A Guide to Surviving the Age of Post-Literacy: How to raise (or become) a reader
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I am saying then, that literacy - the mastery of language and the knowledge of books - is not an ornament, but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power. Longer perspective will show that it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgement of ourselves and the possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow.
from In Defense of Literacy by Wendell Berry
It might not yet feel like a “nightmare of tomorrow”, but as literacy rates plummet, there’s a growing sense of urgency, even quiet alarm, that a pillar of civilization is dissolving beneath us.
Over the past decade reading scores in high-income countries have steadily declined in both teens and adults.1 But it’s the decline in teens—our future generation—that is most concerning.
Not only has the percent of teens who read “hardly ever” risen from 15% in 1985 to almost 50% today, but children and teens overall are losing interest in reading.
In Britain, The Sunday Times just launched a campaign to get people reading, “as new data shows that people of all ages now read social media posts more often than books”.
Reading underpins the development of human civilization, as Joel J. Miller details in his fascinating and thoroughly-researched book The Idea Machine. As trenchantly put by one historian: “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible.”
Recently there have been a spate of articles ringing alarm bells about what our future society might look like, should the decline in reading continue. James Marriott points out that “if the literate world was characterized by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterized by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation.” Writing in The Free Press, Niall Ferguson argues “at stake here is nothing less than the fate of humanity”.
But more troubling than well-founded warnings about how the loss of reading might send us back into a dark age, is that some seem to embrace the collapse of literacy as the new normal—and of no great consequence. Educator Blake Harvard reported that, according to the World Economic Forum, the vital skills of the future don’t include reading. In the WEF’s vision, reading is on the “less essential” list, along with writing, math, and other “out of focus” skills.
How it the world will the ability to read and write and perform mathematical computations be less essential? Is there anything more basic than knowing how to read and write and do math? How will students even begin to build upon a basic understanding of subject matter and foundational knowledge if they’re less likely to be able to read and write and math?
And if society seemingly won’t need workers to be literate, how in the world can we expect those same workers to fulfill the predicted increased need in creativity? You cannot be creative with information you don’t have. There’s got to be some understanding and memory of a topic in order to successfully create from that subject.
The problem isn’t that we are cognitively offloading a few limited tasks onto technology; the problem is we are offloading whole territories of the mind—and believing, somehow, it won’t matter much.
The situation might seem insurmountable. We can easily surrender to the insidious Inevitability Narrative—that there’s nothing we can do to stop the relentless advance of tech, so we should stop complaining and just accept it.
While many will rightly continue to bemoan current trends, analysis of the problem won’t save us. We need to encourage literacy and a love of reading in our youth—or at least a recognition that the ability to decode written words and develop skills of communication aren’t just bottom-of-the-bucket “out of focus” skills, but crucial for learning and the health of society.
We can’t lay the responsibility for this task solely in the lap of institutions or corporations. The locus of control lies with each individual and within our homes.
In today’s post we’ll offer a practical guide to raising (or becoming) a reader, using approaches that have been proven to work, and hope that you will feel encouraged and inspired to bring reading back to life.
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Where have all the words gone?
In order to read, children need to hear words. Lots of them. Not words spoken through a screen, but words spoken in interactions with their parents and caretakers, as well as words read aloud to them.
One of the most important predictors of how well a child will learn to read is the size and quality of his spoken language and vocabulary, and children are more likely to be exposed to new words and their meanings or pick up grammar rules from reading aloud with adults.2
Interestingly, reading ability is more closely linked to a child’s range of vocabulary than their age, and their verbal language skills are a high predictor of later literacy skills.3
As parents and children spend increasing amounts of time on devices, their verbal interactions decrease. A recent Swedish study reports a negative association between screen time and both grammar and vocabulary skills at age 5, suggesting that increased screen media exposure during early childhood might hinder language development. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) Pediatrics, tracked over 220 Australian families over two years and found that TVs and phone screens interfered significantly with children’s “language opportunities”4.
