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Why Wait Until Age 7 or 8 to Teach Reading-Writing to 2nd Language Learners

  • Jul 13
  • 11 min read

Updated: Jul 13

Your child can start Persian at birth. The Persian alphabet can wait, and that is not a delay.


Every year, a parent asks us some version of the same question:

"My daughter is five. She understands and speaks Persian fluently. Why don't you guys teach them how to read yet? Aren’t we wasting the best years?"

It is a fair question, asked out of love. Here is our answer.

Speaking a language and reading a language are two different skills, and they follow two different timelines. One of them should begin the day your child is born. The other one is better served by waiting. Confusing the two is the most common mistake in heritage language education


The timeline that starts at birth

Speak Persian to your baby. Speak Persian to your toddler. Sing to them. Tell them stories. Argue with your mother on the phone in Farsi while they play at your feet. All of it counts. All of it is going in.

This foundation is built at your dinner table, not in our classroom. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) recommends that children learn a second language as early as possible, and the research is clear that a native accent and native-like ease of speech are realistically only available to those who start young.

So if you want to do something today with your four-year-old, the answer is simple: talk to them. That is the whole assignment.

But notice carefully what that recommendation is about. It is about language: hearing it, understanding it, speaking it. It is not about the alphabet.


The main reason to wait until age 7:

Your child is already learning to read at their American school

This is the heart of our answer, and it is the part most parents have never heard.

Learning to read is not something a child does once per language. Learning to read is something a child does once, ever. After that, they are a reader, and they carry that ability with them into any language they meet for the rest of their life.


Think about what your child is actually doing right now in first and second grade in their American school. They are discovering, slowly and with great effort, a set of ideas that are not obvious to a small child at all:

  • That the marks on a page are not decoration. They stand for sounds.

  • That those sounds can be blended together to make a word.

  • That the word means something, put there on purpose by a person who wanted to tell them something.

  • That the marks must be followed faithfully, in a particular direction, one after another.

  • That when you get stuck, you can slow down, break the word into pieces, and try again.


Every one of these discoveries takes months. And here is the point: your child only has to make them once. When they open a Persian book at age seven or eight, they are not beginning at zero. They already know what reading is. They simply learn that Persian runs from right to left, and that these particular shapes make these particular sounds. That is a much smaller job than learning to read.


This is not our theory. ACTFL states it plainly in its guiding principles: literacy development in one language supports literacy development in the second language, and the knowledge and skills a child has built in the first language are reinforced, deepened, and expanded when that child takes on literacy in a second one. And you may reasonably ask: does that really hold when the two writing systems look nothing alike? It does.


Professor Jim Cummins, whose work is foundational in bilingual education, studied children whose home languages used entirely different scripts from English, including Japanese and Vietnamese, and found that a child’s literacy skill in the first language contributed significantly to their progress in the second, despite the dissimilarity of the languages and the writing systems (like Persian).


Professor Ellen Bialystok explains why. Some parts of reading are general: hearing the separate sounds inside a spoken word, understanding what print is and what it does. These transfer easily from one language to another. Other parts are specific to one writing system: that this shape makes that sound, and that Persian letters change their appearance depending on where they sit in a word. These cannot transfer, and they have to be learned on their own terms in each language.


Now put those two facts together, because together they answer the question completely.

The parts of reading that transfer are being built for your child every single day, by their American school. You will get them whether you start Persian reading at five or at eight.

The parts that do not transfer cannot be banked in advance. Your child must learn them whenever we begin, and nothing is saved by learning them earlier.


So starting Persian literacy early does not result in a meaningful gain. It only asks a child to do the hardest part of reading twice, in two languages at the same time, at the age when it is hardest. Wait two years, and something very different happens. A seven-or eight-year-old who reads English arrives at the Persian alphabet already equipped. They know what they are doing. They have the tools. We simply hand them the Persian alphabet, and they use the machinery they already built to pick it up faster, more easily, and with far more confidence than a five-year-old ever could.

