Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, there are three educators who have made great contributions to language education in elementary school, and people are accustomed to calling them

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, there are three educators who have made great contributions to language education in elementary school, and people are accustomed to calling them the "Three Old Men", who are respectively Mr. Ye Shengtao, Mr. Lu Shuxiang and Mr. Zhang Zhigong. Mr. Ye Shengtao, Mr. Lu Shuxiang, Mr. Zhang Zhigong, the national primary and secondary school language education community respect them as "three old". The language education ideas of the "three old men" were the mainstream ideas of the language education sector in the second half of the 20th century (1949~1998), which guided the practice and theories of language education in primary and secondary schools across the country. The most important of the "Three Old Men" ideas on language education is the concept of language tools, which has been developed gradually through three integrations in the practice of language education in primary and secondary schools.