Unlocking Literacy: A Review of Our Research and Cutting-Edge Digital Learning Platforms Bringing Literacy to All Children

Heikki Lyytinen, Abiy Zewdu Agegnehu, Susan A. Galletly, Hong Li, Nshimbi Chomba J., Christopher Yalukanda & Natalia Louleli

Heikki Lyytinen 
University of Jyväskylä, Department of Psychology, Jyväskylä, Finland 
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2867-1749 
Email: heikki.j.lyytinen@jyu.fi

Abiy Zewdu Agegnehu 
Hawassa University, College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hawassa, Ethiopia
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7687-6621
Email: abiyz@hu.edu.et

Susan A. Galletly 
Central Queensland University, Australia 

Li Hong 
Beijing Normal University, Faculty of Psychology, Peking, China 

Nshimbi, C.J. 
Centre for Advancement of Literacy and Skill in School (CLASS), Lusaka, Zambia 

Christopher Yalukanda 
Centre for Advancement of Literacy and Skill in School (CLASS), Lusaka, Zambia 

Natalia Lauleli, 
Faculty of Education, Universidad de la Rioja, Logroño, Spain 
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1698-8765 
Email: natalia.louleli@unir.net

Abstract 

This review highlights our research endeavors to empower children to attain full literacy by cultivating their ability to comprehend and interpret written materials. By fostering deep understanding analytical and critical reading comprehension, we provide students with optimal learning opportunities that equip them with the skills to succeed. Building on the foundation of basic literacy skills, including effective word-reading and word-writing, using consistently written alphabetic orthographies, our approach challenges traditional reading acquisition models historically dominated by English-based research. Instead, we focus on developing a more inclusive and globally applicable understanding of literacy that will benefit students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds emphasizing training for children living in poor countries.

We propose that basic literacy skills of word-reading and spelling are acquired through associative learning: making solid connections between spoken and written language units. We demonstrate that the difference between transparent alphabetic writings, such as those found in African local languages, Finnish, German, Italian, and Spanish, and less transparent writings, such as English and Asian morpho-logographic orthographies, build overwhelmingly from the size of the written units used in learning, e.g., phonemes versus rimes and whole words, and orthographic complexity. We discuss the Transparent-Opaque Orthography Conundrum, whereby children in the world’s many nations with highly consistent orthographies may have a greater need for focused instruction building reading comprehension than children who read English or other complex orthographies. 

Quite possibly, given diminishing PISA and PIRLS results in many nations, the most important message of our article is its emphasis on Full Literacy and how to acquire it using digital training games.

Introduction 

Despite significant advances in psychological research, there is a lack of focus on how children can most effectively learn to read. The existing body of research has identified key factors influencing reading outcomes, yet these findings have not been adequately translated into practical solutions to improve children’s learning. Learning is the foundation of human development, and acquiring academic knowledge is essential for personal and national prosperity, particularly in less developed regions. Given that reading is the primary means by which most academic learning begins from an early age, ensuring that children worldwide develop strong literacy skills is a critical goal. As a result, prioritizing literacy education globally is essential for unlocking the full potential of future generations.

The widespread availability of the Internet and ever-cheaper smartphones connected to it, especially in developing countries, have made it easier than ever to empower us in training children to reach the main goal of reading, i.e., acquiring Full Literacy, powerfully comprehending what is read, for both enjoyment and learning via reading. 

In the past, our team took the first step towards addressing this issue by developing a digital training tool, termed Ekapeli in Finnish, then later, GraphoGame (GG) in other nations, to help children learn to decode text. Initially, we focused on Finnish, a consistently written language (e.g., Lyytinen, Ronimus, Alanko, Poikkeus & Taanila, 2007) then later expanded to support building of basic reading skill of alphabetic orthographies in over 30 nations (Lyytinen, Erskine, Kujala, Ojanen & Richardson, 2009; Lyytinen, Semrud-Clikeman, Li, Pugh & Richardson, 2021). 

The international version of GG enables children to acquire basic reading skills, or basic literacy, by training themselves to sound out text accurately and fluently. With the widespread availability of the internet and affordable smartphones, especially in developing countries, we found GG worked effectively in training Basic Literacy in Africa in Zambia (for a review of research in Africa, see Ojanen, Kujala, Richardson & Lyytinen, 2013). 

Later, in the same African country, Zambia, we intensively studied the efficiency of the GraphoGame to train Basic Literacy skills to find that even fluent Basic Literacy skills were not sufficient for elevating children’s school achievement and academic results. 

Everything we write in this article received its impetus from this dramatic, unexpected observation that building effective word-reading and spelling skills, which enable effective independent reading and writing, did not translate into strong reading comprehension and academic learning. GraphoGame research had always rated its efficiency by assessing Basic Literacy skills which we – and apparently most Finnish teachers – believed was sufficient for school learning. Now we’ve realized that this is not necessarily true. We need to prioritize to understand that the goal of reading being is what PISA results measure: effective analytical reading comprehension, or Full Literacy as we term it. 

Recently both PISA and school achievement have been falling in many countries as we will show later in this article. We believe that this is because our world has changed. Children are no longer reading as they did decades ago. In consequence, many are now failing to naturally develop the reading strategies needed to effectively comprehend text. Children used to read leisure material, which builds strong comprehension and thinking on what was being read – indeed, few children persist in leisure reading, and without effective reading comprehension. 

Many children no longer apply their Basic Literacy skills although almost 100% of Finnish children effectively master Basic Literacy skills during the first semester of the first grade. Still Finnish PISA results are declining. Children in nations with highly consistent orthographies, are perhaps treating every word and sentence as equal, rather than prioritizing those carrying key information. Such a behavior may result from the fact the readers of consistently written language does not require that learner knows the meaning because accurate and fluent sounding of any written word is possible without knowing its meaning. They had to start reading interesting materials as they used to do earlier. This cannot be done without soon starting to fully understand the red line of the stories they read. Thus, all who have such materials and will start reading as soon BLS has been acquired, can start soon enjoying and learning from the texts they read.

New Digital Training Tools Building Reading Comprehension

The observation in rural Zambia initiated our search for ways to train children not only to learn Basic Literacy skills but also to efficiently comprehend what they read. In this article we will inform you how we have proceeded. 

A draft article of the first empirical proofs (Nshimbi & Lyytinen, submitted) is available while writing this in ComprehensionGame.info pages. Today, we are updating our digital learning environments to empower children to achieve Full Literacy, which enables both enjoyment and learning through reading. Our new digital training tools are called ComprehensionGame and Tale Reader. Both are now being validated in Zambia after the initial research revealed them to be very promising. In this study, Nshimbi and Lyytinen piloted the first ComprehensionGame (CG), in the rural district of Katete in Zambia, working with adults and children. Children’s results were evaluated by observing how their reading comprehension skills based on the use of the CG elevated their school performance. We were also able to observe CG’s effectiveness in training rural adults. All participants first acquired Basic Literacy skills using GG implemented to train reading of their own language (Nyanja). Initially, no participants could sound out text in any language, but all learned to decode their local language after using GG. 

Adults given the opportunity to use first GG and then CG developed effective comprehension for reading relatively complex texts discussing the impact of climate change on their farming activities. Reading comprehension was assessed before and after use of the training games, using interviews. 

