The EWAS Approach

A Love of the Language

All EWAS programs are written with very clear psycho-linguistic goals in mind in order to break down the barriers between the young learner and the acquisition of the language. Thus EWAS programs imbue young learners with a love of the English language and give them self-confidence and a belief in their ability to use the English language. They give pupils a feeling of independence, success and achievement in learning and using the language.

The EWAS philosophy and methodology approaches English-language learning very differently from other English-language instruction programs.

Throughout the learning process, pupils practice their oral-aural and reading language skills by playing pre-reading and reading games, by doing activities in the activity books, by acting and by singing. The lyrics of the songs and rhymes feature words and structures that parallel those in the storybook. This offers further practice and repetition of familiar words and structures and builds pupils’ confidence.

As part of the complete business development package, [Franchisees] EWAS provides special presentations and parents’ classes and materials especially written to help educate parents about the benefits of not pressuring their children and how they can help their children at home.

And, of course, all of the practice and repetition the pupils do is enjoyable, entertaining and fun. The children learn English the EWAS way — with a smile on their faces.

Learning to Read

The EWAS approach to teaching reading is unique. Indeed, it adds a new dimension to the teaching and learning of reading in English.

The EWAS system favors postponing the teaching of reading until children have had the benefit of oral-aural pre-reading courses focused on listening comprehension and speaking skills. (Generally, children do not learn to read their native language until age 5 or 6.)
This approach directly contrasts the approach common to many other programs and to many English-language schools. These programs, and the schools that use them, begin by teaching small children to read before they have acquired the pre-reading oral-aural skills. The children feel pressured to do what they are not ready to do.

Learning English then becomes an unhappy task in which the children fail to achieve what the adults around them — their teachers and their parents — expect from them. The children begin to dislike the language and begin to exhibit reluctance to go to English lessons.

Unlike other programs, EWAS does not present rules with many exceptions. Instead, EWAS provides the pupils with an awareness that when they read English they should expect to encounter words in which they have to try out different possibilities according to contextual clues before they know how to sound out a given letter or combination of letters.

More importantly, EWAS provides pupils with the confidence to try these different possibilities when decoding words.

Once learned, internalized and practiced in the context of EWAS lessons, these decoding tools enable the pupils to recognize the sounds that letters and letter combinations make in English in the same way native English speakers do.

EWAS developed reading programs that respond to and overcome the weaknesses of the traditional approach.

Traditional reading programs use unconnected pieces of writing. Most begin by teaching the alphabet and then reading without any oral-aural preparation. These programs also employ the global reading approach and move directly from global reading of words to reading short pieces of writing. They use the traditional phonics approach based on the misleading premise that there is letter-sound correspondence in English on the one hand and irregular instances when this is not true on the other hand.