A systematic review investigating parental use of mobile computing devices and the social and emotional development of children aged 10 years or younger found less engagement, harsher responses, and fewer verbal and nonverbal communications between parents and children when parents were using a mobile device…for every additional minute of screen exposure, parents and children were generally talking or vocalizing less and were engaging in fewer back-and-forth interactions.
The researchers found that the average three-year-old “was exposed to two hours and 52 minutes of screen time a day” resulting in “children being exposed to 1139 fewer adult words, 843 fewer child words, and 194 fewer conversations”- each day.
Missed language opportunities in the early years follow children into their formal education years where teachers have noted “language skills going backwards, both in conversation between children themselves and teachers and reading and writing skills”.
While parents reading stories to their children used to be a common shared activity, The Guardian reports5 that Gen Z parents are increasingly replacing story time with screen time, citing a variety of reasons including, “It’s so boring”; “I don’t have time”; “I don’t enjoy reading myself”; and less than half agreed that reading to their children was “fun for me”.
A report by HarperCollins found that less than half (41 per cent) of under fives are read to frequently, a steep decline from 64 per cent in 2012.
If you want to raise a reader, talk with your child.6
Read to them daily. Early love of books is tied to higher literacy skills later on.7 Have a regular quiet time in the afternoon (or the evening) where everyone reads. We have done this since our first child was born and still continue with this practice over two decades later. When the kids were little we used to start our mornings on the couch, reading through a pile of classic picture books before breakfast. When they were older we would do read-aloud time of longer classics in the afternoons and evenings.
Read yourself. Children need reading role models to follow.
Take books along wherever you go. Read in public. Don’t offer screens.
Fill your home with books. The amount of books in a home have been found to be a more important indicator of educational attainment than parents’ education or any other influence. 8
We have always been fond of being surrounded by books and we thus have 17 bookshelves throughout our home including in all bedrooms, the living room, and the library. See here for our guide for building your own book monastery.
Does it matter how we teach reading?
Reading is simple. Frederick Douglass, as well as Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and thousands of eighteenth-century pioneer children, learned to read with the alphabet and a few good books. Douglass learned his ABC’s from and adult and obtained the rest of his reading competency from street urchins.
The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
Children can learn to read as early as two. Erik Hoel shows how it’s done in this video with his son. In most countries children learn to read around age four or five, while in Finland (which has one of the best education systems in the world) students first learn to read at seven. In spite of this delay, Finnish students score higher in reading comprehension than their US and UK counterparts at age 15. 9
In Switzerland where I (Ruth) was raised, students learn to read when they enter primary school at six or seven, two years later than in the UK. The British Institute of Social and Economic research undertook a two-year study of Swiss schools and found that Swiss students are four years ahead of their English counterparts, and that “the weakest secondary school students in Switzerland had a literacy level close to that of the average pupil in Britain”.
Researchers found that students progress was faster because of a “better foundation” established in kindergarten, where there was “less emphasis on early mastery of academic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, more on lengthening attention span and memory, and developing ‘social skills’ of learning together in a classroom setting”.
Importantly, students are taught using the traditional phonics method, learning about the building blocks of language first, allowing the children to progress faster and learn to read in about six months compared to three years when using a whole language approach.
The way we have been teaching reading may have inadvertently led to a crisis in literacy. Even the master author of sight-word books, Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), warned of the consequences:
They think I did it in twenty minutes. That damned Cat in the Hat took nine months until I was satisfied. I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties in which they threw out phonic reading and went to word recognition, as if you’re reading Chinese pictographs instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country.
The “whole language” approach views reading as a “natural” process (much like speaking). Yet cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf reminds us that, “reading is neither natural nor innate”. Instead, it begins with what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2—a slow type of thinking involving sustained attention and mental effort. It’s only through repetitive practice that slow System 2 thinking becomes fast System 1 thinking—automatic and effortless.
Info graphics such as this one were originally intended to illustrate how this interlocking systems of context, picture cues, and syntax, can help students make meaning out of a text, but have instead been misinterpreted by educators that this is how text should be decoded. In other words, students are taught to use the text to figure out the meaning of the words, recognize the appearance of words rather than learning to decode the sounds of letters, turning reading into a “psycholinguistic guessing game”10
Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Trained Mind11, points out that, “whole language teaching encourages children to guess” and that “illiteracy is still soaring in states where whole-language classrooms dominate.”