The child and adult groups reached relatively good reading comprehension skills after extended exposure to CG. Children had access to CG across a time window of approximately 360 hours (15 days), while adults had access for approximately 240 hours (10 days), with this being the length of time the devices containing the training games were loaned to them. Texts used were designed to have both relevance and interest for readers. Following training, adults showed effective comprehension of their reading, e.g., they were able to discuss the impact of the war in Ukraine, which they’d previously not known about, and the local cost of fertilizers.

The children’s performance in central school disciplines improved despite the content used in CG being carefully selected not to contain any key information related to the knowledge they needed to learn to earn school marks. We compared children exposed to CG to their demographic related classmates who were not exposed. The CG group performed far above their non-CG classmates. The measure used was the change in children’s school marks given by teachers who did not know which children had and had not had access to CG. 

Our Approach to Overcoming Literacy-Related Challenges 

This article will explore ways to bridge the significant gaps in literacy acquisition between countries and cultures. To achieve this, we will include a focus on the level of orthographic complexity children face in learning to read in different nations and on literacy development we have studied two key groups: learners with dyslexia, who face significant challenges in acquiring Basic Literacy skills, and illiterate African children and adults who have lacked both Basic Literacy skills and access to exciting reading materials last of which could have been supporting them to proceed to reach the goal of reading. We will share our initial success stories in helping these learners take the steps towards Full Literacy, initially mastering decoding (Basic Literacy), then mastering Full Literacy, i.e., effective comprehension and analytical thinking, to provide a broader narrative to illustrate the challenges and opportunities for overcoming these barriers. 

One of the main challenges for building literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa is the lack of access to reading materials written in local languages. Our two innovative digital tools, Comprehension Game (CG) and Tale Reader (TR), were purposely designed to meet this challenge. We explain these tools below. 

Our thinking builds from our research using digital learning environments to train literacy skills, including:

1. GraphoLearn technology, which we have studied for years using the term GraphoGame (GG), which helps children master Basic Literacy (decoding) skills of letter-sound knowledge, word-reading, and spelling. GG is now commercially available using its original name (GraphoGame) because universities cannot work as distributors. After selling the GG we have been able to use the term GraphoLearn (GL), when using the GG for research.

2. ComprehensionGame (CG), a new game-based platform that builds skills for critically analyzing and comprehending text while also building enthusiasm for reading and empowering knowledge acquisition via reading. As an additional feature, it also supports the development of critical reading skills, which are increasingly needed today. CG is language-independent, mostly using texts developed by teachers and others in their local language. This system of educators making texts in their local language makes CG accessible to teachers and learners worldwide under the guidelines we have published for them. To fully understand how CG works, one needs to learn to implement content. The associated Creator software is then used to implement the local language content. Users are trained to use the Creator by playing the CG that instructs the Creator’s use. 

The chief task of CG is to motivate children who have practical word-reading skills to decide whether each sentence of the text is True or False and learn to identify the most informative (to be memorized) sentences of the text (see, Lyytinen & Louleli, 2023). Texts are usually made by children’s teachers, often being updating tasks for recently taught content thus fulfilling the need of having appropriate background knowledge when learning something new. We have formulated several models for CG text development. In Finland, SG texts are available for key information in all Grade 2 schoolbooks. In Africa, teachers are advised to proceed comparably.

Key sentences in the texts summarize lesson-by-lesson the critical to-be-stored contents of the curriculum, building on top of what has recently been taught at school. Initial results show that CG can effectively empower reading comprehension among illiterate rural adults and children using their local African language, as shown by the study of Nsimbi & Lyytinen (read from the ComprehensionGame.info pages). We are now working to validate CG’s effectiveness globally. 

3. Tale Reader (TR), our newest digital training environment: a story-listening-based platform tool designed to fill the gap caused by the home literacy environment (HLE) being highly compromised in Sub-Saharan Africa. TR models parental reading of stories while supporting children to learn to read words and providing the story via listening that guarantees the comprehension of the text flow. It also contains stories that instruct Basic Literacy skills explicitly via giving models of instructing the sounds of letters, syllables, and words of animals that children know from pictures shown to them. TR is designed for use with specific individual languages: in the context of this article, we discuss the use of our Tale Reader with African children. 

TR provides a central element of the earliest literacy development. Children enjoy interesting stories in their home language and experience largely implicit learning, (with explicit learning in special sessions) in learning to build Basic Literacy skills. They simultaneously pursue the goal of reading for meaning while learning to read words. TR thus combines the two crucial steps, decoding and comprehension, empowering children to acquire effective Basic and Full Literacy. It contains specially tailored versions of content which also help children who face difficulties in learning decoding skills. Such versions are tailored for each individual language to use words that children know by looking at included pictures. It is intended that, over time, TR will be developed for increasingly more languages and orthographies, with its use explored across nations. An important property of how the reading to children is realized models the way how many children learn to read before school from parents reading of stories by pointing which word s/he is reading when the story is read. 

These tools, CG and TR, support what we term Global Literacy: a strong focus on making literacy development easy to access and achieve across developing nations. 

Both CG and TR are designed to be powerful tools for achieving the goal of global Literacy, i.e., a strong focus on making the development of Full Literacy easy and available across developing nations. We view this as a major way to help children of poor countries learn knowledge starting from early school years, developing efficient readiness for academic learning via reading. 

Both CG and TR run on affordable Android phones, which families in developing nations widely use. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly developing possibilities to translate local language versions of translations stories used in TR. Additionally, training in the use of AI bots for knowledge gathering is included in CG goals. 

We believe these tools have the potential to significantly impact global literacy rates, whose efficiency should be tested based on Full Literacy (instead of the available statistics of today that informs about levels of the Basic Literacy only). We are excited to share our journey and progress with you. 

Basic Literacy (Decoding) Develops Via Associative Learning

Learning requires some consistency between the to-be-connected stimuli. This is easy and apparent when learning to decode transparent writings, which are consistent at grapheme-phoneme level. However, not all orthographies are highly consistent. This creates differences in how learners are able to benefit from spoken and written connections. Ziegler and Goswami (2005) showed that English readers must use larger units to benefit from consistency. Thus, they propose larger units such as rime units as appropriate for this purpose. For a layperson, “ing” is a good example, each being a sequence of phonemes/letters that sound the same way in all contexts of written English.

Identifying and Addressing Reading Difficulties

To overcome reading challenges, we must first identify the key obstacles that hinder children from developing reading skills. Sometimes, the most common bottleneck is ineffective instruction. This is a central problem when children are taught in underdeveloped countries and when the language whose reading must be learned is complex – not consistent to be easy to learn. In orthographies, inconsistency of the connections between spoken and written creates challenges and the potential effects of inappropriate instructions are stronger than those faced by teachers of readers who had to learn to master transparent writing. Very few teachers know and apply association learning theory when instructing reading of English. And furthermore, such connections that work consistently in English relative to consistent orthographies, are very few, not covering all the words children need to learn to spell. Really, it’s only at the word level that full consistency exists in English. The word-level storing of the spoken language makes it possible for second-language learners to benefit themselves when they acquire vocabulary by storing the written words using whole-word images to accumulate their vocabulary of English. This whole-word acquisition of reading skills in English seems neglected in literacy research covering second-language learners of reading English

Most literacy research is based on English, which is a hugely atypical orthography, relative to the highly consistent orthographies most nations use. What’s needed is a model of how Basic Literacy skills can be acquired among alphabetic readers who read far more transparent writings. The greatest difference between English and these is that in English virtually no letters represent the same phoneme across all common words – quite the opposite to what the majority of learners, in consistent-orthography nations, face when being instructed to acquire Basic Literacy skills. The table 1. below shows examples of the complexity of English orthography.

