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Is English your mother tongue?
It isn't mine, and I don't know how to spell English words. I'm somehow capable of it, but I don't remember how I learned (it must've been at school but I don't remember anything about the method other than that they had us copy words a lot), and I could not describe the rules.
Dutch spelling is regular. The method of teaching kids to read essentially hasn't changed in over a century. It involves learning the sounds that letters make and then sounding them out, but that's a lot easier when it's pretty much always the same except for loanwords.
I'm confident I could teach a kid to read without any pre-made teaching materials at all, even though I have no training other than my own literacy - in Dutch. Not in English though, even though I'm personally just as literate in English. I couldn't teach a cooperative English-speaking adult to read. I have no conscious idea what I'm doing when I write in English.
For me primary form of English is written, and I know spelling much better than pronunciation
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I remember learning about four types of English vowel sounds: open, closed, vower-r, vowel-r-e. Alternatively, there's something like the 56 easy rules of English spelling, which cover ~83% of words.
And I remember being forced to memorize the rules and write out which ones applied to common words in catholic elementary schools. I hated it at the time but it was probably the best way to learn.
In French, which I learned via whole-word, I cannot read without a pronunciation guide, although I can speak well enough to converse with a native speaker.
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English is my second language. But when I went through elementary school there was a big push to teach kids English. So there was a kind of parallel thing going on where kids who weren't even alphabetically literate in their first language were doing the ABC's in English.
I'm pretty sure you could teach an English speaker how to read English by just slightly modifying the way you learned to read Dutch and you wouldn't have many problems. Learning to read might be very important but it's ultimately not hard. Literally, kids can do it. It just takes a little time.
Something similar goes on in Ireland where Irish class material will be so much more advanced than foreign language classes despite the fact that most people don't have it as a first or second language. Spanish class will have you learning verb conjugations while in Irish class you'll be studying poetry and reading plays. It's common to hear complaints from people saying they retained more French than Irish after leaving school.
As an American, I learned a few interesting English grammar rules (most memorably, proper use of the subjunctive) from my AP foreign language class because high-school English instruction is almost entirely literature and writing.
This sounds somewhat similar to what you are saying about Irish, with the caveat that English is nigh-inescapable to Americans, even those who speak other languages at home.
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