As part of the Tainan English Reading Festival that kicked off during summer break, Tainan City government hosted the "First in Asia! - Scholastic Sponsors E-books in Tainan" Press Conference in the morning of June 14. During the event, Mayor Huang Wei-che announced the largest children's books publisher's sponsorship of two English e-book systems (BookFlix and TrueFlix) for a year. All 1.88 million Tainan citizens can access the books for free during this period. The Mayor encouraged the public to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity!
Mayor Huang thanked Scholastic for offering Tainan City such a wonderful opportunity to improve the citizens' English skills. Under the leadership of former Mayor Lai and through the hard work of the city government team, the English reading capability of Tainan residents ranks third in the nation. This is significant as Tainan is the city among the six special municipalities with the least resources, and is also located in the southern part of Taiwan.
Mayor Huang pointed out that Tainan is happy to work with Scholastic to offer more English language exposure channels to local students and adults. After listening to the system introduction, everyone can see it is very user-friendly, even elderly citizens can easily learn English with it. Huang encouraged the citizens to make good use of this resource. He explained that with these systems, you don't have to go to a language learning center anymore. Just log in with your ID number and account at home and access a real-time English environment. If everyone can leverage this marvelous resource, it would improve Tainan City’s language learning environment.
Scholastic Taiwan's GM Sonia Dung pointed out that the two English e-book series (BookFlix and TrueFlix) sponsored originally required a membership fee - NTD 1,200 per person per year. But now Tainan citizens can access them free of charge for one whole year. Dung said that BookFlix includes a lot of popular picture books in English that have won international awards. Each book is paired with a short English clip for a fun language learning experience, and the materials are suitable for elementary and junior high school students. TrueFlix is categorized by different study fields. Each article focuses on knowledge targeted at high school students and adults. In addition to English e-books, Scholastic also granted Tainan City Government the image usage rights of Clifford, the famous illustration book series, and The Hunger Games novel series for the English Reading Passports for elementary and junior high school students. Hopefully the popular fictional characters can inspire students to learn English.