On 5 July 2020, I received the following message on Facebook Messenger from a lady in Kenya:
Dear Luqman, I have been following your blogs and you seem to understand these children and able to help them. I have a 11 year old who is showing the signs of shut down in her writing. I would appreciate if you can help through Zoom. Kind Regards.
Her concern was that her 11-year-old daughter was consistently failing her English essay tests.
Precisely because our local environment leans heavily syllabic, teaching pure, clipped, individual letter sounds is the critical bridge our students need to conquer English.
In a syllable-based language environment, students naturally look for vowel anchors. If we teach them that a consonant includes an additional vowel sound, we distort the actual building blocks of decoding.
Since I began writing about literacy in 2010, I have repeatedly highlighted two core reasons why many Malaysian children struggle to learn to read. For years, these observations received little attention from commercial programmes, local academic institutions, and successive Education Ministers. Yet literacy research over the past decade has increasingly moved in a direction consistent with what I have observed through one-to-one work with struggling readers in Sabah.
Yesterday, I wrote about what happens when an idea finally begins to roll. The discussion centred on something I have been advocating for many years: teaching children the correct sounds of letters.
What some readers may not realize is that I was writing about this as early as 2010 and 2012. LINK
For many years I have made a simple observation.
When we teach the sound of the letter b, many of us do not say /b/. We say "buh." When we teach the sound of the letter t, many of us do not say /t/. We say "tuh." Likewise, /k/ often becomes "kuh" or "cuh."
For more than a decade I have argued that a major, under-recognized cause of early reading failure is children being taught the wrong sounds of letters. When consonants are taught with an added “uh” (the schwa)—“buh,” “cuh,” “duh” instead of the pure /b/, /k/, /d/—blending becomes unnecessarily hard. Children try to say “cuh-ah-tuh” and struggle to hear the word cat. The confusion leads many of them to shut down. Once the pure sounds are taught and practiced, that particular source of confusion drops away and most children can begin to decode.
Millions of older students are being treated for comprehension problems when their real literacy difficulties remain unaddressed.
When literacy experts say, "Once a child learns to decode, the hard part of reading is far from over," they are partly right. Vocabulary matters. Background knowledge matters. Syntax matters. Comprehension certainly matters. But there is a problem hidden inside that statement. It assumes that children have actually learned to decode.
For many students, that assumption is false.
These are further thoughts on my previous post at LINK.
Paul Thomas asks whether “kids today can’t read” is a real crisis or, as Chris Ferguson suggests, a perennial gripe. His answer rests on two observations. Adults have always complained about the young. And nobody can point to a golden age when nearly all children left school able to read well.
Both can be granted. Neither answers the question that matters.
Why Fluent Readers Are Not the Mystery. The Real Mystery Is Why Some Curious Children Shut Down.
A few weeks ago, I posed what I thought was a simple question on Substack:
Does anyone know how a child learns to read?
The Questions Lyn Stone Never Answered
I recently read a post by Lyn Stone in which she expressed concern about Lucy Calkins appearing at a reading conference. Stone wrote that she is "interested in accountability before reconciliation" and suggested that before being welcomed, Calkins should publicly acknowledge where she was wrong, apologise for the damage caused, and explain what she is doing now to correct it.
On that principle, I have no disagreement.
More than six years ago, I wrote a post titled People Prefer to Believe a Myth. Instead of Examining the Evidence. Little has changed.
I posted a Substack note on Paul Thomas’s post and he referred me to another post of his.
I think Paul has finally framed the issue in a way that allows for a more productive discussion. Rather than arguing over whether there is a "reading crisis," he is asking deeper historical questions.
Here is my response:
I recently came across an article arguing that the Science of Reading belongs in Tier 1 instruction and should not be reserved for expensive private schools, tutors, and dyslexia specialists.
On that point, I completely agree.
Responding to Paul Thomas on Crisis, Faddism, and Educational Reform
I recently read a Substack article by Paul Thomas titled "The More Things Change ... : The Bi-Partisan Failure of Public Education (SC Edition)." It is a thought-provoking piece that challenges decades of educational reform in South Carolina and the United States.
Thomas argues that politicians and education marketers have created a perpetual cycle of crisis, reform, and disappointment. One generation is told that schools are failing. New standards are introduced. New training programmes are purchased. New materials are sold. A few years later, another crisis is declared, another reform is launched, and the cycle begins again.
A post of mine is still pending in Texas Dyslexia Teachers and Therapists.
This is what I wrote:
“A majority of kids classified as dyslexic are shut down kids. They disengage from learning to read due to confusion.”
The group says it was formed for dyslexia teachers and therapists to collaborate and share experiences and ideas. Anyone in that group could have asked me to explain the sentence, or to show the children I have taught. Instead, the post sits pending. The admin has not said what is wrong with it.
