Compared to mathematics instruction, American public education places much greater emphasis on native language (English) instruction. From the time students enter Kindergarten (K grade) until they graduate from high school, they must have at least one hour of native language study every day. Even in university, there are mandatory English courses in the first and second years. If a student fails the comprehensive examination after completing these courses, they cannot graduate and must retake the exam or enroll in other English remedial courses. Many universities even designate formal essay writing as one of the requirements for graduate school entrance exams; if a student cannot pass, they cannot be admitted as a graduate student.
The main components of native language instruction in the United States are roughly divided into: reading, writing, literary appreciation, Old English, and oral expression. Currently, thirty-seven states across the U.S. have established curriculum standards and comprehensive examinations for native language instruction based on the federal government's "No Child Left Behind" Act. Therefore, the content of native language instruction in schools at all levels across the country is basically the same.
The primary task of native language instruction in elementary school is to cultivate students' reading ability and basic writing skills. In terms of reading ability, lower grades emphasize the teaching of phonics. The United States does not teach the International Phonetic Alphabet; the most basic reading ability begins with teaching students phonics. The basic principle of phonics is to teach students the fundamental rules of the relationship between English (American English) spelling and pronunciation, allowing students to read an English word upon seeing it, or to spell a word according to the rules when thinking of it. In addition, by learning basic pronunciation rules, students can also learn a large number of words intensively.
After the second grade of elementary school, through this phonics teaching method, students have mastered about five thousand to six thousand English words, and reading simple children's books is no longer a problem. (Interestingly, the American "English as a Second Language" pedagogy also aims for this. New immigrants who do not understand English at all arrive in the United States and, in about two years, can master the same number of English words, reaching the ability to basically read general English materials.)
After the second grade of elementary school, through this phonics teaching method, students have mastered about five thousand to six thousand English words, and reading simple children's books is no longer a problem. (Interestingly, the American "English as a Second Language" pedagogy also aims for this. New immigrants who do not understand English at all arrive in the United States and, in about two years, can master the same number of English words, reaching the ability to basically read general English materials.)
Since the first grade of elementary school is a critical year for cultivating phonics reading ability, if a student's phonics reading ability passes, they will begin learning to write paragraphs starting from the second grade. In the second and third grades of elementary school, students do not need to write full-length essays, only paragraphs. Writing a paragraph that can tell a story or explain a fact is sufficient.
At the same time, students will receive training in reading comprehension. Reading comprehension training in elementary school is roughly divided into two stages. After phonics reading, the first stage is decoding and comprehension. Decoding is the most primitive stage; students must be able to read every word in a sentence correctly and know the meaning of each word. However, knowing the meaning of each word does not necessarily mean understanding the meaning of the entire sentence, let alone the meaning of a paragraph or an article. Therefore, "comprehension" is training students to understand the meaning of sentences or articles. Comprehension training includes the recognition of sentence structure, mastery of knowledge, recognition of context, and the mastery of reading cues. Each step involves highly professional reading development theories and corresponding teaching methods. Therefore, even if the textbooks used by English teachers in elementary schools across the United States are different, what they do in the classroom is basically the same because the reading pedagogy training they received during their teacher licensure training is the same. This stage should be completed by about the second grade of elementary school.
The second stage is the requirements for application, synthesis, and evaluation. At this stage, students take reading to a higher level and begin to cultivate critical thinking. In terms of "application," students must be able to find the information they need through reading and then apply it in certain aspects. For example, a student looking at instructions on how to bake a cake can do it themselves, add different ingredients, adjust the oven temperature, and bake a cake. In terms of "synthesis," students must be able to find various information in their reading, then filter out the parts useful to them, and make correct judgments. For example, when traveling from place A to place B, one can join a train tour or a plane tour; the sights, prices, hotels, and itineraries are all different. After reading all the information, students must be able to find a tour group suitable for them through analysis and synthesis based on certain conditions (such as within a certain budget). In terms of "evaluation," students must be able to evaluate the quality of the articles they read or the pros and cons of the information obtained from the articles based on their own evaluation principles or objective evaluation principles.
In the middle school stage, although students need to read a larger quantity, because reading skills have already been trained in elementary school, the focus of native language education is on formal essay writing training, literary appreciation, Old English, and the continued development of oral skills.