Let your child learn to read once, properly. Then let them use that skill to learn Persian easily.


And there is a second reason, specific to schools like ours

We see your child for a few hours on a Sunday. That is our reality, and language researchers have a name for it. ACTFL’s research brief on the impact of early language learning calls it "drip-feed" instruction: a small number of hours per week, spread over several years. And it reports something that surprises most parents. In drip-feed programs, starting earlier does not appear to make a difference.


The brief’s own summary of the point is worth quoting exactly:

"When there are constraints on the available instructional time, a later start to L2 learning seems to be advisable, since older learners can tap into their advanced cognitive abilities and make faster progress."  (Fernando Rubio, University of Utah, for ACTFL)

An early start is powerful when a child is surrounded by the language for hours every day, as they are at home with you, or as they would be in a full immersion school. It is much less powerful when the language arrives in small weekly doses. In that setting, the older child’s greater focus, memory, and reasoning simply carry more weight.


The evidence behind this comes from a large study in Barcelona that followed students who began learning English at ages 8, 11, 14, and adulthood, measuring them after 200, 416, and 726 hours of instruction. The older starters made faster progress. The younger ones eventually caught up in listening and speaking. And the single strongest predictor of how far a student got was not the age they began. It was the total number of hours they accumulated.


That finding should reassure you, and it should also refocus you. What matters most is not that your child starts early. It is that your child keeps going. A student who begins at seven and stays with us for a few years will end up with far more Persian than a student who begins at five and quits at nine, discouraged.


One more thing, specific to Persian

In everyday Persian writing, the short vowels are not written at all. The consonants appear on the page, and the reader is expected to already know how the word sounds. A fluent Persian reader is not sounding out a mysterious word; they are recognizing a word they already carry in their memory. So, unless you are reading a beginner text with all the short vowels displayed, you can only read the Persian you already know how to say.


Of course, when we teach beginners, we do write the short vowels in, using the small marks placed above and below the letters, and we keep using them for several years. They are training wheels. They let a young reader ride while still learning to balance. But training wheels come off. The Persian found in books, in letters, on signs, and in messages from relatives carries no such marks. On the day those marks disappear, the only thing holding your child up is the vocabulary living in their ear.


This is why it is more essential to build up the comprehension first. It is not a preference; it is a structural fact about how Persian is read. And it matches what second language reading research consistently finds:

Children reading in a second language usually decode the words accurately enough, yet still struggle to understand what they have read, because their spoken vocabulary in that language is too thin. In second language reading, decoding is rarely the true obstacle. Vocabulary is.

STARTALK, the United States federal program that supports the teaching of Persian, makes the same point in its guidance: there is a strong, well-established link between how many words a learner knows and how well that learner can read.


Every song we sing or the storybooks we read to our young students, is preparation for literacy. It simply does not look like literacy yet.


Does waiting mean falling behind?

No. And it is worth knowing that this same pattern appears even when children learn to read their own first language. Researchers in New Zealand followed two groups of children across their whole elementary schooling. One group began formal reading instruction at five. The other did not begin until seven. At first, exactly what you would expect: the early starters were ahead, with more letters and more words. If you had measured them at seven, you would have concluded the late starters were behind. Then the gap closed. By about age eleven, the difference had disappeared completely. And on reading comprehension, meaning the ability to actually understand what you have read, the late starters were doing slightly better.


What were those children doing during the two extra years? Not letters. Their schools deliberately kept written words out of the classroom. They played, painted, cooked, sang, and listened to stories told out loud. They arrived at the alphabet later, with far less letter knowledge, but with a rich vocabulary and an ear trained by years of listening. It was enough. They caught up entirely, and on the deepest measure of reading, they moved slightly ahead.


That is what a five-year-old student does in our "Intro to Persian 2" class. They are not waiting for their education to begin. They are building the ground it will stand on.


What we do before age seven

  • Listening and understanding. The bedrock, exactly as it was in English.

  • Speaking, without pressure. Single words, then phrases, then sentences, on each child’s own schedule.

