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Parents [primary school]
The critical ages for learning to read are between the ages of 6 and 9. There is of course much that a parent can do before those ages and many problems can certainly be remediated after the age of 9 but, for most children, the reading habits acquired between ages 6 and 9 significantly determine their reading skills throughout their school days.
Before the age of 6 :
Obviously a child who is blind is going to be difficult to teach how to read but thankfully these are relatively rare. Poor processing of sounds however is much more common. If I was to design the perfect student I would certainly ensure that the child spoke clearly and could appreciate nursery rhymes and I would treat any suspicious hearing loss without delay. Those of course are things that most parents instinctively do but often parents make one big mistake: they teach their children the NAMES of the letters (Ay, Bee, See) rather than the SOUNDS....big mistake! It establishes letter names as the dominant memory attached to each letter.
The problem is that we need to know sounds before we can teach phonic skills (principally the blending of sounds into syllables) and, in most cases, these sounding-out (phonic) skills should be established first (read "Reading Through Tears" by Harrison & Clyde 2005). For example, when these children with name-dominance are asked to sound out a letter F, they immediately match the letter shape with the name ('efffff'). They can hear the 'fff' sound within the name and then correctly deduce that the sound of F must be'ffff'. Sounds OK doesn't it! But now consider the same process applied to the letter 'y' . The name-dependent child has stored Y as 'Wy'. He therefore deduces that the SOUND of Y must be 'w'. Similarly U is stored as 'Yoo' and the child therefore assumes that the sound of U must be 'y'. The most vulnerable letters are y, u, c, g, w and the five vowels. These bad habits then have to be undone before the infant can properly learn the sounds and apply phonic skills. Learning letter names first therefore frequently undermines a child's capacity and confidence in using phonic skills and the latest research indicates that we need to teach phonics first. (read the chapters on VAS Theory in 'Reading Through Tears').
After the age of 9:
By the time the child reaches the age of 9, reading habits, both bad and good, tend to become embedded. If we are to substitute good reading habits for poor reading habits, we need to make the good habits competitive so fast, so reliable that they become more reliable than the poor habits. Bad habits therefore require extra remedial time and the older the child the longer it takes to overwhelm the poor reading habits.
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