A novel and dynamic approach to teaching English by starting in Chinese.

In China, many schools start teaching EFL to their first graders, aged 6–7. Children have to repeat words and sentences that are meaningless to them. They learn to read EFL not by reading but by going through mechanical drills in letters, words and phonic skills. F. Smith asserts that ‘children learn to read only by reading’. But there is a Catch-22 situation here: to learn to read, you have to read, but you cannot read if you have not learned to read. This situation is, however, being tackled by a new experimental approach over the past five years – a ‘sandwich story’ methodology.