Thanks. That’s a brilliant explanation.

I have given up trying to teach phonics to children who have grown up speaking a different language, it is pretty much impossible for them to learn English that way. It caused massive arguments in the school I worked in at the time as there were a lot of children new to English coming from the subcontinent. We had good results from just straight up teaching words (look and say) rather than trying to teach them the way we teach native English speakers.

Best result I ever had though was because the child’s parents were both fluent English speakers (they were Indian and highly educated in India but the child grew up in Italy, so she spoke Italian and her home language, one of the thousands of Indian languages) so when I asked the parents to speak English at home they did 100% immersion with their child and they ended up a fluent English speaker in three years (fluent enough to read and write English at a higher than expected level for an 11 year old) it was remarkable.