Curriculum
The curriculum is divided along several stages of increasing complexity, each introducing new aspects of literacy and building on the existing foundation. They are:
- Symbols
- Words
- Sentences
- Texts
- Writing
Symbols🔗
The first stage of the curriculum introduces every symbol used in English, starting with the alphabet, followed by numbers, and punctuation marks. Students are first asked to identify them and then asked to write them. When warranted, additional notes and examples are provided to clarify how the symbols are commonly used.
Words🔗
The next stage introduces words, starting from simple words of the form consonant-vowel-consonant and continuing all the way to complex words used in undergraduate and graduate material.
While the beginning of the curriculum follows a usual phonics structure, the program differs from most phonics offerings in ways that align better with fundamental principles of literacy acquisition. Rules are used to organize the lessons, but they are not taught explicitly. Metalinguistic concepts like "short vs long vowels" are completely avoided because they confuse students and fluent readers do not use them to read.
Instead, the concept of orthographic mapping is central to this stage. Orthographic mapping is the process by which previously unfamiliar words become instantly recognizable. Without ensuring this level of automaticity, students struggle to read fluently and spend precious cognitive resources on decoding tasks. For a much more detailed explanation of these concepts, please refer to the pedagogy document and the word courses section of the manual.
Each lesson in this stage comes in pairs: a reading lesson tests the student's ability to instantly read them and a dictation lesson tests their ability to quickly and accurately spell them.
The words stage contains twenty-five levels of courses, roughly organized as follows:
- Levels 1-8: One-syllable words
- Levels 9-11: Two and three-syllable words
- Levels 12-17: Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Greek morphology
- Level 18: Foreign loanwords, archaic and British English
- Level 19-25: Semantic categories organized by subject-matter. Starting from common categories like animals and food, the lessons progress to more specialized categories like economics, politics, astronomy, and medicine.
Altogether, the courses contain over 1,100 lessons that cover over 18,000 unique words.
Sentences🔗
After each word course follows a course that asks the student to read and write sentences that include the words introduced in the previous lesson. For example, after a course that introduced words like "mom", "their", "bought", and "bottle", the corresponding sentence course will include sentences like "Their mom brought dinner.", "I bought three bottles.", etc. As the curriculum progresses, the sentences also increase in syntactic complexity to gently introduce students to more complex structures in preparation for reading real texts.
Texts🔗
After a sufficient number of spelling patterns have been introduced, the next stage introduces texts of various types in ordering level of difficulty. The texts are varied across types (news, articles, fiction, poetry, essays), subjects (history, economics, philosophy), regions, eras, and more. Texts are annotated to carefully introduce background knowledge needed for comprehension. By the end of the levels, students will be reading college-level material and beyond. This stage includes only reading lessons.
Writing🔗
The final stage of the curriculum introduces writing. After each level of text courses, a writing course is interleaved. The courses do not ask students to perform writing tasks, but rather show students how excellent writers solve tasks at the sentence and paragraph level. Whenever possible, the tasks are based on the texts read in the previous stage.
Tasks Outside the Program's Scope🔗
Two important literacy tasks are outside the scope of the program due to their non-reproducible nature: reading entire texts and producing original writing. However, the rest of the curriculum supports these tasks. Students are encouraged to pick from the texts included in the program and read them in their entirety. Tutors can also go through the writing tasks and use them as a basis for writing production tasks.
Course Graph🔗
Below is a visual representation of the program's structure. The arrows indicate the dependent relationships between courses. That is, an arrow from course A to course B means that course A must be completed before course B can be started. Only courses are included because the graph is too large otherwise. To have a better look, right-click on the image and select "Open Image in New Tab".
It includes only the symbols, words, and sentence tracks, as the rest of the courses are still under construction.