In Ontario, a Human Rights Commission Report prompted the province to mutely state that it will end the “three-cueing system” and will overhaul the language curriculum with a “focus on phonics” and other instrumental support for students. Amidst declining literacy rates across the U.S., Kelsey Piper reports how reading scores in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee have been steadily rising: “The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research…This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked ‘whole language’ method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound.”12
Rather than relying on institutions to teach (or not to teach) your child how to read, teaching your child to read at home is simple and can be accomplished in as little as 10 minutes a day.
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons – We used this classic to teach all three of our children to read.
See Dixie Dillon Lane’s post on How My Children Have Learned to Read for beginning reading ideas.
Erik Hoel offers a series on teaching your child how to read.
The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading by Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington offers a clear guide to teaching phonics at home.
All About Reading - research-based multisensory instruction for teachers and parents.
When your child is ready to move into early readers, don’t forget to dive into these wonderful classics:
See this note for additional classic early reader books.
Also, this post by Dominika is a wonderful resource: A picture book directory for the overwhelmed parent at the public library
Mensa’s Excellence in Reading Program provides wonderfully extensive reading lists starting with kindergarten.
Memoria Press Supplemental Reading List - A superb collection of books sorted according to grade/lexile levels.The recommended books for grades 3-up are in three categories: (1) classics (2) light reading (3) informational reading.
A Landscape with Dragons by Michael D. O’Brien contains over a thousand classic titles for family reading.
What are your favorite reading resources and/ or early readers?
How can you learn more words?
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick and generally congenial readers on earth… Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.
-E.B. White
One of the reasons that teachers may shy away from teaching classic literature is the advanced vocabulary richly peppered throughout older books.13 The downward trend toward the “doubleplusgood” of simplified language has been on a steady march in the educational system. Students expressive range is kept within grade level vocabulary lists — or the best “National Vocabulary Prevention Program” as educator Michael Clay Thompson calls them— and classic books that contain a rich cornucopia of language, have been pulled from curricula because they are deemed too complex, too inaccessible, or simply irrelevant.
James Marriott reports that, “A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children”. As this classic word chart by Michael Clay Thompson shows, those classics which are still taught in schools hold a mere vestige of the vocabulary which was once considered essential for good communication.
Knowing more words helps students process information more quickly, because prior knowledge of vocabulary lightens the load on working memory. The breadth and depth of a student’s vocabulary moves in tandem with their capabilities for abstract thinking. Each new word opens up a new pathway and leads to better expression of their own thoughts, as well as understanding others.
If you would like to support students in accessing the vocabulary of classic literature, a tremendously helpful starting place is the Classic Words list developed by Michael Clay Thompson. As an educator of gifted children, he began marking advanced vocabulary in every English language classic that he read, a task which eventually developed into a ten-year study of 35,000 examples from 135 different works. From his research he distilled the top 100 words that appear with high frequency in classic works of English and American literature:
My students have often thanked me for introducing them to these essential classic words. I have developed 10 simple worksheet lessons that help you or your student master the top 100 classic words along with their definitions This is what the pages look like (as a fan of cursive writing, I always leave space for copying words). You can download the classic vocabulary lists here.
If you are a parent and would like to support your child in developing a vast vocabulary and command over the English language (or want to increase your own), I highly recommend the vocabulary books by Royal Fireworks Press 14 or the series Vocabulary from Classical Roots.
Because more than half of commonly used English words, and over 90% of multisyllabic “big” words derived from Latin, learning even just 100 of the most common Latin (and Greek) stems gives your student access to at least 5000 English words. Thus, spending just 10 to 15 minutes on stem study a day, is an incredibly potent time investment. I have developed Latin / Greek stem study lists with accompanying practice worksheets, flashcards, and quizzes. You can download the first set of 10 free here. You can access the complete downloadable resources here.
Vibe literacy or classic reading?
A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.
