The development of reading and writing based on Montessori educational materials

The study presents the results obtained in the long-term project “Taiwan preschool English classes: Montessori and non-Montessori approaches”. The article focuses on the analysis of the Montessori materials commonly implemented for teaching very young learners of English. Their teaching materials (e.g. vowel matching cards, sandpaper letters, sentence analysis signs) help to develop all four skills of English at the very early age. Furthermore, they let the kindergartners get acquainted with some metalinguistic knowledge of phonology (e.g. phonics, sound blend), syntax (sentence structure with parts of speech), morphology (building words) etc. Such deeper learning of English as foreign language by very young learners in a playful way leads to the fact that 4-6 years old Taiwanese children have a good foundation of basic English in speaking, reading, listening and writing, while growing in non-naturalistic environment of English.