Young children's reading

It is my dream coming true that I am paid to read and write on topics I care about and am interested in- child development in language. My current project have directed my attention back to children's foreign language learning as I used to teach young children English. The motivation of the research interests came from an experience my current boss encountered in a kindergarten in Beijing (She is very impulsive towards research ideas). Her partner in Beijing had a grand-daughter, who was learning English in the kindergarten, but the kid came back home with an aucward pronunciations (e.g. lesson becomes laison). From there, these academics realized how important to teach young children English properly. It is true that it is not the situation just solely belongs to one kindergarten, it is indeed many educators and parents' worry and anxiety. How to make young children bilingual and literate? Talking about literate, in this circumstances, it means reading and writing. In the understanding of child literacy development, reading is, at least in western society, recognized as the core and key to writing and composing. It is also true in the Chinese society, however the concept of reading is not as widely accepted as that is in the UK, US or any other western society. It is very dangerous that this statement may go far from reach. I had better stay still with just reading. Reading is seen important, and treated seriously in Chinese education. However, reading is somehow not encouraged or motivated. It is more of a task, a homework, it is not supposed to fun. Maybe it is too generalized, saying this may hurt many teachers' feelings. However, the reality is that reading for fun is never a culture. I still remember that how I was criticized for reading novels in my middle school, because it took too much of my study time. The situation may be different now, but I doubted that students nowadays have much more time reading for fun than before. What's the point of reading? especially reading for fun! Developmentally, reading for fun builds up one's fluency in reading, therefore the comprehension of the content of a book. Reading enriches one's language from vocabulary, syntactics to tones. Readers can replicate the talk from a story in their real life. In this case, reading is particularly more important for second language learners who particularly lives in an non-second language environment. Second language learners do not always have opportunities to communicate with people in the second language verbally, but reading a novel or even just a story provide them a context that shows how the second language is used. Through reading, the learner can also practice their language skills such as decoding and comprehension. Why reading is so important for children? Children learns from stories, children's literature is usually narrative with simple languages at the beginning. For young children starting to learn another language at age of 3 (true in Hong Kong and valid in many major cities inside China), reading is the most efficient source for the literacy development. Through reading, children will be able to get to know characters that was built in the stories and discuss about the character and things happened to the characters. What's more, children can act out the story or even retell the story. Therefore, reading is not just about reading anymore. Reading is a door to communication that will be eventually expressed through writing. More reason why children should start reading early...?