How can we solve the Problem?
Reading can be very enjoyable, and learning anything, when you feel constant progress, is also enjoyable. It is failing to learn that is both miserable, and demotivating. How can we make sure that a beginning reader is never frustrated, or faced with failure? The answer is in making sure they are never "stuck" on a word they cannot decipher, or sound out. The normal way to do this is having a helper (typically a literate adult) sit with them and prompt them with every word that they get stuck on.
The Read Easy app will be available, for free, on any smartphone or tablet. Most children (and illiterate adults) can access it, even if the phone is not theirs. The app will take you from any stage of literacy and hold your hand through reading more and more texts that increase in difficulty, without ever leaving you confused or frustrated. This will enable many learners to progress at their own speed, to as high a level of reading ability as they want.
The app can substitute for an adult; always available, never critical or irritated, always instantly helpful; to help them by reading the words they cannot, so they can learn and progress.
What will the User do?
The user will meet an interface that is sound-driven, so that even if they cannot read yet, they will be directed by a voice telling them how to get started. Once they open a text, they can read through it until they meet a word they don't know. To hear the word, they need only touch it. If they touch and hold the word, a popup will not just say the word, but spell it out one syllable at a time, reading them out loud, so that the learner can associate the sound with the written syllable.
Instead of getting stuck frequently, and building up frustration at not being able to make sense of the text, the learner should be able to progress smoothly through it, pausing for mere seconds whenever they meet a word they don't know, to sound it out. The more times that word is met, the more familiar it will become, so that it will soon be learnt, and form part of the learner's reading vocabulary.
There is a challenge for many learners, because the sound of a word depends on the accent of the speaker. If I say the word "bath" to rhyme with "math", and you say it to rhyme with "hearth", I may not readily make sense of the story. To help learners avoid the problem, the app will make it possible for a speaker of any accent to record the sounds of the words in their own accent into the app, so that the words sound "normal" to learners with the same accent. Once the system is well established, the beginner texts will be available in a wide range of regional accents.
What will be available on the App?
To begin with, the app will have a number of progressive texts based on a sound analysis of phonics. The first ones will have only short, simple words that use a small selection of letters, so that for the beginning reader, the learning load is as light as possible. As the texts continue, they will use the full range of the alphabet, but restricting the vocabulary to words where each letter represents a single consistent sound. Then come double letter groups such as "th" and "ch". Then we introduce the multiple sounds of simple spellings, as in the letter "a" in bat, far, and day. Finally, the texts will include multiple spellings of the same set of sounds.
For the learner, these texts will gradually introduce them to the range of spellings that make up English writing, giving them the chance to learn the easy ones thoroughly before going on to more challenging ones.
As well as the free texts available on the app, we will invite the authors and publishers of existing books to publish them on the app. They will decide whether to make them free or paid, but every book on the app will be sound-enabled, so that it works the same way as all the others. We expect to have both "learn to read" books, and popular children's and adult novels and other books, so that there is a wide variety from which learners can choose what interests them most. It would be wonderful if a beginning reader can quickly progress from basic texts which by their nature are less interesting than best-selling books, to those that they find most appealing, without ever getting stuck or frustrated in the process. This is expected to create avid readers out of many learners who at present are highly resistant, due to their frequent frustrations and failures.
At the same time, the paid books will provide an income stream which will finance the creation of new and better beginner materials, and the development of the app for use in other regional accents and in other languages.
How does this help me, a Parent or Teacher?
Parents and teachers can introduce the app to their learners, and it will operate as a helper. The learner can access reading materials on it, and practise reading without needing an adult to support them. This means that as long as they have access to the app on a phone, they can read as often as they like, as long as they like, and whenever they like. They can repeat sections if they found them hard, so they get more familiar and easier; or they can move ahead, reading more and more material that stretches their ability, all without ever getting stuck for want of a helper. The more they read, the more words will become familiar and known, and the more fluent their reading will become.
The app is agnostic with regard to teaching systems. It doesn't matter whether the learner has been taught to use phonics, to memorise sight words, or any other approach - what every learner needs is practice reading simple texts, followed by more complex and challenging ones, until they reach fluency. And this app will give them as much practice as they want, on demand. Slower learners can read and re-read the passages; faster ones can scoot ahead at the speed of their learning, no longer limited by the availability of someone to help them. In every case, we expect it to support and accelerate the process of learning to read.