Turn the English your child has built
into skills they can use on Eiken.

Children who have heard a great deal of English at home already have a solid ability to understand spoken English by the time they begin Eiken. They have listened to streams of English sounds, treated them not as school material but as real language, and connected them to situations and contexts in order to understand meaning.

What they need next is to organize that English so it can be used in a test setting. The sequence is Listen → Read → Organize word meaning → Understand sentences → Think → Write & Speak.

The basic direction does not change as children move from Eiken Grade 5 to Grade 4, Grade 3, and Pre-2. Rather than memorizing a completely different body of English knowledge at each stage, we draw out the abilities already inside their English, one by one, as they become necessary.

We view Eiken preparation not as time spent “studying English,” but as time spent organizing the English children have built and expanding how they can use it.

Children’s English begins with sound. They listen to the English coming in through their ears, pull words out of that stream, and connect them to real situations and events in order to grasp meaning.

What is built there is a bond between Meaning ⇄ Sound. Instead of translating everything into Japanese each time they hear English, children connect from the English they hear directly to meaning and mental images.

When children begin learning print, we add written language to that bond: Meaning ⇄ Sound ⇄ Print. Once familiar spoken words gain spelling, children can take in English not only through their ears, but also through their eyes.

We should not reattach a Japanese translation to every word or ask children to convert English into Japanese before understanding it. Instead, we preserve the English processing built through listening and expand it into reading ability.

For young children, the English they know by ear and the English they can answer with on a test do not always match. They may understand what they hear. They may catch the meaning of short sentences. But they may not yet read print well enough, or they may understand the question itself without being familiar with the format.

At this stage, the priority is not putting children into the test right away. It is building a state in which they can hear English and read it. First, build English ability. Next, build reading ability. Then use Eiken to confirm that progress.

When Eiken becomes the goal, it is easy to head in the direction of “Let’s memorize the words for this level” or “Let’s teach this grammar point.” If English ability is developed first, Eiken becomes a place to use the skills children already have.

This order is especially important in the preschool and elementary years. Rather than climbing the Eiken ladder one level at a time, build the listening and comprehension foundation first—the same foundation that leads all the way to higher levels. Then, once children become able to read, they often move through the higher levels one after another.

The first task on the way to Grade 5 is reading. Children who have acquired English through listening already know many sounds. The next step is connecting those sounds to print.

With picture books, sound, meaning, and print come in together. When children begin to see words they already know by ear, they start to connect the sound to its spelling: “So this is how that sound is written.”

From there, phonics helps children learn basic letter-sound relationships, rhyming helps them notice sound patterns, and sight words help them recognize high-frequency words quickly.

However, English spelling and sound do not line up in a simple one-to-one way. After children learn the basic rules through phonics and related work, they need exposure to a great deal of English so they can recognize spelling-sound groupings as patterns. At this stage, Spells-to-Sounds can also be used to organize spelling-sound relationships.

What we do for Grade 5 is expand the English children know by ear into English they can also understand through print.

Once children can read print to some extent, the next step is making sure they can pull meaning out of the words they read. The key here is content words, the words that carry meaning—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and the like.

For nouns, children can group together words with related meanings—animals, foods, school, family, furniture, transportation, and so on. For adjectives and adverbs, contrasts such as big / small and fast / slow make meaning clearer. For verbs, rather than memorizing one Japanese gloss, children deepen understanding through collocations and chunks: what words the verb appears with and the kinds of situations where it is used.

Children who have acquired English through listening already know many words. But their understanding is often still broad and category-based. At Grade 4, instead of reconnecting each word to Japanese one by one, we organize meaning within English itself so that children can pull out the meaning they need when they read.

If children understand nouns and verbs, they can usually catch the rough meaning of a sentence. What becomes important next for more precise understanding is function words.

Function words create relationships between words. Who are we talking about? Where is something located? Is it possible? Is it necessary? Is this a reason? A condition? How are two ideas connected? Once these relationships become visible, children stop seeing English as a line of separate words and begin understanding it as a structure.

Children have already heard many of these words through their English experience. So rather than making them memorize a grammar system from scratch, we organize through print the intuitions they have built through listening and context. As they begin to see what function words are doing inside sentences they already know, the structure of sentences gradually becomes clear.

At the stage where children are organizing content words and function words within English, Eiken SKILLS Online Lessons can also be used.

From Pre-2 onward, the ability to read passages becomes especially important.

If a child is still converting each English spelling into sound one piece at a time—and using up working memory just to do that—it is impossible to keep tracking the meaning of the whole passage. What is needed instead is a state where the English sound rises instantly when the child sees the print.See the print → hear the English sound → understand the meaning

At first, much of working memory is spent simply decoding the print. But once reading becomes more automatic and that burden becomes smaller, children can devote more cognitive resources to understanding the content of the passage. One useful approach here is soku-doku reading. Instead of stopping to translate each sentence into Japanese, children keep reading at a steady pace in English word order. 7-day English is well suited to this kind of training.

“Being able to sound out print” and “being able to read and understand a passage” are not the same. From Pre-2 onward, the bridge between the two is fluent reading with speed.

In writing, ideas have to come before English. Suppose a child is asked, “What is your favorite season?” Instead of stopping at a one-word answer like “Summer,” the child thinks about why summer is their favorite. Because they can swim. Because there is a long vacation. Because they can read lots of books. One opinion should lead to several reasons.

Jumping straight into English composition rarely works. First, children need to decide what they think, why they think it, and what reasons support it. Only after organizing that content do they use the English they already have to express it.

We also guide children away from writing in Japanese first and then converting it into English. Instead, they learn to understand the prompt in English, organize their thoughts, and express them directly in English. That helps not only with writing, but with interviews as well.

At the stage of aligning English ability to real test formats such as writing, listening, and interviews, Eiken Online Lessons can also be used to organize spelling-sound relationships.

As the levels rise, what is required becomes broader. Children need to read English passages, understand word meanings, and understand sentence structure. Beyond that, they must decide their own position on what they have read, give reasons, and explain those reasons logically.

In writing, children need a structure of Opinion → Reason → Supporting explanation. In summaries, they do not keep everything that was written. Instead, they choose the central information and reconstruct it concisely.

As topics become more complex, children also need to consider a single issue from several directions—advantages and disadvantages, cause and effect, pros and cons, or what changes under different conditions.

At this stage, what matters is what children understand through English, what they think about it, and how they communicate it in a logical order. The higher the level, the more thinking skills are layered on top of English ability.

English ability is connected. Children listen and understand. They read print. They understand word meaning. They grasp relationships inside sentences. They understand whole passages. They organize their own thinking. Then they write and speak about it in English.

Eiken lets us place a series of checkpoints along that path. At Grade 5, we look at reading. At Grade 4, we organize word meaning. At Grade 3, we use function words to understand sentences. At Pre-2, children read longer texts and turn their thinking into writing. Beyond that, they summarize, consider multiple perspectives, and build logical arguments.

Each new level is not about memorizing something entirely new. It is about building on the skills already drawn out at earlier stages and adding the next ability that is needed. In this way, when we treat Eiken as a place to draw out the abilities children have already built through home English, the value of Eiken within home English during the preschool and elementary years becomes much clearer.