Literacy

Depends on how motivated they are

Also depends on how much time can be devoted to the effort. The average 12 year old in a rural setting prior to the industrial period would be spending a good deal of time helping around the farm/workshop unless said 12 y/o has been placed under the direct care of the tutor for whatever reason.

Either way - waylander's answer continues to apply.

Ditto to this. All my experience on this subject is limited to adults learning to read for the first time and one extremely motivated four-year-old. If they're very motivated, it could be a few months before a person is totally up to speed.

There was a thread around here somewhere about adults and illiteracy not too long ago... so I'm repeating myself, but whatever. My kid learned to read at a second-grade level in 100 days. Of course, she was four/five at the time and doesn't have the capacity that an older kid would. Hope that helps.

Well, what technique is the teacher using?

Back when I taught Special Ed (I was a sixth grade teacher, so—yeah, about the right age group) we had reasonably good luck with the Wilson program. Basically, it focused on trying to teach the kids the patterns by which words are formed. F'rinstance, if you have a word like "bad"—one vowel in the middle—you know you're going to get a short A sound. If you know that's the pattern, you also know how to read words like fad, cat, let, etc, and you can even figure out nonsense words like tish and hox. Of course, then you have to learn the exceptions to the rules—having an R at the end of a word changes just about everything, having a double L changes a, o, and u but not generally i and e . . . anyhow, it gets more and more complicated but it's all about the logic of spelling. It does exist, really.

The problem is, in a medieval setting, there's no guarantee that your teacher will approach the problem methodically. He/she might just say, "C-A-T spells cat. Memorize it and we'll move to the next one." Which is much, much less efficient. I mean, yes, when you read you will end up with a lot of words memorized, but that's not the optimum place to start.

I also have to admit, I have never taught a twelve-year-old non-reader to read. I did get a boy once who hadn't learned his alphabet, but when we retested him his IQ was around 58 or so and he got moved to the Comprehensive Development Class. (I taught Resource, which was designed for people with learning disabilities and assorted oddball problems, not people with developmental delays or mental retardation.) Our kids generally read at first or second grade level; they'd gotten there on rote memorization and blind stubbornness and then stalled because, for one reason or another, they never really got reading. They tended to improve by a bit less than a grade level a year, but many of them were already convinced that they were stupid and reading was stupid and Resource was a giant waste of time. And, of course, they were still fighting past whatever learning disability they had in the first place.

If you had a reasonably bright, highly motivated illiterate student of twelve or so I bet he/she could learn to read well enough in two or three years. It depends a bit on what you need him/her to be able to read, though. A light novel (which wouldn't exist in the culture you describe, anyway) is a lot different from leafing through an ancient, possibly mis-copied religious text full of metaphor and symbolism. You can read a lot of things with a sixth grade reading level, but if you don't have a lot of books to practice on . . . I don't know.

Of course, all bets are completely off if the written or educated language of the time is different from the spoken one, like Latin.

Izunya

I don't know. I can't read either.

Alternatively, you could follow medieval examples and make literacy (in the sense of being able to read and write) less integral to the education system. An interesting book on the subject of medieval literacy is M.T. Clanchy's From Memory to Written Record.

For what it's worth. I'm reasonably bright, but no genius. I learned to read in six weeks at the age of not quite 6. The method was phonics (which wouldn't have existed in your story's time period). I didn't know what all the words meant, but I could read the paper aloud to you. About two and a half months into the school year I moved (across the world) to a different school. They were teaching sight recognition (see spot run). I thought my classmates were incredibly stupid. The fine motor skills for writing are a little different issue. So I think your 12 year old could easily learn to read and write in that 3 year time span. And possibly even better than the upper class students he would be joining.

MM

I mentioned this post to my Mom and she brought up another issue: namely, that the nature of the language matters a great deal. Learning to read Chinese would be a lot harder than learning to read English, while learning to read German would probably be easier. (Or, at least, I find German spelling pretty simple.) It'll be harder if the spoken language has diverged at all from the written language. And, honestly, I don't know what would happen if the spelling hasn't been standardized yet. On the one hand you'd run across texts which use cumpleetlee dimented spelleen that you have to puzzle through, but on the other hand, you'd pretty much have to think in phonics. And there'd be no such thing as a spelling test.

Oh, and dialect is a problem. Take it from someone who taught in rural East Tennessee. I remember trying to explain why the word for little tiny bait fish is spelled "minnows," when everyone knows it's pronounced "minners." I also had some fun moments convincing my students that the proper plural of "test" was not and never will be "testes." (They pronounced it like that, too—you know, one of the hardest things about becoming a teacher is developing your poker face.) I finally told my students that reading is easier if you pretend you're Tom Brokaw; think about the way an anchorman talks and all this phonetic stuff starts to make more sense.

As for my own experience learning to read—well, I didn't get it at all in kindergarten. Then in first grade, I suddenly realized I could do this, so I decided I was going to read "a real book." Watership Down, to be precise. And, rather to the surprise of all the adults around me, I did it. (Okay, so it took me from September until Christmas, but still.) The thing is, I don't really remember learning to read at all. I remember being illiterate and then I remember realizing I could read without any sort of transition period between them. Kind of bizarre, really.

Of course, my Mom read to me every night as a kid.

Izunya

In pre-industrial times, the winter months were fairly idle times and were devoted to teaching children. This is how we got our traditional school year. I would assume a motivated 12-year-old would learn to what we would consider his age level, in one winter. It would depend on the available reading materials and what was used to stretch his vocabulary.

Years ago, I read the autobiography of an Irish gypsy. He had a total of six weeks formal schooling, when the family camped close to a convent with a girls' school, and the nuns invited the kid to join a class for as long as the family were in the area. I'm not sure now how old he was, but a bit younger than twelve, I think.
This was enough to give him a start in reading, which he followed up by reading anything he could get his hands on. What did disappoint him was his handwriting. He said that his ideas were like a peacock - but then you looked down and saw the peacock's feet, and that was what his writing was like.

I've served as a literacy tutor to adults, but I've worked a lot with kids too.

But 12 really is a bit old (though anyone at any age can still learn if they have a brain that functions & a desire to do it). Why would an academy wait until they are that old to accept them? By then they've acquired habits for good or bad, maybe even started a trade if they are country children.

Younger is always better when it comes to learning, and doing it fast! We can always learn but the speed is greatly affected, the older we are. That includes language-based things like reading & writing.

You can justify the MC learning how, say in a few months, to read at a basic level if someone works regularly with them. If the MC is very smart, then speed it up more. If you show how they can do it, then anything is possible in the story, really.

I'd suggest starting them at 8 y/o and taking it from there. Good luck!

It would be extremely difficult unless the person was very bright. I've taught ESL to people in various levels of illiteracy. In most countries, people are exposed to letters and writing, so even if they are illiterate, they understand the concepts and the symbols are familiar to them. You describe a situation where that is not the case. This person would have to make the mental leap that there is such a thing as symbols (letters) and they can represent sounds and words. An illiterate in an illiterate society doesn't think that way.

A good example of how a person living in an illiterate society thinks is St. Augustine, who was amazed when he saw that his mentor, St. Ambrose, could read silently, without even moving his lips.