Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters.

You have to hand it to humans. We're pretty smart. Making arbitrary orthography representative of specific language sounds is crazy abstract. Even if it seems intuitive now, we all started by mastering this substandard. It's all about figuring out which letters go with which sounds. Then when they're strung together to make words, we can sound 'em out. And finally, we want to tackle how they're organized on the page in terms of basic sentence structure, capitalization, and punctuation.