From The Machine Stops by Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker, 2019
Henry Oliver related in a post last year that Freddy Baveystock, Head of English at Harris Westminster, suggested in the Times that to save English literature, “we should scrap Shakespeare” and students should instead study modern authors and Instagram posts.
In 2022 The National Council of Teachers of English issued a statement declaring, “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” In her viral essay The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books Rose Horowitz reports,
In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula.
Discussing this with Peco over dinner he offered this reflection: “This is a major values shift in how we think about literacy. The new suggestion makes it appear as if the goal is to allow students to read more ‘relevant’ literature. More likely, it’s to protect students from boredom, to protect their academic self esteem, and to protect teachers from having to deal with bored students. All this is part of a larger cultural vibe that emphasizes ease over effort and the entitled feelings of the self over our shared literary heritage.”
This shift in de-centering books and sustained reading in education reflects what we could call “vibe literacy”. Vibe literacy is characterized by reading snippets, ensuring students are entertained, lowering expectations to make students feel good, and focusing on opinions and feelings, resulting in shallow reading and estrangement from a rich literary heritage.
The comparison of two English courses below demonstrates how this shift translates into classrooms. The left side lists the reading expectations of a Grade 9 English public school course, on the right are the readings our daughter completed for a classical education Grade 9 English course.
We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are, not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others.
Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader Come Home
When teaching English literature we reach to the classic greats because they were skilled wordsmiths capable of transfixing the human condition onto the page. These classics are challenging, enhance our thinking, and at times require painstaking work, but render lasting rewards of a deepened and complex understanding of humanity.
Michael S. Rose reports that in a study of classical schools, “80% insist students read ‘great books’—not excerpts, not summaries, not textbooks written by committees, but the actual works of Homer, Euclid, Shakespeare, and the Founding Fathers. It’s as if they believe these books contain something our age of infinite information somehow lacks.”
If you would like to use a classical education approach to teaching English at home, try the Logos Press Brit Lit set which includes a primary unabridged texts and reference tools, reading schedule, assignments, etc. for a full-year course.
Also:
Ambleside Online Master Book List
The Thousand Good Books by John Senior: from nursery and grade school, to adolescent and young adult.
Audiobooks: Use Librivox and allow the child to listen to the story (while maybe reading along). Cheryl Winstead from The Thousand Good Books Project comments that, “people can listen at a higher reading level than they can visually read at. Audiobooks or read alouds can be a great way to help kids find joy listening to good literature and develop the vocabulary to understand it.” Check out their wonderful collection here: “Classic children’s literature in a podcast! We’re a family crowd-sourcing and -funding a growing library of audiobooks.”
Also see Classics Read Aloud for recordings and accompanying resources!
A young teacher friend was preparing to teach a Grade 10 English class this year. He related that he was disheartened because he was instructed by the school not to have his students read Romeo and Juliet, nor any other classic novel, because reportedly 60% of students had failed the Grade 10 literacy test . Instead he was to have them read parts of YA novels, a sure way to lose all interest in the beauty of the English language.
Shakespeare’s universal themes of love, pain, victories, and failure have remained the same over the centuries, or as columnist Heather Malik observed, “The world is complicated. No one explains it better than Shakespeare. Human nature doesn’t change…Shakespeare is eternal.”
THANK YOU to all fellow Substackers who stepped in and offered a plethora of suggestions for introducing kids to Shakespeare. Here is a selection:
How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare by playwright Ken Ludwig
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb
Inspired by Shakespeare - How I spread the feast that is Shakespeare in a way that both my children and I could partake by Carol Hudson
8 Year Olds Can Learn Shakespeare (paywalled) by Dr. Claire Honeycutt🕊️❤️
I think the best way is simply to take them to productions from a young age, if possible, or even watch some good film adaptations…You don’t have to make them sit through the whole thing at once, either! Read a scene, watch the scene, discuss the scene- or if they are brand new, watch the scene first.
