>> I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level. > The way y

>> I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level. > The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic. I don't really think that's what they're saying here. They wrote "by 5th grade I was reading at a college level". They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I don't know how to pronounce" issue. That's different than "not fully able to read". >> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it. > This is not exceptional for an adult. Sadly, I think that it is. I looked up US literacy rates for this thread to validate my memory that they were something like 98%. I learned that not only are they 92% at "level 1", but only "[f]our in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences" [0]. I know this isn't exactly directly responsive to reading speed or whatever, but this is just to say I had a much rosier picture of US literacy in my head and maybe you do too. [0]: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp