Here is the preface to my book which I hope to upload onto the internet by next month at the latest.
A majority
of children are wrongly classified as dyslexics when in fact they are
instructional casualties. Many smart children who are predisposed to shutting
down will disengage from learning to read when they have been taught wrong
sounds of the alphabet.
Many schools around the world teach the sounds of letters wrongly,
leading to children failing to learn to read. Children who could otherwise
learn to read if not mistaught are then labeled as
“needing” specialized remediation classes to overcome their learning/reading
“disability”.
There are
educators who say that we should not teach children letter names before
teaching sounds of letters as this will only confuse the children. I disagree
with this theory as there are many words which begin with letter names for
example, bee, deep, eagle, giraffe etc.
Let us
therefore teach the names of the letters of the alphabet. One common way of
doing this is through the alphabet song. Here is an example in a YouTube video:
There is a
war between ‘Whole language’ proponents and ‘Phonics’ proponents that has been
going on for decades. The phonics proponents say that there is no need to
memorise words and the whole language proponents say there is no need to teach
phonics. I find that a combination of phonics with memorization of sight words
is what works best.
This book
teaches phonics along with 5 sight words to be memorised in each lesson. For children
who are in primary three and above you may ask them to memorise 10 words during
each lesson. These sight words introduced in this book are called Dolch words
which comprise about 70 percent of the words in most
books.
Make sure
that consonants are not taught with extraneous sounds. It is the extraneous sounds added to
consonants that confuse many children who are then classified as dyslexics.
I am not a
trained teacher. In 2004, a friend asked me to teach his son who spoke good
English but was unable to read even a single sentence despite having gone to
kindergarten for one year and then to primary one – another year.
I was
curious as to how a smart child like him could not read even a single sentence.
After teaching him for 2 years I learned a great deal about why he could not
read previously, but was able to read after my coaching. I therefore decided to
teach more of such children and have, to date,
taught more than 70 children on a one on one basis.
Almost all of
my students could read in Malay but not in English when they first came to me
for tuition, despite English and Malay using the same alphabet.
This book is
a result of my observation and interview of all my former students. All of them
had shut down from learning to read as a result of confusion. They were
confused because they had been taught the wrong sounds of letters and were not
told that the letters in the English alphabet have more
than one sound.
I have
published a book on why such children shut down or disengage from learning to
read. The book is backed up with corroborative evidences from experts in the
education field.
The book is
entitled ‘Shut down kids’ and is available on Amazon. Those in Malaysia,
Singapore and India may get a copy from my website at www.luqmanmichel.com.
This book is
provided free of charge on the internet. Please pass it on to your contacts so
that together we may reduce illiteracy.
2 comments:
As we know disability child are very special. They need extra care and support from their parents or guardians. Some schools and colleges provide special care courses. This should be very clear about the special need children that what they love to do. They also have their own interest. Smile tutor are one of the home tuition guide. They provide full support to the special need child at their home.
Thank you Rum Tan. Most of these kids will not fall under the disability group if they had been taught sounds of alphabets correctly from the beginning.
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