Letter	%	of different words	all words	Exemplary word
i	62.3	24076	3471217	I (in)
I	19.4	4386	1083446	aI (i)
I	5.1	2519	283459	i (social)
L	95.4	22272	2934160	l (all)
D	94.4	14990	2844232	d (and)
M	100.0	11176	1817206	m (from)
B	99.0	7726	1169525	b (be)

By examining the process of reading and understanding the difficulties that arise, we can pinpoint the underlying causes of these obstacles. Our research has shown that even children with severe dyslexia can make significant progress when we consider the environmental factors contributing to their difficulties. In the following sections, we will explore the common causes of severe reading difficulties and effective strategies for overcoming them. 

Solving Problems of Acquisition of Reading Skills: A Genetic and Environmental Puzzle 

Dyslexia is a problem that involves both genetic and environmental factors (Vellutino et al., 2004). Developmental dyslexia, which impacts children with familial risk for dyslexia is deeply rooted in brain development. It is commonly defined to involve difficulties in phonological processing (e.g. Ramus et al., 2003; Goswami, 2002), morphological processing (Lyytinen & Lyytinen, 2004; Louleli et al., 2020; 2022) and visual perception (e.g. Valdois, Bosse & Tanturier, 2004). Below, we show how many children with dyslexia have difficulties processing sounds and connecting phonemes to the written symbols representing these. We optimistically believe that optimal instruction can help overcome reading difficulties, even in children with severe dyslexia, particularly if the children are reading a highly consistent orthography.

Observing the Behavioral Cause of Dyslexia

Research conducted under the leadership of the first author in Finland, the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD; for the latest review of the main results, see Lyytinen, Erskine, Hämäläinen, Torppa & Ronimus, 2015), used advanced techniques including brain imaging and behavioral assessments to follow from birth to adulthood the development of participants at familial risk of dyslexia, and a low-risk control group. The JLD findings showed that children at familial risk for dyslexia who develop reading difficulties have difficulties differentiating acoustically close sounds to connect these reliably to their letters, which can lead to compromised Basic Literacy skills (Leppänen et al., 2010; Hämäläinen et al., 2012, 2021; Lohvansuu et al., 2021). 

That this differentiation of the acoustically close sounds is a behavioral cause of dyslexia is strongly attested to by the means used in detecting it in the JLD. Soon after birth, a subsample of JLD children from both groups participated in a brain event-related potential (ERP) study to observe so-called mismatch negativity (MMN) invented by famous Finnish researcher Risto Näätänen. It uses rare deviant sounds, interspersed within a sequence of repeated sounds, to show that the brain detects (responds to) the difference. In the JLD study, for 3-5 day old newborns the repeated sound used was a 1000 Hz sinusoidal tone pip and the rare (12%) deviant sound differed only in having a higher pitch (1100 Hz). As Figure 1 shows, the MMNs was clearly evident in the ERPs of newborns who did not end up facing reading problems but was not evident for children with familial risk who would face reading problems 8 years later.

Removing the Bottleneck that Leads to Dyslexia

A bottleneck is a situation that causes delay in a process. For Basic Literacy skills, difficulties mastering letter names and sounds is a bottleneck for at-risk readers. Studies run in Finland showed that sufficient drilling of connections between spoken and written language, (which in Finnish language means phonemes and letters representing these,) could reduce the auditory insensitivity or fuzziness of sounds that at-risk children struggle with. For this purpose, the first author coordinated the development of Ekapeli (see Figure 2, from which GraphoGame was later developed to train readers of other languages). It was shown that Ekapeli (First Game in English) could help in reducing difficulties, evidencing that, as expected, the connections requiring the most drilling to become stored, were acoustically closest items: connecting the sounds of l, m, and n to their letters (Niemelä et al., 2020).

On the left side is the traditional Ekapeli-display where written items are slowly falling and the players has to be able to choose the letter representing the sound s/he hears from the headphones. On the right side the figure reveals how the learner has consistently failed to identify the /N/ sound when M was an option (7 times). However, they stopped choosing S to represent /N/ in the last fourth of the trials (no errors in the final 9 of 34 trials with S as an option). For more details, see Lyytinen et al., Scand. J. Psychol., 2009, 50, 668-675 and Saine et.al., Child Development, 82, 3, 1013-1028 for documentation of the efficiency of the game in supporting learning among at-risk children (from which this figure is modified.)

The original Ekapeli was developed two decades ago (see Lyytinen, Ronimus, Alanko, Poikkeus & Taanila, 2007; Lyytinen, Erskine, Kujala, Ojanen & Richardson, 2009). Its validation studies of versions implemented for different languages were made under the name GraphoGame (GG). The results of tens of studies were then summarized by Lyytinen, Semrud-Clikeman, Li, Pugh, and Richardson (2021) revealing its success. The University of Jyväskylä, needing to focus on research, could not concentrate on distributing the GG, which had to become commercialized for wider use.

Ending The Bottlenecks Zambian Children Face Due to Environmental Reasons

GG trains the Basic Literacy (i.e., to learn accurate and fluent decoding) skills to children who, for some reason or another, are not receiving sufficiently effective instruction in school. Before we introduced Zambian learners to the opportunity to use our Ekapeli-based GraphoGame/GraphoLearn technology, their readiness to acquire Basic Literacy skills was highly limited. The GG/GL’s studies could complete the acquisition of the Basic Literacy skills under the conditions that both teachers and children use it, as shown in Figure 3.

Training Children to Acquire Basic Literacy Skills Using Our Games

Training successfully children with dyslexia requires a multifaceted approach that considers biological, environmental, and social factors. The JLD study revealed that severe developmental dyslexia most likely occurs among children who have a genetic background, i.e., in family lineages frequently showing dyslexia (Lyytinen et al., 2015). Among the 200 children followed in JLD, all children who faced severe reading problems had familial backgrounds, although milder decoding problems were observed also among some children born to families that failed to identify any relatives with dyslexia. The problems of these latter children quite likely have an environmental origin, i.e., insufficient instruction and/or low learner interest in practicing reading. 

Experimental research can provide convincing answers by varying potential causes and measuring changes in the dependent variable, here in the difficulty to acquire the decoding skills. Such an experimental intervention study could be made after JLD to new samples, using Ekapeli as an intervention (independent variable). These research studies have revealed, as expected from the results described above, that auditory insensitivity compromises the acquisition of decoding skills. The most likely interpretation is that the difficult-to-differentiated phonemes could not be connected reliably to the letters representing these. Happily, drilling the connections between spoken and written language can help these children, however, quite likely, only game-based learning will make the extent of drilling needed tolerable enough to overcome this problem. Achieving hundreds of repetitions in a child is difficult for any teacher and child, whereas game-based learning, used strategically, can keep both motivation and practice levels high. 

That Ekapeli as such is very successfully helping children facing problems in learning to read was documented in detail in a number of Finnish studies (see Lyytinen et al., 2007; 2009; Saine, Lerkkanen, Ahonen, Tolvanen & Lyytinen, 2010, 2011, 2013). Later on, we focused on the identification of the key difficulties that were expected to be observed in learning to master differences between acoustically close phonemes, such as those represented by the letters l m and n, which will be discussed below. 

All difficulties observed from the JLD study showed speech-perception-related challenges. Such problems tend to affect the accuracy of decoding in a short time, also among typical Finnish learners. This is the variation of phonemic length affecting the meaning of common words such as tuli, tuuli, and tulli. It is difficult to master spelling among almost anyone but Finnish and Estonian people who have become sensitized to make such differentiations from birth. Ulla Richardson’s dissertation (1998) empirically showed this in the JLD. 

