Why Does PalKids Prioritize Reading Over Conversation?

Even if children understand English, that does not necessarily mean they will speak it at home.

After all, if they speak Japanese, they can immediately communicate their feelings and needs to their family.

Unless they are in an environment where they cannot eat, play with friends, or participate in class without speaking English, there is usually little natural necessity for children to choose English on their own.

As a result, parents may feel, “We have been doing this for a long time, but my child still will not speak English,” or “I cannot see the results.”

However, a lack of speech output alone does not mean that English is not being stored and built up inside the child.

Reading is a skill that makes the English children have been building internally much easier to see from the outside.

They can read English sentences aloud. They can decode short words they are seeing for the first time. They notice English signs around town and say them out loud. They can understand the content of a picture book by reading it for themselves.

When parents begin to see behaviors like these, it becomes much easier to feel that their child has truly been absorbing spoken English and building up sound patterns and word chunks all along.

Speaking is influenced by the conversation partner, the situation, personality, and the need to speak. Reading, by contrast, is something children can do at their own pace whenever print is in front of them.

That is why, in home learning, reading often becomes a clear and practical indicator of progress.

Human beings do not store speech exactly as it is heard, the way a recorder would.

Instead, the brain processes speech in a somewhat abstracted way so that differences in speaker, speed, and pitch can still be recognized as the same word or the same sound.

When knowledge of print is added to that process, children can connect the sounds they have heard with spellings and more easily distinguish between words that sound similar.

For example, “hat,” “hut,” and “hot” have similar spellings, but they are different words with different vowel sounds and meanings.

When children who can already hear these differences to some degree learn print, they can connect each sound pattern to a different spelling: “h-a-t,” “h-u-t,” and “h-o-t.”

Print is not a replacement for speech. Rather, it adds visual form and spelling information to words children already know as sounds, giving them a way to organize word memory.

Ehri (1998) argues that knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences is essential for learning to read English words.

The kind of reading PalKids aims for is not reading that converts English into Japanese one word at a time.

It is reading that confirms in print the English children have already heard and helps them grasp meaning while keeping English word order intact.

They see in a picture book an expression they have heard in the audio. They use illustrations and context to confirm the meaning. When they see the letters, the English sounds already in their minds come back to life.

In this way, spoken language, print, and meaning become connected, and the English children have been hearing develops into reading ability.

In second-language learning, learning print can influence how speech is perceived and pronounced.

Bassetti (2008) argues that second-language spelling interacts with spoken input and influences learners’ second-language phonological representations.

Bassetti (2017) also reported that Italian native speakers who saw English double-letter spellings tended to reflect consonant length in their pronunciation, even though English normally does not distinguish consonant length in that way.

This shows that while spelling can help organize pronunciation and phonological representations, it can also lead learners to bring the sound-letter rules of their first language into the second language, sometimes producing pronunciations that differ from the target language.

It is important to connect print after sound

If children try to read English words before they know enough spoken English, relying only on romanized or Japanese-style pronunciation, there is a risk that inaccurate sounds constructed from the spelling will become entrenched.

When children are first exposed to spoken English and already have the target sounds in mind, it becomes much easier to map spellings onto actual English pronunciation.

One of the biggest reasons PalKids emphasizes reading is that children become able to increase their English input by themselves.

With audio-based learning, English needs to be presented from the outside—someone has to speak, audio has to be played, or a video has to be shown.

Once children can read, however, they can open a book themselves and engage with English at their own pace.

As they move from picture books to short stories and from short stories to chapter books for children, the range of vocabulary, expressions, grammar, and knowledge they can encounter at one time expands dramatically.

Share’s (1995) Self-teaching Hypothesis proposes that each time children phonologically decode an unfamiliar letter string, they create an opportunity to learn that word’s specific spelling.

In other words, once children master basic sound-letter correspondences, every new word they read becomes something they can learn for themselves.

Adults do not need to teach every English word one by one. The act of reading itself becomes an opportunity to acquire new vocabulary and spelling.

The vocabulary and sentence patterns used in everyday conversation are biased to a certain extent.

If children are exposed only to short conversations at home, the language they hear will tend to center on everyday expressions such as “get dressed,” “eat,” and “play,” making it harder for them to encounter words that express abstract ideas or broader knowledge.

Books contain vocabulary that is harder to encounter through conversation alone, as well as more complex sentences, explanations of events, characters’ feelings, and knowledge about science and society.

The more children read, the more opportunities they have to encounter English vocabulary and expressions.

Because written text remains on the page, children can go back to parts they do not understand and reread the surrounding context. That ability to process English at their own pace is also a major advantage over conversation.

Eiken assesses vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, listening, writing, speaking, and more depending on the level.

For that reason, passing Eiken is not the result of reading alone.

However, the ability to accurately read the questions and answer choices, and to understand the meanings of words and sentences, is an important foundation at many levels.

Even in households where the results of audio exposure and daily listening study were hard to see, once a child begins reading English texts or passes Eiken, it becomes easier to feel the ability that had been steadily accumulating up to that point.

That said, passing Eiken does not need to be the final goal.

It is best used as an opportunity to objectively confirm one part of a child’s English ability, and then connect that success to further extensive reading, continued study, and using English to gather information.

PalKids’ emphasis on reading does not mean we believe speaking activities are unnecessary.

Reading ability and speaking ability share vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, but they are not exactly the same skill.

When reading, children can go back to the text and process meaning at their own pace.

In conversation, they must listen to what the other person says in the moment, think quickly about the content, choose an appropriate expression, and respond with spoken English.

As children learn a large number of words and expressions through reading, and become able to organize their own ideas into English sentences through writing, they gain more language material to support flexible spoken output.

However, being able to write sentences does not automatically mean they will be able to speak fluently.

Conversation also requires practice in retrieving English instantly, responding to what another person says, and adjusting pronunciation and rhythm.

By building the ability to construct English through reading and writing, and then connecting that foundation to real interaction, children can aim for meaningful spoken English that goes beyond memorized set phrases.

At PalKids, we begin by repeatedly exposing children to spoken English so they can build a foundation for perceiving English sounds and rhythm.

Next, we connect the English they have heard to print and develop that foundation into reading ability.

Through reading, children increase their vocabulary and expressions and expand the range of English they can understand.

Then, through writing, they gain repeated experience organizing their own thoughts into English sentences.

Finally, they learn to use the sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and content they have built up in actual conversation and presentations.

If children repeatedly practice conversation before they have enough listening comprehension, vocabulary, and reading experience, learning can become centered on memorizing fixed question-and-answer patterns.

Being able to use expressions such as “How are you?” “I’m fine.” “What color do you like?” and “I like blue.” is certainly important.

However, in free conversation, children need to combine the vocabulary and grammar they have learned according to the situation in front of them and the ideas they want to express.

To do that, they need broad English input that is not limited to everyday conversation, as well as experience understanding texts and creating sentences for themselves.

Building a rich store of vocabulary and expressions through reading, and gaining experience putting thoughts into English through writing, helps support the content of truly flexible spoken English.