I posted this message to Dr. Yanni Zack on the "Teaching Stratigies" part of this site but I want to post it here too so more people will read it and give me some feed back on it.

So what has been your experience or your ideas on this? When should reading and sentences be introduced to a learner of English?

Hi Dr. Y

I am at a school here that uses the Cambridge English series of books along with a couple of other series of books. This week I went into a class of 7&8 year olds who all had a good vocab of English but they could not speak a simple sentence. They are using the Playway2 book that has no sentences or even words in it. I feel that this is not a good book to be using as these students need to be learning basic sentences along with vocab.

What is your feeling on this? Are you familiar with these books and if yes what is your opinion on them? When do you feel that sentences should be introduced to a students English lessons?

I have been teaching here in China now for three years (how time flies). In this time I have taught beginners, students as young as four years of age and any combination of level and age. I feel that if you are teaching beginners no words is ok if you are introducing A,B,Cs and numbers but you should soon introduce letter combination sounds, basic words and basic sentences once a base of vocabulary has been established. But in my school they feel this the way they are doing this is ok. I disagree.

Any words that you have will be read with great interest. Thanks

Wendy