By studying these challenges experimentally, Finnish researchers could observe and document the effects of Ekapeli intervention through both behavioral assessments (Pennala, Richardson, Ylinen, Lyytinen, H., & Martin, 2014) and brain activity measurements (Lovio et al., 2012). We agree with most researchers who have studied the causes of severe reading difficulties that speech perception problems are a central factor contributing to such problems, which are particularly evident when auditory demands are high. 

Our research has identified several approaches and strategies for identifying and addressing reading difficulties. Most notably, the Dynamic Assessment (DA) feature is particularly effective in both identifying and treating learning-related problems in learning-game contexts. DA can be used with all our digital learning games.

A Dynamic Assessment Approach and Support

In this article, we use the term Dynamic Assessment (DA) to mean computer-based monitoring of children’s learning successes and errors, with instruction then modified by the computer program, changing strategically in response to children’s data, so that instruction is tailored precisely to meet the child’s current, immediate learning needs. Integrating assessment and treatment simultaneously allows for continuous progress monitoring and immediate support. 

When initiated early and effectively, DA is accurate for identifying, e.g., Finnish children at risk of Basic Literacy difficulties at school entry. In African studies, DA has been found effective in identifying children with dyslexia who need strategically tailored instruction via digital training games. DA identifies children who are unlikely to learn to master effective literacy using usual school instruction. This precise identification tool is valuable in the Zambian situation where typical Western identification tools show that virtually all Zambian children are at risk, with most experiencing very poor start in learning to decode, evident even after two years of instruction, as shown by Jonathan Munachaka, whose dissertation is under review at the time of writing this text. 

Many studies have shown the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach effective in identifying and addressing learning difficulties. However, using traditional RTI methods, intervention is usually delayed. Being delayed, sometimes for weeks and often until the next term or semester, can hinder progress and cause the learner to experience a very stressful life. Games that utilize the DA approach provide immediate, tailored support and targeted help precisely when it’s needed. They epitomize in many ways RTI used with most substantial effect. 

Dynamic Assessment monitors the learner’s effectiveness in learning (storing connections between the spoken sounds and written letters and words), tracks progress as the learner is moved from familiar items to more complex ones and organizes for the learner to experience as many repetitions as are needed to achieve effective learning, and reliable long-term memory storage of learned concepts, to be achieved. It offers immediate help that’s precisely what is needed, diagnosing difficulties in real-time, and simultaneously providing needed intervention. And most importantly, it is not just in training to decode where the digital learning games can apply DA. CG can apply it comparably for the support of efficiently acquiring Full Literacy, as discussed later in this article.

Keeping Learners Engaged

Maintaining learner engagement is crucial for any learning and easy to maintain in game-based training. Most children find learning using computer-game contexts engaging. In addition, for effective game-based learning, it’s essential to organize learning so that the player does not experience repeated failures, which can lead to frustration and disengagement. In a computer game, after a few failed trials, this can be managed by providing easier items known from earlier behavior of the learner in the game to result to successful choices and thus positive feedback and reinforcement, which encourages learners to continue playing and motivates them to improve their skills. GG uses visual and auditory cues to provide a range of positive feedback options to keep learners engaged, e.g., see Figure 2 for Finnish and Figure 4 for English; the first is an illustration of the traditional form of the game and the second shows how learning to store the connections between written and spoken English requires use of larger units.

Early Identification of The Need for Help

Timing is critical in identifying and addressing learning difficulties. Our studies have shown that mostly only preventive training leads to success. The optimal time to start using GG and Dynamic Assessment on the days the child enters school is to prevent basic literacy difficulties in children learning to read a consistent orthography. 

Early identification can be achieved at a much younger age, as shown above. However, while very early identification has interest for academic purposes, there are potent advantages when support is provided when children’s brains are as mature as possible to succeed in benefiting from training related to reading acquisition. At the same time, it is essential to prevent difficulties by carefully timing interventions so that children do not view themselves as weaker learners than their classmates. Thus, timing assessment and training to be at school entry, in the first weeks of school, works well using the games and Dynamic Assessment to establish needs and provide strategic training.

Our studies have shown that other time-related issues must also be carefully tailored to be effective. Short sessions several times per day work best, with sessions no longer than 15 minutes and children having breaks of at least an hour between sessions. Children benefit most when sessions continue on consecutive days until Basic Literacy skills of letter-sound knowledge, word-reading, and spelling are mastered for their consistent orthography. In contrast to English (Galletly, 2023; Galletly, Share & Knight, 2024), in the many nations with consistent orthographies, this mastery of basic literacy means children have adult-level accuracy in word reading and spelling from early in Grade 1, then developing speed and fluency over time (Lyytinen, 2023).

Importantly, our research has shown that for all languages and orthographies, it is essential to avoid pushing or coercing children to play GL, which means pauses of days are sometimes needed. Play-based learning, with children engaged and motivated, is a crucial aspect of GL success. Keeping the child “hungry” to want to use the learning game is essential, which is why too long sessions should be avoided. 

Multiple factors indicate the need for and value of using game. The JLD study provides the data and directions needed to identify at-risk children. Firstly, we consider the child’s familial background, as a history of dyslexia can increase the risk of developing the condition. Secondly, we pay attention to delays in spoken language development, particularly if both expressive and receptive language have been delayed (see Figure 5).

Figure 5 shows how so-called late talking can appear as a delay of either expressive and/or receptive language observable at 2 years of age. As shown in the figure, having familial risk (see the right part of the reminders above) slightly delays spelling acquisitions. As shown the most significant effect of the delays can be observed, however, in the learning of children with familial risk, for whom both expressive and receptive spoken language development have been delayed.

In addition, and perhaps most importantly, we observe how the child stores and recalls letter names and sounds when using GL at the start of school (which also reveals the knowledge of the sounds of the letters), as difficulties in spontaneously storing letter names and sounds can be a highly reliable indicator of the likelihood of a child facing difficulty in learning Basic Literacy skills. Unlike many English letters, Finnish letter names each cues well the sound of this letter. In Finland, we have observed that if children have not stored letter names by the time they start school, this accurately indicates their need for Ekapeli (or GL elsewhere). Figure 6 shows how letter naming is a much more accurate predictor than any other early measure collected during the JLD study.

Most important is, however, to attend to the predictors that anticipate how the learner will reach the real goal of reading and effective reading comprehension, which PISA results reveal. Figure 7 shows that the most severe bottleneck for Full Literacy builds from the combination of familial background and delay in receptive and expressive language development. In the JLD data, this combination proved too much for usual Finnish remedial education (despite the families in the study having been provided with strong support to assist development) to support children to achieve healthy PISA results. 

It is important to note that Ekapeli couldn’t be designed and developed until after the JLD children were past critical school age. Because of this, Ekapeli was not available to the JLD participants when they started school.

Figure 8 shows the connections between development of the spoken language and steps of learning to master the written language. The acquisition of Basic Literacy is connected to relatively late developmental steps of spoken language, as seen in the phonology column and especially that of letter naming. In contrast, the acquisition of Full Literacy (as reflected by the PISA results) has its starting points far earlier, in early language development. The early speakers acquired more advanced Full Literacy (PISA results) relative to the other children although their Basic Literacy skills were not necessarily mastered any earlier, with some, in fact, later than many other children. 

