Friday, August 4, 2017

A classic case of a shut-down kid reading English as one would read in Malay



The kid in this video is a smart kid who will be categorized as dyslexic because he cannot read in English. It is very obvious that he can read well in Malay. He is confident enough to cancel out alphabets that he thinks is wrong.

The teacher had not told this kid that in the English language we have silent letters like the silent ‘e’ at the end of the word ‘have’. The boy says ‘Saya tak faham lah’ which means ‘I don’t understand’, but does the teacher explain it to him? No! She just continues (screaming) and this is exactly what will make the kid to ‘shut-down’.


All it takes is for the teacher to explain to the kid that the alphabets in the English language have more than one way of being sounded out. The same goes for children all over the world who are prone to shutting down.

The kid then reads ‘time’ in the way it would be read in Malay and does the teacher explain? Again, no, and what can we expect from such a kid other than to shut-down.

Listen to how he pronounces the word ‘come’. That is exactly how it would be pronounced in Malay.
This same problem is what goes on in the minds of kids who disengage from reading English in the English speaking world. Parents ask kids to listen to videos that teach wrong sounds of alphabets. Teachers in kindergarten teach wrong sounds of alphabets to kids and then when the kids shut-down they are classified as ‘dyslexics’ and left to rot.

James Wendorf said, in The Children of the Code series, “Make sure that reading is taught in the most effective way”.

Dr. Jack Shonkoff said: “The most important step toward improving the health of our children’s learning is recognizing, understanding, and minimizing, unhealthy learning.”

Dr.David Boulton: 10 times the number of kids who have innately biologically ordered learning difficulties have learning difficulties that are a consequence of what they learned…... Until such time we can read that they are cognitively going askew relative to what they have learnt in the past then our teaching is kind of brute force against this deep core stuff that is working against us.

AND yet when I write and tell the professors in Linkedin that many children cannot read because of unhealthy Teaching they do not even bother to listen. I know Shanahan and the other ‘experts’ in Children of the Code do not know why kids shut down or disengage from learning to read. But, why won’t they listen to someone who knows?

1 comment:

Luqman Michel said...

I wrote to FB on 15.5.2018 to find out how to get the original person who posted that video on FB. I want to get permission to use that video.
Here is my request on FB.
I would like to use a video in my blog and would like to get permission from the original producer of the video. How do I get that person. Here is the video: https://www.facebook.com/luqmanmichel/videos/10154405285275502/

Please this is important as I do not want to land up with copy right issues.