A concept I've thought about in this same area is some kind of color coding of words to help children learn how to decode words at the level of syllables. So fo

A concept I've thought about in this same area is some kind of color coding of words to help children learn how to decode words at the level of syllables. So for instance "please" might be "plea" and "se" – avoiding the sounding of of "pa la eh ah [no, they go together as an ee sound] sa eh? [silent e]". Lots of vowel insertion that makes it very hard to actually assemble those sounds into a word! But in another way this could be a kind of overlay of information. Maybe it shows how words are split, maybe it's to disambiguate different pronunciations of "ea", ... I'm not sure what's the most important added information. But overlaid on the words it might be a kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for kids to successfully read words and gain the practice that makes it possible to remove that scaffolding. There's a lot to think about there when it comes to reading (not to mention a ton of pedagogical knowledge)... I'm not sure I have the space to be a solid collaborator, but I do find this stuff interesting to talk about sometime...