I’ve seen it countless times in my work with ‘dyslexic’ students: the moment when a child is present in body but absent in mind. They hear the words, but they’re not really listening. They’re not processing. Their mind has quietly “switched off.”
And truth be told, this isn’t unique to dyslexia. It’s something all of us experience in everyday life.
We’ve already seen how poor teaching methods—whether Whole Word or phonics—can leave children confused about the very basics of reading. But what happens when decoding looks fine, yet comprehension falters? Too often, the label “dyslexia” is applied without asking the harder question: is the real issue fluency, or language itself?
Why Reading Aloud Still Matters
Yesterday, I reflected on the challenges children face when learning to read, and the importance of balancing phonics with sight word instruction. Today, I want to turn to something equally vital but often overlooked: the power of reading aloud.
If decoding skills are the mechanics of reading, then reading aloud is the heart—it brings stories to life, nurtures comprehension, and builds the emotional connection that makes books more than just words on a page.
Fifteen years ago, when I first began tutoring children with dyslexia, one challenge stood out above all others: sequencing difficulties. These struggles—processing and ordering information correctly—often became the most persistent and frustrating hurdle for my students.
What Is the Pygmalion Effect?
The Pygmalion effect describes how belief and expectation can shape performance. When teachers or parents expect a child to succeed, the child often rises to meet that expectation. It’s a powerful reminder that encouragement is not just emotional support—it’s a catalyst for achievement.
In my last post, I argued that most children who struggle with reading are not “disabled” in the clinical sense, but rather victims of poor or confusing teaching. When the foundations are muddled—wrong sounds, distorted input, or unclear strategies—many children disengage, and once that shut-down happens, remediation becomes far harder.
It's Often the Teaching, Not the Child
In 2010, my mentor, Dr. Richard Selznick, shared a profound insight that has stuck with me ever since: most children on the left side of the bell curve aren't truly "disabled" in the clinical sense. Instead, they are often "teaching disabled" or "curriculum disabled." These kids thrive when given structured, explicit instruction with ample practice and immediate feedback. True dyslexia—where a child struggles profoundly even with the best teaching—is far rarer.
Here is a comment I made this morning, on a FB post by Dyslexia Inspired.
This resonates deeply with views I've been expressing since 2010. Back in 2004, when I began investigating why many intelligent children could fluently read in Malay and Pinyin (Hanyu Pinyin) but struggled with English, the prevailing explanation was a phonological awareness deficit as the root cause of dyslexia.
I wrote extensively on social media challenging that theory, arguing it couldn't hold because these same children demonstrated strong phonological skills in more consistent orthographies like Malay and Pinyin.
That dominant theory faced significant scrutiny and was largely reframed or debunked around 2017, with emerging research highlighting its limitations.
Now, it feels like the same old idea is being repackaged with new terminology—what I'd call putting fresh lipstick on the same pig.
For more on my early writings, Google search "phonological awareness luqman michel"
Here are comments on the post:
Intro
For years, I have written about dyslexic children who leave school unable to read, only to discover literacy later in life. Their stories raise an uncomfortable question: Why do so many fail in school, yet succeed as adults? The answer lies not in their intelligence, but in the way they were taught.
Visit my bookstore at: https://payhip.com/LuqmanMichel
Why Experts Ignore Evidence on Phonics and Dyslexia
The ongoing "Reading Wars" – the fierce debate between advocates of systematic phonics instruction and proponents of balanced literacy or whole-language approaches – have persisted for decades, leaving many children struggling with reading and labeled as dyslexic. Over the years, I've documented interactions with prominent educators and researchers on my blog. These posts highlight a frustrating pattern: questions rooted in real-world teaching experience and student evidence are often met with evasion, silence, or outright dismissal. This blog post summarizes five key entries spanning from 2020 to 2025, revealing a core issue that could potentially resolve much of the controversy.
Enough is Enough – The Gatekeeping Must Stop
After more than 15 years tutoring dyslexic and struggling readers one-on-one – watching kids light up when confusion clears and they finally read fluently – I'm done holding back.
I've poured my observations into this blog since 2010, only to face silence, blocks, and herd-like defensiveness from the "experts" in the Science of Reading (SoR) and structured literacy world. Parents are desperate, kids are suffering needless disengagement, and yet the echo chambers on Twitter/X rage on, protecting egos, products, and flawed dogmas. It's time to call it out plainly: We're creating "dysteachia" – preventable reading failure through poor instruction – and mislabeling it as incurable dyslexia. And the gatekeeping? It's a big disservice to every child who could thrive with simpler, common-sense fixes.
The dominant view, repeated endlessly in Western research, is that dyslexia is a neurobiological phonological processing deficit. But in 2010, I began questioning this after teaching children who struggled severely with English yet read fluently in transparent orthographies like Malay and Pinyin.
If a child truly has a phonological deficit, shouldn’t it impair reading in any alphabetic system? Yet these same children decoded Malay and Pinyin effortlessly.
– Extraneous Sounds That Cause Shutdown
For decades, the “reading wars” have pitted Whole Language against phonics. Yet despite the swings in fashion, reading failure rates have remained stubbornly similar across eras: 20–30% of children still struggle significantly.
Why? Because both approaches often share a critical flaw: teaching stop consonants with an added schwa sound (/uh/).
Peter’s thread paints English spelling as chaotic — with “200,000 phono-illogical errors” supposedly blocking children from learning to read. But how many of those words does a Grade 1 child actually face?
The Reality in Grade 1
By the end of Grade 1, most children read simple books containing just 300–500 unique words. These are mostly high-frequency and basic decodable words like:
Why English Spelling Isn’t the Main Villain in Reading Struggles
Recently, Peter (@PeterDMayr) shared a passionate X thread arguing that English’s irregular and unpredictable spelling is the primary reason so many children struggle with reading. He highlighted the landmark 2003 study by Philip Seymour and colleagues, which found that children learning consistent orthographies (such as Finnish or Italian) often achieve near-perfect decoding by the end of Grade 1, while English-speaking children typically trail two to three years behind. Peter contends that this orthographic complexity inflates dyslexia diagnoses, widens inequality, and imposes heavy societal costs—a perspective echoed by many spelling-reform advocates. It’s an argument that’s easy to sympathize with.
