A reading ladder in order — instructions and simple stories, guessing words from context, news and reviews, inference and irony, then speed, stamina and formal prose.
Reading is the skill that improves fastest, because it is the only one you can practise without another person and the only one where you set the speed. The ladder here is built on what each step adds rather than on how long the texts are. It starts with reading for a single piece of information — an instruction, a short story — then the habit that makes everything above it possible: working out an unknown word instead of stopping at it. From there it moves to texts written with an agenda, news and reviews, then to what is implied rather than stated, and finally to the three things advanced reading demands: speed, stamina across long texts, and patience with formal prose that was never written to be easy.
13 lessons