Progression in Materials for Learning to Read and Write - a Cross-Language and Cross-Century Comparison of Primers

This work is part of a larger effort about understanding the effects of didactic materials on acquisition of reading and writing in German. In this paper, the focus is on progression in primers (beginner readers). Texts in various languages are analyzed in terms of complexity, as measured by entropy between letters and phonemes, from the point of view of reading or writing that text. The assumption is that a good teaching text would start low and increase gradually in complexity. At the same time, languages have different requirements on progression depending on their orthographic depth. The goal of this work is to compare German primers to various other languages for the beginning stages of reading skill acquisition. We show that there are difference across languages and a large span of approaches in primers of presenting material to the learner.