Figure 8 highlights the children most likely to need training in reading comprehension using Comprehension Game. These are learners who were late to develop language skills as young children and who thus may be less likely become interested in language-related skills and to be able to build effective reading comprehension skills.

The Role of Digital Tools for Literacy Acquisition in Finland and Other Nations

Our approach is grounded in traditional learning theory, implemented successfully by the first author using GL (for a review of our related studies, see Lyytinen et al., 2021). Studies using GL consistently show that associative learning is crucial to effective instruction of basic literacy skills, as our successful training using GG has shown (Lyytinen et al. 2021). It does this quickly for typical learners in consistent-orthography nations, often needing less than a few hours of playing time when its use is distributed optimally. For learners of fully transparent writing systems such as Finnish, typical school beginners can acquire Basic Literacy skills within minutes rather than hours of playing, and most children with learning difficulties are highly accurate after a few hours of playing if Ekapeli (Lyytinen, 2023). 

GL has also been used with success for training early learners of less consistent French (Lassault, et al., 2022), and highly inconsistent English (Kyle et al., 2013) also, including those with atypical learning needs (Ahmed et al., 2020). For reading acquisition of English orthography, gains from GL use are considerably less than those made by consistent orthography readers. Whereas GL often progresses consistent-orthography children to very high, adult levels of word-reading and spelling accuracy, with children learning to read English making slower progress. GL is continued until children reach the level of skills of their classmates: this, for English children, represents significant gains, with many now rescued from the ongoing severe difficulties many English readers experience across all school years. 

While many consider nations such as Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China to have highly complex orthographies, children in these nations do not struggle as English readers do. This is because the nations moved last century to 2-Stage Early Literacy, preventing damaging effects from their complex orthography by holding back that orthography, with children first learning to read and write a highly consistent beginner’s orthography, which builds both literacy and learning skills (Galletly, 2023; Galletly et al., 2024). GL has been developed for the highly consistent beginner orthographies of China’s Pinyin, Taiwan’s Zhuyin, and Japan’s Hiragana. However, GL has not as yet been designed for those nations’ complex morpho-logographic orthographies, only for the highly regular beginners’ orthographies, Pinyin in China, and Hiragana in Japan.

Basic Literacy is necessary but not sufficient for achieving Full Literacy

To acquire Full Literacy naturally, children must start reading materials they judge as interesting. We could call these materials leisure reading. Leisure reading trains readers fast to reach the reading goal, i.e., learning to comprehend the stories. One could wonder if they would read these exciting stories without being able to follow their red lines and thus understand everything well enough. 

However, not all children with Basic Literacy skills start to read leisure materials today. They thus require additional support to build reading comprehension and Full Literacy. Surprisingly, school instruction does not focus on building reading comprehension. It could be easy. Including exciting reading material as obligatory reading for learners to choose from and test that they have understood the story, e.g., by essay writing, would help. This strategy has been used to confirm reading comprehension in only a few countries. This may be because, in decades past, after learning the Basic Literacy skills children would soon move to leisure reading, and this built reading comprehension skills. In today’s world, however, extensive leisure readers are far less common. Even in Finland, whose children gained the highest PIRLS and PISA scores among nations two decades ago, a reduction has been observed across the last ten or so years, with this also observed in school learning based on reading comprehension. 

This drop in Finnish results, in combination with Zambian children’s academic results not improving from GL use, and effective Basic Literacy skills caused the first author to realize that many children need extra support to build Full Literacy skills of strong reading comprehension and thinking analytically about the texts being read. He then designed the demand characteristics, and paid for and coordinated the programming, of Comprehension Game (CG) to train Full Literacy skills for children in all nations choosing to use CG. 

In the less developed world, an overwhelming lack of exciting leisure reading materials means most Sub-Saharan African people are compromised comprehenders of texts. Other factors also contribute to weak reading comprehension in those countries. Unfortunately, most statistics on reading in Africa focus just on Basic Literacy skills levels, with this insufficient, given that even very fluent decoding skills do not guarantee effective academic learning in schools. An unfortunate flow-on effect is then seen, due to this overemphasis on Basic Literacy skills and lack of emphasis on Full Literacy skills, with in the efforts and support actions of funders failing to be focused on this, the most important goal.

Two of the present authors’ studies in rural Zambia (Comba and Lyytinen, described above) showed two critical findings. The first finding was that illiterate village children with GL training for reading Nyanja in Katete (Zambia), their local language, mastered Basic Literacy effectively. However, this did not improve their academic learning results at school. The second finding was that Comprehension Game made a significant difference in children’s academic learning, evidenced by significantly improved school results and academic learning. 

We believe CG is a powerful tool for empowering literacy development. It may also be necessary in more affluent consistent-orthography nations, e.g., Finland, where PISA results show declining reading comprehension skills. Its potential for use in developing countries is enormous because, with no leisure reading materials available in one’s local language, CG is a stand-out, practical, realistic way to train children to read for meaning and reach Full Literacy. 

The first author is trying to make CG freely available for use without charge in poor nations, intending to use financial resources from users in wealthy countries to enable broad use in developing nations. Importantly, CG It is designed to work effectively on the inexpensive phones now used widely by families in developing nations. 

However, while CG is a useful and powerful tool, it depends on users having mastered fluent Basic Literacy skills and teachers’ readiness to create texts using local languages. 

The second training tool designed by the first author, Tale Reader (TR), is intended to remove needs for other effective reading instruction tools, building Basic Literacy skills and leisure reading materials written in local languages, but offering the possibility that children will acquire both Basic and Full Literacy skills simultaneously, from a young age, while providing them with early childhood literacy enrichment. Prioritizing this multiple-advantage potential, the first author is now organizing data collection in rural areas of several Sub-Saharan countries to evaluate its effectiveness in helping children reach the goals mentioned above. 

Tale Reader is a motivating, engaging, and powerful learning tool that African children can use independently without adult intervention. This complete tool is meant to substantially elevate school learning among children whose families currently have no access to reading materials but have an Android device and Tale Reader. 

The original support tool of the Basic skill, GL (GG) requires considerable initial development for each written language requiring preferably skills of phoneticians, which takes time, effort, and money for the salaries of those developing it. Tale Reader can replace GL/GG because it can be created at considerably less expense than GL/GG. Implementing it to support the acquisition of Basic reading skills can be done locally by following the guidelines given to the local teachers and/or parents. 

Tale Reader is a potentially effective tool and resource for achieving literacy worldwide, mainly for learners whose Home Literacy Environment has few or no reading materials and where it can replace parents who are not able/or habit to read to their children. 

Tale Reader is especially important in environments where children have nothing interesting to read soon after they have learned the basic literacy skills to build interest in reading and help them become fully literate. Ethiopia, where one of our authors intends to trial Tale Reader, is a representative example of a developing nation with a lack of local reading materials.

Ethiopia: An Example of A Sub-Saharan Nation Exploring Tale Reader

Ethiopia’s Education and Training Policy of 1994 sought to guarantee equal access to basic education for all citizens, emphasizing the use of national languages as the primary medium of instruction in primary schools. Although significant strides have been made toward achieving universal primary education, challenges related to quality and equity persist. Disadvantaged children – particularly those from low-income families, uneducated parents, and rural areas – where children often struggle to develop Basic Literacy skills by the end of primary school. Key barriers to proceeding, even among those who have learned the basic literacy skills, include insufficient home support, limited access to literacy materials, and ineffective reading instruction supporting reading comprehension. Many children from low socio-economic backgrounds lack parental literacy in their mother tongue and enter primary school without adequate literacy preparation. Furthermore, schools face hurdles such as inadequate infrastructure, scarcity of printed materials, and insufficient teacher training in fundamental reading strategies. To combat these persistent literacy challenges, our initiative aims to enhance educational outcomes for socio-economically disadvantaged children in Ethiopia through use of the Tale Reader program.