As a former college literature professor, I often encountered students even at the college level who struggled with Shakespeare. When working with his dramas, therefore, I actually made free use of the many excellent film adaptations of his works. Whether in part or whole, these performances often unlocked comprehension for my student students, as well as provoking their genuine fascination with the plots. Bethany
Tessa Carman hosts Shakespeare play readings and also recommends beautiful picture books: “the Eric Kincaid-illustrated retelling of The Tempest has inspired me from childhood, and we have some beautiful editions of Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
Ryan Dickinson suggests getting to students via pop culture: “Paul Kelly has an album of interpretations of sonnets, and they’re beautiful - Akala has this talk about hip hop and Shakespeare”.
Erin Rhodes Shakespeare on Toast was helpful for me as I began to teach Shakespeare (I have taught him to ages ranging from 7th grade to undergrad). Good Tickle Brain had some stick figure comic renditions of whole plays that were well done, fun, and added that visual component that helps comprehension so much.
Carolina Nancy Kelly’s blog Sage Parnassus, and the podcast The Play’s The Thing by Circe. sageparnassus.com/my-to…
Kelsie Hartley recommends Digital Theatre as a great (paid) resource for watching plays.
How can I become a reader?
If you would like to restore your deep reading circuits and rediscover the joy, insight, and myriad of associated benefits of reading fiction, the first step is to committing to regularly reading tangible books.
Even reading just 30 min a day will allow the average reader to finish a shorter novel in under two weeks. If you spend an hour a day, you can complete a 400 page book in a fortnight.
Our Reading Rebellion post includes a downloadable pdf of over 150 fiction book recommendations from fellow Substack writers and readers in a variety of genres. All of these books are in the range of 200-400 pages to make them easily readable within a fortnight (or less).
If you experience difficulty with the act of reading, there are remedial steps you can take before diving into books. Susan Wise Bauer offers this diagnostic test in her excellent reading guide to reading: The Well-Educated Mind. She instructs,
“Glance at your watch’s second hand, note the time, and then read the passage below at normal speed.”
“How long did it take you to read the passage?…If it took you a minute or less to read this passage, you are already reading at an appropriate speed for serious prose. If you found no more than ten unfamiliar words in this passage, your vocabulary is already at the so-called-tenth-grade literacy level”.
To increase your reading speed or for remedial phonics practice, Susan Wise Bauer recommends Phonics Pathways and Wordly Wise 3000 or Vocabulary from Classical Roots to increase your vocabulary.
If you are not sure where to start reading, try these resources:
How to get started reading English literature by Henry Oliver
Read the Classics with Henry Eliot (He’ll be leading a free read along of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov next year!)
Join a slow read on Footnotes and Tangents by Simon Haisell
Reading Books Made a Man Out of Me. And why I’m launching ‘Old School,’ a new podcast about great books and how they can make us better men. by Shilo Brooks for The Free Press
The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer
Also:
The Great Books - History as Literature by Susan Wise Bauer
The Harvard Classics first compiled by Dr. Charles W. Eliot in 1909
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die edited by Peter Boxall, and written by over 100 hundred international critics.
Top 100 Works in World Literature -The editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.”
The Top 10: The Greatest Books of All Time - Contains 103 Books; Top 10 books chosen by 125 top writers from the book “The Top 10” edited by J. Peder Zane.
The Mensa reading list for grades 9-12 is also an excellent, extensive source to get started for adults.
The Thousand Good Books - Great Books of the Western World
The Greatest Books site is an excellent resource with 251 lists including Greatest Books of All Time Written by Women, Africa’s 100 Best Books, Favorite Books of Spanish Authors, Best Foreign Works Chosen by Francophone Writers , 100 Books to Read from Eastern Europe to Central Asia
If we give up our print books, we are giving up our semantic mountains. Without those mountains, we have no stable refuge of social and historical meaning. We will be tossed in floodwaters that move fast and break things, including the knowledge and stories, and traditions that have been thoughtfully curated over centuries.
from A Guide to Booklegging by Peco and Ruth Gaskovski
We conclude by returning to the beginning—to the World Economic Forum’s vision of the future, which defined reading as a “less essential” skill. At the same time, the WEF defined two of the core skills of the future as “Analytical Thinking” and “Creative Thinking”. Yet a person who cannot read long text and books—who lacks the literacy to process complex chunks of information—will have nothing to analyze but surfaces, vibes, and impressions. Only when we’re literate can we start to think deeply about what we’re reading, whether a nursery rhyme, novel, or scientific paper, and produce creative ideas on our own.
