If your child is learning English and your family speaks another language at home, you can tell us, and their new English books are written with that in mind. It is optional, and you can turn it off at any time.
Turning it on
- Go to Readers, then your child, then Settings.
- In "Reading and level", find "Learning English".
- Switch on "is learning English".
- Choose the "Language spoken at home", or "Another language" if yours is not on the list.
- Press "Save".
The setting appears once our privacy notice and notice to parents describe it, and only for readers on a family account. A reader added by a school cannot have it.
What changes in their books
- Fewer new words, met more often. Most books bring in two or three new words, such as "enormous" or "cautious". A book for a reader learning English brings in two, and uses each of them on more pages.
- Plainer sentences. The story and the length of the pages stay what their age group gets. The sentences are built more simply, one idea at a time, with the same words for the same things all the way through.
- The picture shows the word. On every page with a new word on it, the picture is planned to show what the word means.
- A slower voice in echo reading. When your child reads to Pip and Pip reads the page first, Pip reads about a tenth more slowly. Listening to a book and tapping a word are not slowed.
Books written to your child's phonics phase never bring in new words, so for those only the sentences change. Books already on their shelf stay as they were made, and books in Spanish are not changed.
Notes in your home language
When you choose a language, each book's page on your dashboard lists the words the book set out to teach, with what each means in the story and a word or two in your language beside it. Open Readers, then your child, then Books, and choose a book. The notes are for you, to help you talk about a word with your child. Your child never sees them, and grown-ups you share your family with see the words and meanings without the notes.
The notes are written when the book is made and nobody checks them, so trust your own word where it differs. Giving a new word in the language spoken at home is something teachers of children learning English often do. It was not part of the studies behind how these books teach words.
If you choose "Another language", the books change in the same ways and there are no notes.
What we keep
We keep that your child is learning English and the language you chose, and nothing else about it. It is used only to write their books as described above. The name of the language, and never your child's name, is sent to the service that writes the meanings of a book's words, so it can write the notes.
Turning it off deletes the setting straight away, and takes the notes out of the books already made. It is also deleted with the rest of your child's profile if you remove them. What we hold about your child and about you lists everything else.