This is fascinating. The TL;DR is that teachers have been using the “three cues” system to teach kids to read which focuses heavily on using sentence structure, context and pictures (the way my 21st century kids were taught at school) This doesn’t work well, and a much better approach is to teach phonics so kids can sound out words and eventually memorize “word shapes” that they’re able to read faster than even looking at the individual letters or even making a mental image (the way my 20th century self was taught)