How I Taught My Kid to Read
You teach Russian or Spanish with phonics. You teach Chinese with whole-word. English needs a bit of both, since it is mostly phonetic.<p>An on-demand approach to phonics works very well. The rules and exceptions are pointed out as mistakes are made. This avoids the boredom of drilling endless phonics rules and the long-term difficulty of whole-word.<p>A common mistake with phonics is the accidental association of specific vowels with consonants. For example, B is not buh. It is equally bye, boo, bah, and so on. When describing the sound B makes, it is best to always resist giving just a single example. Instead: babe, boob, Bob, bib, bub. That mistaken association causes trouble when sounding out words, because the extra vowel ends up in the resulting word. Something like "baby" turns into buh-ay-buh-ee with 4 syllables.<p>Untreated speech problems also interfere, no matter if you want to call them accents or dialects or whatever. It is common to fail to distinguish running from run-in, or pin from pen. It is common, particularly in New England, to drop or add an "R". This makes reading so much harder. Teaching a person to read can easily turn into speech therapy.<p>Late readers face the additional problem of not wanting to read books that parents would buy for 4-year-old kids. (the intersection of things 4-year-olds like and the things that won't offend or embarrass parents) There really isn't much adult fiction with the vocabulary at the level of The Cat in the Hat.