Why Prior Learning Blocks New Teaching — and How We Fix It

 

Two children can sit through the same lesson and walk away with completely different messages. The difference is not simply effort or ability. It is shaped by neurodevelopment, prior experiences, sensory processing, and a sense of psychological safety. Achievement is never just a response to instruction — it is a response to the meaning the learner’s brain has assigned to that instruction.

 

This shifts the fundamental question of teaching. We must ask not only “What did I teach?” but also “What did this learner experience?” That second question turns inclusion from aspiration into everyday practice.

 

The Power of Prior Experiences

Prior experiences — whether earlier success or failure, relationships with teachers, cultural messages, or the information a child has already absorbed — act as a powerful filter. New information does not automatically overwrite what came before. Learning is constructive. The brain builds on, or collides with, existing models.

 

When a child has been taught something inaccurately, the old mapping often remains dominant. The new information may be distorted, ignored, or even experienced as threatening. Disengagement follows. This is one reason a stubborn percentage of students leave school with functional literacy difficulties that persist for decades.

 

A Concrete Example: Letter Sounds and Dyslexia

In more than a decade of specialist teaching I have worked with over 80 dyslexic students. All of them came from wealthy families, so socioeconomic disadvantage was not the barrier. Yet almost all arrived with the same foundational problem: they had been taught letter sounds with extraneous “uh” sounds — buh, cuh, tuh, and so on.

 

These impure sounds create lasting interference. Blending becomes distorted. The brain stores an inaccurate link between letter and sound. Later, accurate teaching collides with the earlier model and is often rejected.

 

When I deliberately helped these students unlearn the incorrect versions and replace them with pure, crisp phonemes (no added schwa), the change was dramatic. Decoding improved. Confidence returned. Many went on to excel. Without that unlearning step, the faulty foundation can contribute to students leaving school as functional illiterates — a description Tom Cruise himself has used of his own school years as a dyslexic student who struggled severely with reading.

 

Why This Matters Beyond Any Single Classroom

If the same teacher can produce such different outcomes depending on what each child already carries, then uniform delivery of “correct” content is never enough. Diagnostic teaching must surface the existing maps — factual, emotional, and relational — and create the psychological safety and structured practice needed for revision.

 

Socioeconomic factors, attendance, overall instructional quality, co-occurring difficulties, and the home literacy environment all interact with these priors. My own students show that wealth alone does not protect a child from the consequences of inaccurate early teaching. That is why, since 2010, I have made my lessons freely available on this blog: so that parents without financial resources can still access the precise, pure-sound instruction that has made the difference for so many.

 

New idea added: Prior learning is not only about academic content — it also includes the emotional scripts children carry. A child who has repeatedly felt unsafe or humiliated in learning contexts may reject even accurate instruction, because the brain tags it with the same threat response. Fixing literacy therefore requires not only correcting faulty sounds but also rebuilding trust in the learning process.

 

From Aspiration to Practice

Educational environments are continuously communicating. Every seating arrangement, every tone of voice, every modelled sound, and every piece of feedback is assigned meaning by the learner’s brain. When we treat prior learning as data rather than an inconvenience, and when we are willing to help students unlearn what is blocking them, we turn inclusion into a daily reality.

 

The question remains simple and powerful:

 

Not only “What did I teach?”

 

But “What did this learner experience — and what must now be revised?”

 

That is the work. And it is work that every child deserves, regardless of the resources available at home.

The Global Blind Spot in Reading Science: What Malay Literacy Teaches Us About Dyslexia Diagnostics

 

In the intense global debate surrounding the "Science of Reading," a single narrative has taken root: The Phonological Deficit Hypothesis. Mainstream reading experts argue that an inherent Phonological Awareness Deficit (PAD) is the primary neurobiological cause of dyslexia. If a child cannot blend sounds to read words, the diagnosis almost default-points to a broken internal phonological processor.

But what happens when we look outside the English-speaking world?

The 2004 Accidental Experiment That Proved Reading is not unnatural

 

In 2004, I knew nothing about phonics, phonemes, or decoding rules. But I was asked to help a child who had completed kindergarten and an entire year of Primary 1, yet could not read a single sentence.

Using my auditor’s mindset—which is trained to question everything and look strictly at raw data—I decided on a simple experiment. I sat with him for one hour a day, opened a Peter and Jane book, and read. He echoed me, sentence by sentence.

Six months later, without a single lesson on letter sounds, he was reading well beyond a Grade 1 level.

In 2021 he graduated with a double degree from the University of Southern Australia.  

The Phonics Trap: How Extraneous Sounds Cause Children to "Shut Down"

 

We often wonder why so many children—especially those diagnosed with dyslexia—struggle for years to acquire basic literacy. The common consensus blamed the child's brain, assuming they had a fundamental deficit in phonological processing.

But my decades of teaching experience, combined with an extraordinary case of a single bilingual child, proved a completely different reality: Children aren't failing to learn; they are shutting down because of how they are taught.

Specifically, they are shutting down because teachers around the world are unknowingly sabotaging them with extraneous sounds.

Reading Isn’t Unnatural: Your Brain Was Built to Adapt

 

To clarify: This isn’t a defense of traditional Whole Language or a call to abandon phonics. Millions of children successfully learned to read under both eras, and literacy failure rates remained remarkably stagnant across both periods.

 

The real point is that the mainstream Science of Reading has mistaken English’s chaotic complexity for a universal human limitation. Our brains are incredibly powerful statistical learning engines. When a writing system is consistent, the mind finds the patterns naturally without an agonizing, mechanical grind.

Why a Hybrid Approach Triggers 3-Month Reading Breakthroughs for Dyslexic Students

 

The education world has been and still is locked in a fierce debate. On one side, mainstream cognitive neuroscience pushes a purely phonocentric model, claiming that explicit phonology is the only valid path to literacy. On the other side, older philosophies relied heavily on visual guessing.

Both sides miss the operational reality of how a struggling child actually learns to read.

Asking the Questions Others Ignore

 

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.

Rote memorisation of Dolch Words and Lesson 13.

 

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

Here is Yeshua reading the Dolch words from Lesson 5

 Here is Yeshua reading the Dolch words from Lesson 6

 

 

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