This innovative tool combines interactive basic literacy instruction with culturally relevant, age-appropriate reading materials in Amharic. We hypothesize it will significantly bridge the literacy gap for millions of Ethiopian children. Our approach includes a mixed-methods study with quantitative and qualitative data collection, targeting children aged 6-7 years old from families with illiterate parents and a lack of educational resources, to comprehensively assess the tool’s effectiveness in improving decoding and comprehension skills.

We are especially excited to see how well Tale Reader succeeds in providing sufficient support – under the described conditions – to build not just Basic Literacy skills but also Full Literacy. If successful, this will be evident in children’s school achievement levels. We intend to compare Tale Reader’s effectiveness in Ethiopia with the effectiveness of combined GraphoLearn and Comprehension Game-based training piloted in rural Zambia, where results were very promising (Chomba & Lyytinen, 2024 submitted). It will be interesting to see whether Tale Reader, with its simple appealing methods and literary enrichment will be as or more effective than the more complicated GL then CG process.

Needs to Assess Full Literacy Not Just Basic Literacy

The most crucial aspect of assessing reading skills is not to measure just Basic Literacy skills that reflect ability to read words and decode text accurately, and to instead always include assessment of how well the goal of reading, Full Literacy, has been reached. It would reveal how well the text is understood by reading. This had to be used when identifying children in need of help. This is most critically attended in poor countries. We had to know how well their inhabitants can learn knowledge by reading to help themselves and their nations. Knowledge learning plays a vital role in such development. The most central aspect of jumping out from poverty would be the elevation of academic learning, which is centrally based on reading skills – not only on listening instructions of teachers. Full literacy only can guarantee efficient academic learning. 

The most natural way to acquire Full Literacy after acquiring Basic Literacy skills is to start reading leisure materials. Such material can suck children to read when the content is interesting enough. As soon as the first most exciting books have been read, comprehension strategies have developed naturally to the level at which reading lessons will be successful without stress. 

It looks now, however, that the world has changed from the time when, e.g., Finnish children achieved excellent PISA results, which most likely was a result of interest in reading, which was common among the majority of children – not like today when only girls continue reading as revealed by many cues and e.g. the Finnish school learning results revealed by the national assessment body of school learning. Today, leisure reading out of school is happening less and less, especially for boys, and PIRLS and PISA results have been falling for more than 10 years now in many regular-orthography nations (see Figure 9). School achievement in Finland is also falling comparably, with the Finnish Agency showing leisure reading to have the highest correlation with school achievement. 

In the developing world, very little or no leisure reading material is available. In many developing countries, there is a total lack of leisure reading materials. Thus, they do not have an opportunity to start reading interesting material. My own and my colleagues’ long experience reveals that only a few people in these nations, e.g., in Africa, develop effective Full Literacy skills. This is why we concentrate on developing training tools for them, which are also needed today in countries such as Finland, which used to have reading children with good PISA results. 

Most research concerning reading comprehension has focused on the concepts and factors related to reading comprehension, but not training the skills and strategies needed to comprehend texts. Very little has been done to teach children how to acquire full literacy if this fails to proceed to that level naturally. Natural proceedings have been ordinary until the beginning of 20. century, but it seems that no more. Suppose children follow the old habit of starting to read leisure materials after they have learned Basic Literacy (i.e., decoding). In that case, they will not read if they do not comprehend what the material tells them. Most of the teaching resources have been used to guarantee the acquisition of basic literacy, and I anticipate this is enough – as it has been earlier. But it seems not to be enough anymore.

Needs to Build Reading Comprehension Across Nations

Across the world, we need research focused on how to stop the continuing fall of PIRLS and PISA results, happening in many countries (see Figure 9). This is very serious because, at least in Finland, it has also been shown to have started to reduce school learning, as mentioned above. In the figure, the falls of PISA results are shown between the two last assessment points. It reveals that the falling is an acute process that may continue. There is no reason why children would move their attention back to reading after they have ended up preferring, e.g., playing digital games, which is the most likely reason, especially among boys. Also, the use of social media, which may be more common among girls, does not comparably require mastery of good reading strategies. But it is also common in many countries that the fall in girls’ PISA results has been observed.

The goal of research we need now should be to attempt to find effective interventions. Something like this has been tried in many countries by focusing on increasing interest in reading. But at least in Finland, rewarding children for reading has not been successful. Thus, a more realistically effective intervention had to be found to directly support learners in approaching written language to reach an equal level of comprehension of written language as they understand spoken language. This is attempted below by finding the simplest possible way to try. We have also tried to document that our training games to elevate reading comprehension are effective – before even proposing these for broader use (see Lyytinen & Louleli, 2023). 

Comprehension of spoken and written language is associated with background knowledge of the content to be comprehended. Both ways of understanding language have the same conditions. None specifically instructs comprehension of spoken language, and the same has been the case concerning written language until now when many children have stopped reading interesting written content. 

To comprehend written language, one has to learn the same content when given orally using one’s spoken language. The concepts used in the text have to be known. Often, this is defined by speaking about background knowledge. For teaching reading comprehension, the most natural context is school learning. It takes steps from earlier learning according to the curriculum. If Full Literacy is supported in the context of lessons, needed background knowledge is guaranteed, plus teachers’ classroom instruction actively supports it. 

An appropriate way to elevate reading comprehension is to instruct the needed strategies in the context of learning lessons in school. It can be started at the age when the learner can fluently decode written language. We should be able to train it as reading comprehension proceeds naturally. In a training game, the player must be helped to attend to the critical content worth of storing to memory if the material is based on lessons. This helps learners to understand that not all words of sentences are equal.

An even simpler way to instruct children to acquire full literacy would be to include content-wise exciting books for obligatory reading (as has been made in some countries). The most concrete example of efficient training material is short detective stories. These work also for observing how well the goal of reading is acquired. It can be made in two ways. The most natural might be essay writing, where learners are motivated to describe what they learned from the book. 

The ComprehensionGame.info pages also offer an assessment opportunity. We have a story where the readers’ full attention is focused on identifying the key player. This detective story has been used to motivate the use of the Comprehension Game (CG) by offering a detective story: Wolf Killer. All who can quickly identify the killer and tell from which sentences they learned it does not need further training. Our experience has shown that children reading leisure books can usually identify the killer without problems. 

Our first digital learning game designed for training Full Literacy, Comprehension Game (CG) is recommended to be applied for learning lessons at the grade when children are fluent decoders. One must comprehend the written knowledge s/he is acquiring for any academic learning. Without full comprehension of the written school lessons, they are not open to be stored for later use. 

 The primary method of elevating comprehension is teaching an appropriate strategy for approaching the text. This strategy means focusing on the essential contents, i.e., the most informative sentences of the lesson, to help the learner understand that not all words or sentences are equally important. The sentences that are informative are those that the learner has to store in her/his permanent memory.

The amount of text that can be handled in the working memory is limited to 5-7 sentences. These limits should not be exceeded to make learning possible. Knowledge is typically stored by handling it in the working memory until it has been moved to long-term memory to be saved to permanent storage.

