Discourse with Dr.Richard Selznick Part 3 – Why kids disengage from learning to read

Luqman Michel: Dr. Selznick, for our next discussion, if I may request, please ask your 'patients' one question. Ask 10 such 'patients' and let us see what they say. Please keep a record.

Ask them for the sounds of a few consonants.

Let us find out if they will add vowel sounds to consonants such as mmmm (not muh),

nnnn (not nuh), fff (not Fuh.) lll (and not Luh).

This will give us an idea as to whether they are shut-down kids or otherwise.

 

Dr. Selznick: I know where you are going with this and I really don't need to do the survey.  Having tested a few thousand kids in my career, I think I have a pretty good sample size.  I would say that the vast majority of struggling kids would say "tuh," for the phoneme /t/ and "fuh" for /f/ as two good examples.  

Of course there are many other examples.

With those kids we would be recommending a training that directly teaches the sounds to eliminate this error and to "train their ears" to the sounds.

My comment now: I have checked with many kindergarten and tuition centres here in Sabah and with some teachers in many overseas countries and know that kids shut down or disengage themselves from learning to read as a result of being confused by being taught wrong sounds of symbols.

IF “the vast majority of struggling kids would say "tuh," for the phoneme /t/ and "fuh" for /f/ as two good examples”, where did these kids learn this from?

Here are some quotes from Children of the Code:

 “Most struggling children are struggling because what they learned in the past is inadequately resourcing or maladaptively directing their current learning. The most important step toward improving the health of our children’s learning is recognizing, understanding, and minimizing, unhealthy learning.” (Jack Shonkoff)

My comment: “learned in the past” from whom or from where?

“……even if we settle on a middle number, let us say 10%; that still leaves a lot of children who are not dyslexic, whose brains are not wired any different way, who have reading difficulty. We still don’t have the capacity nor the will to change what it is that we are doing with reading early on and so consequently unless we make those significant changes we are not only going to lose the dyslexics but I am also concerned about these other children; these other struggling readers.” (Nancy Hennessy)

“….95% of those kids are instructional casualties. These are what we call as NBT – never been taught.” (Dr.Reid Lyon)

My comment: It is not “never been taught” that is the problem. It is being taught in the wrong way.

 “….teachers’ who really don’t understand what the code really is.” (Dr. Russ Whitehurst)

To be continued…………….