The "Sine Qua Non" of Reading Acquisition (Stephen Parker)

I happened to read an article by Stephen Parker on Reading Acquisition which you can read here.

Here are some extracts and my comments.

My student from Kenya (Part 2)

My student in Kenya, could sound out the phonemes of all the letters accurately after a few days of coaching.

She sounded them out correctly on her third attempt. There were hardly any extraneous sounds to the consonants.

The 44 phonemes

This is a follow up of my previous post. I got the idea for this post from a debate I heard a few days ago where Jonathan Solity said that 10 single graphene phoneme correspondences represent 70% of words in children’s books.

Sounds represented by letters

                                                                      A as in ape.

I read the following tweet by ‘The Reading Ape’ as follows:

The Reading Ape @TheReadingApe

‘Decoding is the critical test of reading ability-To render aloud a pseudoword or to recognise a word never seen before in print as a specific word in one’s vocabulary cannot be accomplished by rote memory. These feats require knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Perfetti 2010

2:45 AM · Jul 17, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

With the hope of a good discussion I twitted as follows:

My student in Kenya, Africa (Part 1)

On the 5.7.2020 I received a message on Facebook Messenger from a lady in Kenya, Africa which said the following:

Dear Luqman, I have been following your blogs and you seem to understand these children and able to help them. I have a 11 year old who is showing the signs of shut down in her writing. I would appreciate if you can help through Zoom. Kind Regards.

Katherine Billington vs Luqman Michel (Part 2)

This is a continuation of my messages with Katie on Twitter.

Katherine Wang

"There are regional differences in the pronunciation throughout the English diaspora of the phonemes and it does not impact the illiteracy rate."

Luqman Michel

Katherine, do you really think I don't know this? You have been hoodwinked into believing that it does not impact literacy. I ask you a direct question. Did you take time to listen to my 5 videos that takes only 15 minutes? Answer me yes/No?

Katherine Billington vs Luqman Michel

I want to cut down on my posts and concentrate on teaching kids remotely. 

I am currently teaching a 11 year old kid in Kenya, Africa, to read and spell. I have not taught anyone on spelling but I am now reading on that and therefore busy.

The 5 E's Learning cycle

I saw a tweet by Dr. David Dzyngier this morning and decided to write this post.

 

The 5 e’s have been used for many years to teach science. I feel it is just as applicable to learning to read.

Ms. Lyn Stone A request

My blog posts are mainly on why kids are unable to read in English.

I believe, there are enough educators who are now convinced that many kids shut down/disengage from learning to read because of confusion as a result of teaching of pronunciation of phonemes wrongly.

As such, I have decided to write one or two posts per week unlike previously where I wrote one post per day.

Now, I have time to look at some of my tweets that have been rebutted by tweeters.

A post by Debbie Meyers and my comments

Here is a well written article by Debbie Meyer with a lot of thought provoking questions to which I believe I have the answers.

An open letter to La Trobe University

Here are emails to and from La Trobe University which are self-explanatory. 

The response from the university is similar to responses I have received from NZ and OZ since 2010.

Do read my email and then read the response to my email.

How in the world are we ever going to eradicate illiteracy or improve our education if we have educators and universities responding in such a manner?

Tweets between Nathaniel Swain and me

 

There were 2 issues that have not been settled between Nathaniel and me. Our Twitter conversation is copy pasted below. I have added a third question and request Nathaniel to respond.

You can't teach old dogs new tricks (Final part)

This is a continuation of extracts from a post by Pamela Snow and my comments.

This blunderbuss approach no doubt explains why university lecturers grapple with the frustration of trying to teach first-year students who do not know the basics of how to construct a sentence, in spite of the fact that they have studied English for 13 years and have passed Year 12.

You can't teach old dogs new tricks (Part 2 of 3)

This is a continuation of extracts from Pamela Snow's Blog post and my comments.

Pamela Snow:

What WL (Whole Language) advocates do not appear to understand, however, is the important neurobiological difference between oral language and written language. Where humans have an evolutionary advantage for acquiring oral language, such that it is sometimes described as biologically “natural” or “primary” (see the work of David Geary), written language is recent in evolutionary terms, being only about 6000 years old, and is biologically “unnatural” or “secondary”.

You can’t teach old dogs new tricks (Part 1).

I read the blog post here by Prof. Pamela Snow on Twitter yesterday and here are a few extracts and my comments.

If by democracy the NCTE (National Council for Teacher Educations) means every child reads as poorly as the next one, they may be right, but that does not address the social justice imperative. The only way for reading instruction to exert force on social justice levers is for it to be fail-safe for the overwhelming majority of students.