We can’t educate our youth through vibe literacy. They need to learn to read fluently, and we can help them by modeling it, filling our homes with books, and adopting well-proven methods for acquiring the skills.
So rather than cognitively offloading reading onto technology, or denigrating it to a non-core status, we can do the reverse: embrace it, and cognitively onload it. There won’t be any advanced future civilization of adults who can think deeply, unless preceded by a generation of youth who can read deeply.
For that, we need only take time. And it will make all the difference between doom or bloom.
So find a good book, and begin. Read daily and for sustained intervals, bathing your mind in long and beautiful or intelligent text. Read alone. Read to your children. Read without ceasing.
The future of society might depend on it.
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Further Reading
Reading Down by Grace Pate Pouch
How to teach your two-year-old how to read by Erik Hoel
15 Ideas to Motivate Your Children to Read by Graham Ormiston - check out his Storygram Parents a “newsletter providing advice, tips, and ideas to help parents who want their children to enjoy reading.”
What I Learned from Reading Peter Pan to my Children by Henry Oliver
Why Read the Classics? by The Culturist
The Idea Machine by Joel J Miller (see Peco’s review of the book here)
The Reading Wars: Why Natural Learning Fails in Classrooms by Peter Gray
When Children Are Not Read to at Home: The Million Word Gap
See here for empirical studies on book reading increasing child vocabulary.
Thanks to Boze for linking this study.
“Children who had experienced a higher level of conversational turns per hour had an increased verbal test score” and displayed greater brain activity. See Language unlocks reading: Supporting early language and reading for every child.
Thanks to Graham Ormiston for linking this study: Parental involvement in the development of children’s reading skill: a five-year longitudinal study.
“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status, and other family background characteristics… The difference between a bookless home and one with a 500-book library is as great as the difference between having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) and having university educated parents (15 or 16 years of education).” See Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations.
Wise Bauer further notes that whole language proponent Ken Goodman, professor of education at the University of Arizona, declares that, “accuracy is not an essential goal of reading”.
Please note that the book recommendations in this post are NOT affiliate links.
Literacy research demonstrates clearly that “becoming a good reader depends on understanding and using spellings and spelling-sound correspondences, and, conversely, that poorly developed knowledge or facility with spellings and spelling-sound correspondence is the most pervasive cause of reading delay or disability”.
As a second language learner (who had to read The Hobbit with a German-English dictionary in hand), I can attest that patience and practice is all that is needed to read even the most complex works of literature.
I’m not an affiliate - I simply love the curriculum and have never come across anything better.
The Mensa program provides wonderfully extensive reading lists students starting with kindergarten all the way to high school. The books can be read independently by the student, read aloud by the parent, or listened to as an audiobook (also, when a student completes a reading list, they receive a certificate of achievement and t-shirt).
I want to add a plug for reading poetry. Many books for toddlers and little kids rhyme, and some of them are quite clever. But once they were out of toddler ages, I intentionally read aloud poetry to my kids (starting around kindergarten age.) Robert Louis Stevenson and A.A. Milne are especially approachable as is a Child’s Book of Poems by Gyo Fujikawa. We branched out as they got older, but that early foundation in poetry as just another type of reading aloud we got to do together was a key step toward their ability to appreciate later things like Shakespeare, Beowulf, The Battle of the White Horse, the Fairie Queen, etc.
Thank you for the deep work of putting this together. Lots to think about.
The reading wars only exist and can only exist in languages that have very opaque orthographies. The exact same debate exists in English and in French. In languages with shallow orthographies, where one letter and one sound are close to a 1-1 match, there is no such debate, because learning the alphabet gets you almost all the way to reading. This makes comparing school systems across languages, especially age in first grade, a tricky subject.
(The inherent characteristics of the language you are learning to read in and how they impact how you learn to read is of particular interest to me, because my children have 4 native languages. I also learned to speak and read Japanese as an adult, and learning to read a non-alphabetic has deeply influenced how I think about reading.)