Quote Originally Posted by gRomoZeka
I've read an article, which stated that thre are two ways of teaching kids to read in English (I don't remember the names). The first one uses reading rules, practicing at reading combinations of letters (ch, ck, etc.) and finally applying these rules to reading real words. That's the way they taught us in English classes.

The article said that this method was thought to be unroductive and many schools use the second way, based on memorizing "shapes" of words (the one, Yazeed described). But the author states that people who learned to read this way are often at a loss when they see an 'unfamiliar' word and generally they read slower have lower comprehensive abilities.

I remember this article because I was intrigued by this second method. I can't exactly understand how it works. Do you have to memorize every word? Or you just learn some number of basic words and then compare new words to them, guessing their pronunciation?
It's interesting, but weird.
I don't know about that theory exactly, but I can tell you how I was taught to read.

I learned before I started school because my mother taught me - first using letter blocks, which we used to form simple words, and then simply practicing. We'd take simple books and then I would read out loud. When I got it wrong, she'd correct me, and the errors gradually got fewer and fewer. It was as simple as that. By the time I started school, I could read anything, basically, and I had never been taught any "rules" at all.

It doesn't take long before you pick up the "pattern" of English pronunciation. I think anybody could learn to read in the same way.