二十五年的实验6
赴英进修

陈碧华　执笔 

政府的锁国政策不知让台湾下一代的英语教育倒退多少年？世界各国因为网际网路的发达而如火如荼的学习英文，连一直被台湾人民不放在眼里的中国大陆，更是以黑马姿态纵横国际求才现场，夹著人多势众财力雄厚，席卷优秀师资。我和锡东因为常参与国际会议，近年来与大陆学者常在会议场所中相遇，深深感受到他们来势汹汹，也很为台湾不曾长进的现象忧心忡忡，我们担心台湾人才的培育并没有国际接轨，即使政府的口号喊的震天价响，但下一代的英文，不但没有整体提升，反倒退步。

 

更糟的是父母的决定严重受到专家学者的言论影响，当时教育部利用一些专家学者似是而非的研究结果，全盘否决幼儿学英文的功效，扼杀下一代轻松自然学习英语的机会，荒谬的是这些所谓的专家没有任何人有真正从事幼儿英语教育的经验，只凭著一些采样数字，就可以到处发表言论，反对幼儿学习英语。身处在这个是非不分黑白颠倒的社会，我觉得我必须挺身而出，为真相说话。因此我选择再度回到研究所，针对幼儿学习英文做研究。为了涵盖世界上两大英语系国家不同的制度，特别选择英国约克大学，进入幼儿英语教育研究所就读。这次我直接以康乃尔幼稚园的孩子做研究对象，探讨幼儿英语学习各种特点。
 

两年中利用写论文的机会，我发现幼儿学习英文的优势无庸置疑，但因为环境关系会有盲点，孩子来自不同台湾家庭，发展出一些自创的英语，虽然他们彼此沟通无碍，但我担心这些错误，会深植在脑海中很难改正，唯一解决方式就是改造环境，增加幼儿接触正确英文环境的机会。为达到这目的，2001年我们成立台湾第一个英语儿童图书馆，我认为孩子必须养成独立阅读的能力，如此才不会局限于课堂上片面的学习。为了增加孩子正确的input，2002年康乃尔正式在电台播出「彩虹时间」英语儿童故事，我希望藉著孩子喜爱听故事的心理，邀请外国老师录制各种好听有趣的故事，每天晚上在孩子就寝时间播出，当作床边故事。七八年来我很感动外国老师努力的创作各种有趣又有教育性的故事，这些完全对广播外行的老师，竟然帮助康乃尔连续三年夺得教育电台最佳外制儿童节目，后来太阳以及好家庭电台都加入播出阵容，每周播出至今。
 

收音机听故事虽然有趣，但现场说故事更可以与小朋友互动。受到台中市文化局以及美国在台协会邀请，康乃尔也开始每个月在文化中心、国立图书馆及敦煌书局提供英文故事时间，我希望借由康乃尔宝贵的资源，服务无法到康乃尔上课的孩子，拉进英文双峰现象和城乡差距。现在我们更骄傲受到台中市政府的委托为全台中市国小英语教师开立英语讲座课程，分享我们的教学资源。

---

A Twenty-Five Year Experiment 6
Studying In The UK

By Bih-Hua Chen 

The ban on teaching English to young children made the students lose their competitiveness to their peers from other countries in the international society.  It was very sad to see the government make such a bad policy which was clearly against the world trend.  Due to the development of technology and the internet, every country in the world has tried its best to prepare their youngsters to be proficient in English.  Even China has sent many head hunters to recruit teachers abroad which had never been done before.  Shyi-Dong and I also noticed that the scholars from China who attended the international conferences had become much more threatening.  The reason was that their command of English was impressive.  It was ironic that the government ran the slogan of internationalizing the country everywhere, but young children were deprived of learning English.

To make things worse, the professors and researchers associated with the government strongly voiced the drawbacks of sending children to learn English at a young age.  It was ridiculous to let those people who had no hand-on experience in teaching young children English to speak for the government.  It was frustrating to see the truth distorted in this way, so I decided to go back to school to do more research.  I hoped that my findings could verify the mistakes the government was making.  In order to compare two different systems in the world, I chose York University in the UK as my second graduate studies in Education.  This time I focused on teaching English as a second language to young children and I used Cornel students as the specimen samples.

In two years I made numerous observations and studied Cornel students’ language skills development intensively.   I noticed that there was no doubt about the benefit of learning English at a young age; however, there were some problems that needed to be fixed.  Even though we used an immersion program, the students developed an interlingua.  They had no difficulty communicating with each other, but I was afraid that the mistakes would imprint on their minds forever.  It seemed that the only solution was to give them more exposure to English after school.  In order to achieve this goal, I launched a radio program in 2002, Rainbow Time which focused on stories.  Our foreign teachers started to compose a variety of interesting stories and recorded them in our own sound room.  This was an extremely difficult task because all the stories had to be interesting and creative, but none of the teachers had experience in broadcasting.  Amazingly, the program got lots of attention from the public and over seven years we have been invited to air it on three radio stations.  We were honored to receive ‘the Best Children’s Program’ award from Education Radio for three consecutive years.

In addition to broadcasting, we publish monthly magazines which consist of three different levels of English and lots of colorful illustrations.  Moreover, we have been invited by the city government and AIT (equivalent to American Embassy) to offer story times at public libraries.  We are very happy to offer these community services to children who can’t afford to attend Cornel.  Now we are proud to be appointed by the government to train all the elementary schools’ English teachers at Cornel.

 

儿童双语幼稚园：
康乃尔&康尔嘉英语【官方网站】http://www.ecornel.com.tw
康乃尔&康尔嘉英语【facebook粉丝团】http://www.facebook.com.tw/cornelfans
康乃尔&康尔嘉英语【Youtube影音网】http://www.youtube.com/user/corneltai

英文有声书杂志：
彩虹时间儿童英语故事有声月刊【部落格】http://www.wretch.cc/blog/CRainbowTime
彩虹时间儿童英语故事有声月刊【facebook粉丝团】http://www.facebook.com.tw/rtfans