  • Playing with sound. We clap the beats in MĀ-MĀN. We catch the long Ā in NĀN and ĀB. We notice that DAST and DAHĀN begin with the same little sound. There are no letters anywhere in these games, yet this is the exact skill that makes decoding possible later.

  • Songs, stories, food, and holidays. These are the reasons a child will want to continue.

  • Letting Persian script live in the room. Children see it on the walls and see their own name written in it. We never teach it and never test it, so that when the alphabet finally arrives, it arrives as an old friend rather than a stranger.


What we are saying, and what we are not

We are not claiming that a five-year-old is incapable of learning letters. Of course, they are capable. Sit a willing five-year-old down and drill the letters patiently, and that child will learn them.


Our claim is that starting earlier does not produce an advantage that lasts, and in a two-hour-a-week program, it may not produce an advantage at all.


But starting early comes with a cost, and we would like to name the cost precisely.

The years between five and seven are extraordinarily good for certain things. A child of that age absorbs the sound of a language almost effortlessly, will sing the same Persian song a ten times without complaining, and genuinely believes a word game is the most interesting thing in the world. Those years are made for building the oral memory and for building the love. They are not made for decoding drills. A child pushed into decoding before they are ready will do it, but slowly, with a lot of effort, and often with a quiet growing sense that Persian is difficult and that they are not good at it.


That is the real cost. We can teach a nine-year-old the alphabet in a matter of weeks. We cannot easily undo a child’s conviction that they are not good at Persian.


And one more thing, which parents of young children rarely see coming

Our school is not only, and not even mainly, a place where children learn to read and write.

Your child is growing up in a country where they will spend most of the week as the only Iranian in the room. Their name will make teachers pause. They will feel a small distance open between the world of their home and the world of everything else, and most of the time they will not tell you that it is happening. Often they will not have the words for it, even to themselves.


Then on Sunday they walk into a room full of children with the same name problem, the same weekly video call with grandmother on the phone from Iran, the same food in the lunchbox, and the same two worlds to carry at once. Something in them relaxes. Here, they are not the exception. Here, they simply feel "belonged". You cannot install this in a child later. It has to be lived, and lived early, at exactly the ages when we are supposedly "only" singing songs.


So the years before the alphabet are not a waiting room. They are the years your child learns, without anyone ever saying it aloud, that there is a place in the world where they are entirely normal.


Our rule, and the reasoning behind it

  • For heritage learners, children who hear Persian at home, we begin reading and writing at age seven.

  • For non-heritage learners, children with no Persian spoken at home, we wait until age eight or nine. 

Reading Persian requires an ear already full of Persian words, and heritage children already have one. A child starting from zero needs several more years to build that ear before the letters can mean anything at all.


And now the honest part. This is not an argument for waiting forever. Once children begin American school, English rushes in and quickly becomes the dominant language of their lives. Literacy is one of the strongest tools we have for holding Persian in place, and ACTFL advises parents that because reading and writing develop slowly as children mature, heritage language instruction should extend as long as possible, ideally from elementary school all the way through secondary school.


So we are waiting until age 7 to start reading/writing, on purpose, and we are planning for the long run rather than a fast start. Seven, not five; and just as importantly, seven, not twelve.


What you can do this week

You do not need a workbook, and you do not need to teach anything. You need five minutes.

Talk to your child in Persian. Out loud. Today. At dinner, in the car, at bedtime. Let them answer you in English if that is where they are right now, and keep speaking Persian anyway. Ask them to teach you what they learned on Sunday, and let them enjoy being the expert.

Every word you say to them is a word they will be able to read later.

That is not us postponing the work. That is you doing the most important part of it.

 

If you have questions about your child’s placement or about our sequence, please come and talk to us. This is a conversation we love to have.


Chicago Persian School offers classes for children ages 3 through adults in the Chicago area, with in-person classes in Des Plaines and online options for families wherever they are. We welcome students at all proficiency levels, including receptive bilinguals who understand Persian but are building their speaking confidence.


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