My tweets to and from Emily Hanford

Emily Hanford is a Senior Producer and Correspondent at APM (American Public Media).

Let me state at the onset that I have nothing against Emily and I am not a fan of anyone either.

I was cajoled into teaching a kid to read in 2004. I then decided to do research on why many smart kids could not read in English while they were able to read in other languages using the same letters.

I started writing a blog in 2010 so that more people will be aware of what I had discovered. My discourse with some of the top educators in the world is in my blog.

I am not funded by any organization and my work is self-funded. 

I stopped teaching so-called dyslexic kids in May 2019 so that I may be able to go around to schools and club (Lions, Rotary and Toastmasters) to share my findings with the public.

The following are my recent tweets to Emily Hanford and her responses.

Luqman Michel

I am telling you @ehanford that most schools in the world are teaching the pronunciation of phonemes as in theTV programme below. This programme is aired in more than 100 countries. Is this how pronunciation of phonemes should be taught?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8gFfr2b5hU

Sally Shaywitz in the New York Times. (Had said)

People with dyslexia have trouble separating words into phonemes, the sounds that correspond with each part of a word. 

For example, the word “dog” is broken down into the phonemes “duh,” “aah” and “guh.”

@ehanford is that how you Caucasians teach phonics?

https://dyslexiafriend.com/2018/09/time-audiencereceivers-all-play-part.html

Read that post.@ehanford

I tagged @educationpalmer and said ‘for your info and comment.’

Here is Emily Hanford’s response:

Lots of problematic stuff out there like this. It's why teachers need good training on what phonemes are... and a lot more.

I then replied:

Yes, this is encouraging. I mentioned this to you in September 2017 in 2 emails.

This is not just problematic stuff like all the others. This is what causes many smart kids predisposed to shutting down to disengage from learning to read.

My comment now:

What does Emily, and many others who say similar things, mean by ‘Lots of problematic stuff out there like this.’

Then they will list, vocabulary, pronunciation, morphology, diphthongs, digraphs etc.

I am talking about the basic foundation of learning to read which is pronunciation of phonemes. Without this solid foundation, all students find it difficult to read. 

A majority somehow through analysis (we will deal with this later) learn to read. However, they waste much time trying to figure it out. This may explain why the kids from the UK, the US and Australia are left far behind by kids from China and Hong Kong.

The above is similar to many other conversations I have had with educators in the US, the UK and Australia. They ignore my comments in their blogs and on discussions on LinkedIn.

This is basically the problem with the white educators who speak only English and therefore do not understand why kids can read in Malay and Han Yu Pin Yin but not in English.

These educators do not have the capacity to discuss this matter openly.

Are they that naïve or is there a force directing them…

If there is anyone who thinks I am being harsh, then this I must say -  I have tried getting through to Emily Hanford since 2017. I shall post the emails to and from Emily in the next few days.