are full of rhymes and alliterations which can be employed by teachers to train learners’ listening and articulation skills. Machado argues that “a person does not always listen for knowledge but may listen to a sound because it is pleasing to hear” (1995: 138). If learners listen to a certain nursery rhyme for the first time, they may not fully understand it. However, they like it very much because they find pleasure and entertainment in hearing the rhyming words. If language development is the goal for learners’ early experience, auditory appeal is one of the best reasons for teachers to choose nursery rhymes. Rhymes and alliterations may seem to be the tools of poets and writers only at the first glance. However, when teachers read nursery rhymes again and again to the learners, they become familiar with the rhymes and alliterations, and later on their familiarity with the rhymes and alliterations may be reinforced in the process of listening and may serve as the basis for learning to read. Machado also notes that “listening is a learned behaviour, a mental process that is concerned with hearing, attending, discriminating, understanding and remembering” (ibid: 137). When learners hear a nursery rhyme, they hear their teachers’ articulation, listen attentively, try to discriminate the different sounds and understand the meaning conveyed by the sounds, and they try to recite it themselves after hearing it many times. The teachers’ reading is entertaining because they use their voice in special ways: they alter t，英语论文题目，英语毕业论文 |