Needs for Intentional Attention in Building Reading Comprehension

Writing systems differ in how comprehension via reading can work. Any comprehension typically requires intentional attention. The decoding of fully transparent alphabetic writings can be learned fluently without any deliberate attention to the meaningful contents of the sequences of letters. Chinese writing represents another end. The most minor meaningful units of language, morphemes, play a central role in learning to decode Chinese. This means that at least the comprehension of words to be read is necessary.

How to assess reading comprehension?

Effective reading comprehension is a readiness to follow the primary meaning of larger wholes, e.g., the story or lesson. Therefore, sentences comprise an appropriate minimal level of comprehension. But even there, it is true that not all sentences are equal. One must learn to identify the most informative sentences to understand, e.g., the story/lesson fully. This is very important if the purpose of reading is to learn the content of the text, such as the lessons from schoolbooks. 

Reading comprehension is acquired naturally, mostly by reading leisure books. Even small children can learn to apply optimal strategies without being aware. They simply want to know what happens in the story, and this cannot be followed without comprehension of what the story is telling them. This was the starting point when the first author developed the Tale Reader application.

If we believe that reading interesting material is the only way to reach sufficient readiness to comprehend written language, we will have problems with children who do not have access to such interesting reading material. This is the case in Africa. Accordingly, African children would fail to learn to comprehend written language. This is why we must have another way to guide them to reach readiness to understand written language. 

The first author believes there may be two ways to help African children comprehend written material. 

1) CG can replace the reading of exciting reading material if applied according to the ways listed above. However, there is a problem with using CG. It requires that learners’ teachers implement the appropriate content. This may be difficult because the readiness of many African teachers to implement appropriate content may be insufficient, especially in rural Community Schools where parents work as teachers. We have developed digital learning environments for teachers as models to train themselves to write appropriate implementations. 

2) An optimal way to reach the goal of reading (i.e., learning the content of the text by reading) is to organize the initial instruction of the reading skill with this goal in mind. For this purpose, the first author developed a digital tool called Tale Reader. This tool is meant especially for children living without any access to exciting reading material and with an insufficient home language environment, as shown below.

If a child’s first serious contact with written language is organized so that s/he notes how one can enjoy by reading, her/his first step towards reaching the goal has already been taken. Thus, if the home literacy environment (HLE) is good enough, this may happen naturally when a parent reads exciting stories to the child. If the reading parent happens to understand that by showing, e.g. by finger, the word s/he is reading when the text is sounded to the child, it may happen that the child who is listening and looking at the story, succeeds without explicit attention, to acquire the decoding skills at the same time s/he is primarily attending the proceeding redline of the story and fully understanding what is happening in the story. Thus, the whole reading career up to full literacy can happen very early. If we attend emergent readers, most have learned to read very early via good HLE, which contains sufficient parental reading of exciting stories to the child from early on. 

The Tale Reader application tries to work like a wise parent to create a sufficient home literacy environment for African children. The core philosophy behind its design is rooted in realism. It must be able to:

1. Reach practically everyone: this is possible if it works in the devices families use to own cheap Android phones. 
2. Work in many African languages. This is possible because parents and teachers can create and implement the stories. If parents cannot read, we can use available tools to create stories for children. Increasingly, creating stories is possible using almost all languages using artificial intelligence (AI). 
3. Speak aloud and write texts in each language used. Training is most effective when spoken and written words are synchronized (just as when a parent points with a finger where s/he is reading). 

Everyone who uses CG for sufficient time will likely become an effective reader. The same may eventually happen to TR users in Africa if we/local people have implemented enough exciting content for reading to African children using their language.

Cultural Differences and the Regular-Versus-Complex-Orthography Conundrum

In this final section we discuss cultural differences due to differences in orthographic complexity. We also discuss the Regular-Versus-Complex-Orthography Conundrum, our term for bidirectional contrasts of advantage and disadvantage in literacy development, between complex-orthography and regular-orthography children and nations. 

Complex-orthography children and nations include, e.g., Thai-reading children in Thailand, and English-reading children in Anglophone nations. The term “Complex” refers to the highly-complex, “opaque” orthographies those children work through to master Basic Literacy. Regular-orthography children and nations include, e.g., Finnish- and Swahili-reading children in Finland and African nations. The term “Regular” refers to the highly consistently written, “transparent” orthographies children in regular-orthography nations learn to read and write in Basic Literacy. Taiwan, Japan, China, and Korea are considered regular-orthography nations (Galletly, 2023), as in these nations children first learn to read and write their nation’s fully-consistent beginners’ orthography, e.g., Japan’s Hiragana and Taiwan’s Zhuyin, then use it as a learning tool supporting learning to read and write their nation’s highly-complex morphologographic orthographies, e.g., Japan’s Kanji and Taiwan’s Hanzi.

There is an English saying, “What you win on the roundabout, you lose on the swings.” It means that while one might win in one area, it’s common to also lose in another. The conundrum considers this win-lose situation for regular-orthography and complex-orthography children and nations.

It is both curious and inappropriate that most reading research focuses on English reading development and instruction, positioning English as the norm, when English is most decidedly not the norm, as the vast majority of nations use highly regular orthographies (Galletly, 2023; Galletly et al., 2024; Share, 2021). 

This has unfortunate effects in many developing nations. As Galletly, Share, & Knight (2024) emphasize,

The impacts of Anglocentrism go beyond Anglophone nations to also impede progress in developing nations (Share, 2008, 2021, 2023). Lacking an indigenous literacy research infrastructure, all too often, developing nations adopt Anglophone ideas about literacy learning and instruction, and Anglophone teaching methods. This is a most unfortunate error, given profound differences between highly complex orthographies such as English and the typically regular orthographies of most developing nations. Quite likely, continued use of Anglocentric and European methods, where regular-orthography methods are needed, is a significant factor needlessly perpetuating illiteracy in many developing nations. 

English literacy development is decidedly atypical with this evidenced most strongly in learning to read and write English being so extremely complicated for beginners, resulting in much larger numbers of children having severe reading and writing difficulties. 

Given that most nations are regular-orthography nations, the norm across nations that provide appropriate learning contexts is children learning to read and write a regular orthography quickly and easily, effectively mastering Basic Literacy skills using Association Learning. 

Thus one key orthographic cultural difference is orthographic regularity versus complexity and associated level of difficulty of mastering Basic Literacy: how quickly and easily nations’ children will develop highly accurate word-reading and spelling skills, enabling them to be independent readers, writers and learners.

Associated cultural differences building from nations’ extent of orthographic complexity for beginning readers include the impacts of cognitive load, the extent of activation of risk factors, the number of children experiencing difficulties acquiring Basic Literacy when effective learning contexts are provided, and the extent of difficulties they experience (Galletly, 2023, Knight, Galletly, & Gargett, 2017, 2019). 

Beginning readers who learn to read a regular orthography experience very low cognitive load. While research is needed, it is likely that this low cognitive load is a central factor underlying and optimizing other factors (Galletly, 2023; Knight & Galletly, 2020), including the extent of activation of risk factors, the number of children experiencing difficulties, and the extent of difficulties they experience. 

When effective instruction and learning contexts are provided, virtually all children in regular-orthography nations master Basic Literacy easily and effectively. Because the learning is straightforward, logical, easy association learning, the difficulties experienced by a small number of children are mild, enabling intervention to then be highly effective. For regular-orthography children, learning to read and write words is a simple skill with an easy pass-line that virtually all children pass easily and effectively (Galletly, 2023; Knight et al., 2017, 2019; Knight & Galletly, 2020; Lyytinen, 2023). 

