Following Frank C. Laubach’s thirty years of experience in teaching adult illiterates around the world in 300 or more different languages, he stated, “Over 90 percent of the world’s languages, writing styles, have one sound for a letter and one letter for a sound. In such languages learning to read is swift and easy, requiring from one to twenty days.” Furthermore, he found that in 295 of these languages (98 percent of them) students could master reading and writing in less than three months.
In comparison, most U.S. students require two and one-half years or more to learn to read well enough to succeed in school. As Rudolf Flesch explains, “Generally speaking, students in our schools are about two years behind students of the same age in other countries. This is not a wild accusation of the American educational system; it is an established, generally known fact. . . . What accounts for these two years? Usually the assumption seems to be that in other countries children and adolescents are forced to study harder. Now that I have looked into this matter of reading, I think the explanation is much simpler and more reasonable: Americans take two years longer to learn how to read—-and reading, of course, is the basis for achievement in all other subjects.
Frank C. Laubach believes even more time is lost: “It is estimated that two and one-half years are lost in the student’s studies because of our chaotic spelling.”
Perhaps most convincing of all is this quote: “In November 1974 Professor Durr reported on a study trip to Russia in the pages of The Reading Teacher. . . . He found that first-graders are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia. . . . All children in the USSR are given an ABC book and start to learn from it the day school begins. They learn at first about a letter a day and what it stands for, and gradually proceed to syllables and words. By December 15 of their first year all Russian children are through with their ABC books and start reading simple stories and poems. There is no further instruction in reading as such after the end of first grade.”