In writing training, except for teaching how to write letters, there is no content on "applied writing" in American native language instruction. The United States does not teach students how to write notices, contracts, statements, meeting minutes, investigation reports, news reports, IOUs, invitations, obituaries, and the like. Presumably, this type of thing falls within the scope of a lawyer's duties in the United States; only what is written by a lawyer meets legal requirements, and students have no need and no possibility of learning to write such professional applied documents during their primary and secondary school years.
Formal essay writing training begins from the first day students write articles in the upper grades of elementary school and continues until the last English course in university. This is the most important part of American native language education. In the past, the TOEFL and some other English exams for foreigners did not mandate writing (i.e., formal essay writing) as a required section. As a result, when Chinese students went to the United States to attend university, the biggest headache for university teachers was that Chinese students could not write formal essays. Currently, under the strong pressure of universities at all levels in the United States, the university examination committee has finally been forced to mandate formal essay writing as a required part of the new TOEFL exam, the GRE exam, and even the SAT exam.
American English formal essays have two main parts. First, it is stipulated that the types of articles can only be the following: narrative articles (narratives); explanatory articles (expository); definitive argumentative essays; comparative argumentative essays; analytical argumentative essays; refutational argumentative essays; and evaluative argumentative essays. Therefore, during exams, students cannot write in other styles (such as poetry, scripts, novels, applied documents, prose, etc.). Secondly, the format of formal essays is very strict; if the format is wrong, regardless of the content, it will definitely fail.
In terms of literary appreciation, it mainly requires students to have a relatively deep understanding of writers from a certain historical era. This includes the writer's life and writing experience; the style and textual characteristics of the writer's works; the writer's way of shaping characters and environments; the writer's arrangement of plots; and the humanistic spirit reflected by the themes of the works. In addition, different literary forms of works are also under study. For example, what are the characteristics of poetry? What are the special features of poems by different poets, in different eras, and from different countries? What role does the application of rhetoric and special sentence structures play in the work? These are all topics discussed in literary appreciation. Students start reading original novels from the first year of middle school, and which works must be read is usually stipulated by the Department of Education of each state. Recently, the examination of required reading works has even been added to the comprehensive examinations of various states.
American middle school native language textbooks are usually hardcover, often thousands of pages long, very thick and heavy. Some are arranged by genre, with articles of the same genre studied together; others are arranged by writer, with representative articles selected together. However, because only one or two relatively short works by each writer can be selected in the textbook, teachers usually require students to read the original representative works of the writer, such as novels or poetry collections, outside of class. Therefore, the total amount of reading is quite large.
The study of Old English mainly involves the study of vocabulary, sentence structure, and rhetorical expression in the dramas, poetry, and prose of important British and American writers from the Shakespearean era to the 19th century. This part is mainly knowledge-based and does not require students to have the "ability to read Old English simply without the help of reference books," and exams will not present a passage of Old English for students to translate. However, after finishing their studies, students must be able to write an argumentative essay to answer questions.
The requirements for oral expression in American native language education are very detailed and clear in the curriculum standards. Basically, oral training in American native language education mainly focuses on the following aspects:
First is the training of self-expression. This training includes reading texts fluently; reciting articles fluently; expressive recitation; and finally "interpretative oral expression." So-called "interpretative oral expression" includes: when a student receives an article, they can immediately express the author's emotions and the atmosphere of the article through reading aloud; in addition, if it is a speech, the student can fully express the thoughts and feelings in the manuscript through tone, having close communication with the audience; finally, if it is a script, the student can fully express the character's image through oral expression; even without looking at the person, just by hearing the voice, one can know which character in the story is speaking.
Second is the training of oral expression in small groups. This training includes being able to listen to others' speeches in a small group environment, summarize others' viewpoints, express one's own opinions, and orally analyze, evaluate, and refute others' viewpoints.
Third is the training of oral expression in a whole-class or even larger environment. The goal is to allow everyone, once on stage, to speak fluently for several minutes on a topic in front of hundreds of people. Of course, it also includes training in debate and public speaking skills.
In the early stages of the establishment of American public education, the minimum goal for language ability was "to ensure that all citizens with voting rights are literate, can understand the content of candidates or proposals, make thoughtful choices, and cast a meaningful vote." After two hundred years of development, it now appears that the requirements of American public education for students' language ability have far exceeded the minimum goals of that time. Interestingly, American language teachers have never had any doubts or debates about whether native language education is "language-oriented" or "literature-oriented," or about topics like "comprehensive language education," "narrow language education," or "humanistic education versus instrumental education." American native language courses are not even called "English," but are called "English Language Arts."