In contrast, due to the complexity of learning that is required English-readers experience extremely high cognitive load across their years of Basic Literacy development, and this high cognitive load activates risk factors, and causes many children to struggle, with many developing ongoing severe Basic Literacy difficulties. Anglophone nations have a long tail of struggling readers (Galletly, 2023; Hanley et al., 2004) that is not present in regular-orthography nations that provide effective learning contexts and instruction. 

However, it seems likely that not all crosslinguistic differences are advantaging of regular-orthography nations, and disadvantaging of complex-orthography nations, with appreciable evidence of the Regular-Versus-Complex-Orthography Conundrum in Full Literacy development of many regular-orthography children after Basic Literacy is mastered, and perhaps also other areas, e.g., subsequently learning to read a complex orthography. Whereas Knight, Galletly, and Gargett’s (2019) Orthographic Advantage Theory, emphasizes only the advantages which regular orthography nations experience, research is needed to explore both advantages and disadvantages. 

Reversed advantaging as regards developing reading comprehension (Full Literacy) shows in strong reading comprehension skills developing more quickly and effectively in complex-orthography children, e.g., those reading complex, ‘opaque’ orthographies such as English, Taiwanese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji, than in children in regular-orthography nations (Galletly, 2023; Hanley et al., 2004). Quite likely this stronger reading development is a spin-off of Basic Literacy development for them being so complex, as the children then need to use comprehension cues to help work out unfamiliar words they are trying to read, with this building reading comprehension.

Galletly (2023) discusses multiple cross-national studies showing healthy reading comprehension, with English readers having higher or as high comprehension, despite weaker Basic Literacy skills than regular-orthography children, including Welsh readers (Hanley et al., 2004), Turkish readers (Oney & Goldman, 1984), and Japanese and Chinese children (Stevenson et al., 1990). 

As explored earlier in this article, the lack of strong reading comprehension (Full Literacy) in regular-orthography children with strong Basic Literacy skills seems due to children reading without adequate intentional focus on texts’ meaning, and deliberate seeking of meaning cues while reading. 

Regular-orthography nations showing declining reading comprehension in PISA rounds, discussed above (see Figure 9), also suggests likelihood that rapid, easy Basic Literacy development, does not guarantee strong Full Literacy development, with this creating need for, and value, of tools such as CG and TR.

In the sense of “What you win on the roundabout, you lose on the swings.”, while transparent-orthography children win for Basic Literacy development, many lose for Full Literacy development, experiencing impeded development of reading comprehension due to failure to adequately focus on reading comprehension (Full Literacy). ComprehensionGame will be a powerful tool for these children. In contrast, children reading complex, opaque orthographies such as English lose for Basic Literacy development, experiencing highly impeded learning, but with many winning for reading comprehension development. 

There seems need for, and value in, research exploring and establishing the different dimensions of crosslinguistic differences, orthographic impacts and the Regular-Versus-Complex-Orthography Conundrum of many regular-orthography children failing to develop effective reading comprehension (Full Literacy), and stronger development of reading comprehension (Full Literacy) in many English readers. 

As an example, research is needed to show the proportions of regular-orthography children who experience weak Full Literacy, and the proportions of complex orthography children who experience strong Full Literacy. It seems likely research using tools such as CG, TR, and the Dynamic Assessment, which these digital learning tools use, will be precious.

Conclusions

While we have seen this scenario work successfully when implemented by teachers or parents directly, further experimentation is needed to ensure it is equally effective on Android devices. Crucially, local parents and teachers cannot undertake this process without guidance, and it’s essential to understand that advising cannot be facilitated through traditional means, such as sending experts to Africa to instruct elite teachers on how to implement it. These conventional means to help African children have not helped children to learn until now, and it is unrealistic to have sufficient coverage to include rural children, for example. And the need to master the local language is not realistic.

Today, we have the Internet. Via it, we can send all this information and the training tools to be distributed to children. But this fails without local teachers and advisors. Thus, we must have a private firm in each country, which, in collaboration with us and the local Ministry of Education (ME), we organize the distribution in practice and are open to providing help when needed. This private firm must have well-informed people. The writers of this article are such. We hope that together with the first author, we will succeed. 

This all is now under trying. It is happening today in Zambia, where the first author has colleagues, he has supervised to PhD level to understand how reading acquisition can be supported. In Zambia, we already have a firm called Centre for Advancement of Literacy and Skill in School (CALSS) led by the earlier director for research at the Zambia National Union Teachers and chairperson of the Teaching Council of Zambia, a branch of the Ministry of Education and Senior Lecturer, who is now retired. He is preparing the distribution and is under training to become able to answer any questions users may have. 

After the working mode has been initially developed and tested in Zambia, we move to Ethiopia, where one of the authors is prepared to take his turn next. In Finland, we have a young student who is under training to become able to try it in a new environment, Ghana, so that we can collect experiences on how to start distributing it to all poor countries slowly. All this is planned so that the games will be accessible online without fees in those countries. 

We hope the developing agencies understand that this may be the only realistic and cheap way to elevate literacy levels in poor countries. It has failed for hundreds of years when vast amounts of financial support have been used. Now, we believe that we can proceed successfully and cheaply. But it is only because we now have new technology, such as artificial intelligence, which we did not have earlier. It may also be helpful that we have the described games whose background is based on tens of years of reading research, starting from the one that opened the mystery of dyslexia in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal study of Dyslexia which followed children’s spoken and written language development and learning from birth to adulthood. It required more than 10 years of follow-up of children with familial risk for dyslexia and their comparison to the development of typical children from birth to reading age. Thus, it shows that today, research can start helping people in a massive sense. This will happen if our goal of distributing our support to all poor countries is successful. The total amount of funding needed for that is extremely little compared to the amount spent unsuccessfully to reach the same goal. But when writing this, we have not yet received a penny for this new approach. But it is good to know that the first author was supported extensively by the Academy of Finland’s Centers of Excellence of Research programs for more than 20 years. After that, he has worked for more than 30 years helping children living in Sub-Saharan African countries – including assisting in opening the Centre for the Promotion of Literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the University of Zambia. It, however, failed to collect funding after the Finnish funding ended and has not been active for years. Now, the duties have moved to the mentioned new center headed by one of our writers, Christopher Yalukanda, from which the distribution and service will be organized to Zambia and, at the beginning, also to other Sub-Saharan countries.

A warning may be in place concerning using the illustrated smartphone applications. In Sub-Saharan Africa where the use most likely happens in the family’s phone at home this is not a problem. In the developed world most children start to have their phones which they wanted to use also in school environments. It is recommended to use the games at home. This is because we do not propose using phones in school, and the possibility of concentrating optimally on learning via games is not optimal in a noisy environment. This is why home is the best environment to use our learning games on the side of making lessons where reading the lesson from the schoolbook is the first step. Using the ComprehensionGame, learners can finalize what they learned by first reading the lesson to then confirm that they have understood well enough everything which had to be stored to memory. They can have all crucial content stored in their memory before the game is over if the content has been implemented according to the guidelines we have given.

We know that the instruction of Basic Literacy skills is very difficult to optimize realistically in Africa. Therefore, we are prepared to start proposing that training of basic reading skills, in combination with a good start towards learning full literacy, can be initiated before school age using our Tale Reader at home using the Android phone most families own. To start approaching these goals, we urgently need financial support because this cannot be made by mere developer’s personal savings.

References 

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