The Importance of children

 As David Paul says in his book “Teaching English to Children in Asia '' Pearson 2003, “After countless interviews with children to assess their English abilities, I noticed that the children who could speak and retain English were the children who could read English”.

 Of course play is really important for children's development, and should be done as much as possible and reading shouldn’t be too much focused on until they are at an age that they can start to comprehend the idea of reading. Which is around 3-4 years old.

While they are in an immersive English environment they are seeing lots of English words and learning how to read them by sight and phonetically.

 In an immersive environment learning to sight read whole words is a lot easier than going to regular English lessons because of the amount of time the children spend in the immersive environment.

For an Individual learning English as a second language (ESL) and only attending weekly classes, it is better to learn phonetically to gain a solid foundation when it comes to recognising words and how to pronounce them.

 Again from experience we have found that reading stories to children and showing them lots and lots of English words really benefit their language development and retention.

 They gain confidence to try new ways of speaking and trying things out. Seeing the word and repeating it numerous times throughout the week and year, helps to connect the correct accent to the word.

Which is a big immunising effect against the insidious Katakana English and Romaji (romanised katakana) accents that creep in to speech around the start of Primary school. Romaji practice starts around year three of primary school.