The Puzzle That Started It All
Every genuine breakthrough begins when someone dares to ask the questions others ignore.
When I began teaching my first student, I was struck by a puzzle: how could such an intelligent child fail to read in English after two full years of schooling? That simple question opened a path that has guided my work ever since.
Here are three video clips of a boy with dyslexia in Perth, Australia, reading Dolch high-frequency words from Lessons 1 to 6 of my book. He learned these words through rote memorisation.
High-frequency words (commonly known as Dolch words) are words that appear frequently in everyday language and especially in books for beginning readers. Examples include: the, went, she, you, see, to, like, and one.
A sight word refers to any word that a child has stored in their sight vocabulary — that is, a word they recognise and read instantly and automatically upon seeing it, without needing to decode it.
I explicitly teach all my students to rote-memorise these high-frequency words. In practice, the children repeatedly say the letter names (not the letter sounds) while learning them.
This approach contrasts with the position taken by many Science of Reading advocates, including literacy researchers Dr. Jan Burkins and Kari Yates (authors of Shifting the Balance). They recommend against memorising high-frequency words as wholes and instead emphasise explicitly teaching children to map individual speech sounds (phonemes) to letters or letter groups (graphemes) so they can decode words independently.
However, my students — including this boy with dyslexia — successfully memorised all 220 Dolch words by repeating the letter names. This outcome suggests that rote memorisation of high-frequency words remains an effective and practical strategy for many learners, even when it does not rely on phoneme-grapheme mapping.
Here is Yeshua reading the Dolch words from lessons 1 to 4
My post from 2010 on Lesson 13 is unavailable.
Here is the link to lesson 13 from 2020.
https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/11/lesson-13-oat.html#more
Malaysia’s poor PISA performance is not about “context” or “Covid excuses” — it is about systemic negligence: wrong teaching of letter sounds, failure to remediate intelligent children who disengage, and a culture of denial among so‑called experts like Dr. Anuar Ahmad who block questions instead of answering them. Singapore screens and rescues its “shutdown kids” early, Malaysia labels them dyslexic and leaves them behind.
My journey into literacy advocacy began not as a trained teacher, but as a curious observer. I wanted to understand why so many bright children struggled to read in English, even though they could read fluently in Malay and Pinyin. That question drove me to teach from 2004 to 2010, and through those years I discovered something crucial: the widely accepted explanation—that dyslexia is caused by a phonological awareness deficit—was simply not true. All of my students could read in other languages; their difficulty was specific to English.
This is a repost of an article written by my mentor, Dr. Richard Selznick, several years ago. Its message remains as relevant today as ever, reminding us to keep our focus on the heart of the matter when helping children learn to read. LINK
The parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant has echoed across centuries as a cautionary tale about partial truths and fragmented perspectives. Each blind man, grasping only one part of the elephant, confidently describes the whole animal—yet each account is incomplete, even misleading.
A recent LinkedIn exchange revealed a troubling mindset in education debates. When I shared that teaching letter names helps children decode irregular words like ceiling, giraffe, or bee, a commentator dismissed me with sarcasm: “Don’t look at science. Make stuff up instead.”
This is a continuation of my post yesterday.
Diana Black Kennedy Educational Therapist, Speaker, Author – Answer to another question
If you teach them phonics, then what is your argument?
The reason having them memorize the dolch words as one full chunk is problematic because memorizing words as one chunk is not the most efficient way to teach kids to read--it is sort of like giving the man a fish rather than teaching them to fish. Not to mention that if words are learned as one whole chunk rather than through repeated decoding means that they are recalled less efficiently because there are less connections to the words. If a word can be decoded it should be taught through decoding. Even words that are irregular generally are only semi-irregular. It is more powerful to teach kids to decode the parts they can and focus their energy memorizing the parts that are irregular.
There is an on-going LinkedIn discussion where Emma Hartnell-Baker insists that orthographic mapping only occurs via phonics.
I replied: I beg to disagree as I know that to be incorrect. I have addressed this in full in my blog post. Here are questions I asked which no one has answered.
Here is my first question that Diana Black Kennedy has responded to.
How did the deaf and mute learn to read words back in the 1840’s when pictures/ images were accompanied with words? For example, a picture of a dog with the word ‘dog’ below it. Let us remember these are deaf and mute people which means they cannot hear any sound of words let alone phonemes. The deaf and mute first learned to read this way.
Recently, I had a thoughtful discussion on LinkedIn with Brenda Nagberi, Founder & Lead Consultant at Bremon Educational Consult, Autism Advocate, and SENCo.
It mirrors conversations I've had with many educators and experts — productive until they block me or delete the thread.
The Key Exchange:
For decades, the reading world has been locked in debate over high-frequency words (often called “sight words” or Dolch words). Should children rote-memorize them, or is memorization “nonsense” that must be avoided in favor of pure phonics and orthographic mapping?
As someone who has worked with over 80 children labeled “dyslexic,” I’ve seen what actually works. These kids struggled to read in English but had no trouble reading in Malay (a transparent orthography) or Pinyin. My method—systematic phonics combined with deliberate memorization of all Dolch high-frequency words—produced strong results. The children learned the words without difficulty, gained confidence quickly, and progressed in reading.
The Pendulum Swing in Reading Instruction
In Response to Dr. Sam Bommarito's recent post. Link.
This post is in response to a recent post by Dr. Sam. I agree with his observation about how scientists often enter arguments. Years ago, he interviewed me. It was not a debate — he asked questions, and I answered them. Yet the interview was never aired. Was it because he could not accept my discovery?
The pattern is unmistakable. Multiple outreach attempts to Chinese official channels—embassies, consulates, education ministries, and even higher offices—have met with consistent non-responses or automated acknowledgments followed by silence. Emails sent in late June and early July 2024 to addresses like those in Kota Kinabalu, Penang, the Ministry of Education in Beijing, and others detailing concerns over inconsistent Pinyin instruction received no substantive replies. Staff interactions, such as calls to consulates, yielded promises of follow-up that never materialized.
The core issue isn't just phonics or romanisation—it's a deep cultural and political reluctance to admit that a system introduced decades ago might need refinement, especially when outsiders (or even internal reformers) point it out. China created Hanyu Pinyin in the 1950s by adapting Western systems like Yale romanization. It deliberately moved away from Bopomofo (Zhuyin) for mainland use because pure alphabetic initials (b, d, etc., without added vowel sounds) were cleaner and more consistent.
I have been learning Mandarin and have attained survival Mandarin and continuing my journey. Along the way, I have also spent considerable time researching dyslexia, reading difficulties, and effective language teaching methods. What started as a personal learning experience has opened my eyes to a deeper cultural and educational issue that I call The Chinese Dilemma.
