Sally Shaywitz writes in her book, Overcoming Dyslexia, A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level about how important it is to get students reading as soon as possible. One of the primary reasons is vocabulary growth. Vocabulary growth is important so that students have the foundation for building their future reading skills. The more they read and the more fluent they read, the better they are being students and understanding the world around them.
Sally Shaywitz quotes a study done in which researchers had students keep journals of how they spent their time when they were not in school. The very best readers, those who scored better than 90% of their peers on reading tests, read for more than twenty minutes a day. These students averaged 1.8 million words a year. Students who scored at 50% read for only 4.6 minutes a day and only read 282,000 words in a year. Students who read at the tenth percentile read for less than a minute a day and read a mere 8,000 words in a year. A reader at this level would require a year to read what the best readers read in two days.
It is crucial to catch poor readers as soon as possible and help them get the right kind of intervention. It is important to ensure that a student is making forward progress in their reading skills at an acceptable rate to help them catch up to their peers. Sometimes the programs schools offer are a good fit for a student, but if they are dyslexic and the school is not using a program based on Ortin-Gillingham methods, they will not move forward at an acceptable rate and the number of words they read a year diminishes. A parent needs to make sure their student is moving in the correct direction. If they are not, the parent needs to find a way to get the right program to their child or they will suffer the consequences of being a poor reader for the rest of their life.