Disinformation by SoR advocates

 

I saw the following image on LinkedIn and commented on it. I then happened to see that that image was liked by 83 members and was re-posted by 42 of them. I then decided to post this on my blog hoping to get some comments from those who re-posted. Will any of the 42 educators have anything to say? It will be an interesting discussion.

 

The following are my comments on the LinkedIn post. 

 

Comment on ‘Memorising words is not an effective way to learn how to read’:

'Memorising words is not effective?' Says who? I teach all my students to memorise the 220 Dolch words. Having memorised these words they are able to read about 50 to 70 % of the words in their book. I teach them to memorise by rote memory and not visual memory which is what most educators think of how kids memorise words. I have several blog posts on this and here is just one of them - LINK

 

Why would educators say don’t teach kids to memorise the 220 Dolch words?

My comment on ‘Reading is not natural’.

'Reading is not natural?' This is what has been handed down for years and I have disagreed with it for more than a decade. We have an innate capacity for reading.

Read my post on this at https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2023/07/brains-innate-capacity-for-reading.html

Let us not accept everything written as the Gospel Truth.

Most educators believe what is circulated on Social Media without any evidence whatsoever. Read what Pamela Snow of La Trobe University reported:

Reading (and its corollary, writing) is a human contrivance that has existed for only approximately 6,000 years (Snow, 2016). This recency of reading as a human skill is important, because 6,000 years is a mere blink in evolutionary terms, and the human brain has not developed specialized neural pathways to support a skill that is widely agreed to be essential to successful living in first-world developed economies and to the social and economic trajectories of developing nations.

Why do we accept whatever nonsense is reported by educators?

Now there is scientific evidence to support what I have said for many years. The brain has an innate ability to learn to read. Will Pamela Snow or La Trobe University retract that ludicrous statement?

 

My comment on ‘Science of Reading is the research based on how we learn to read.’

Does anyone know how a kid learns to read? Not that I know of. Read my post on Stanislas Dehaene’s ‘How the brain learns to read’.

 

My comment on ‘No matter how I teach reading about 40% of students will pick it up...'

Again who says this? My book - Teach your child to Read- which will be out by the end of next month will get any and all kids with no acuity problems to read by the end of the 30 simple lessons.

That may sound exaggerated but before you decide it is, please read a testimonial from a grandma from California I helped to get her two grandchildren to read.

There are more testimonials in my blog on testimonials. 

 

The following are comments I received in LinkedIn from one  Monyka and my replies.

 

Monyka L. Rodrigues, PhDView Monyka L. Rodrigues, PhD’s profile (She/Her) Author Research Scientist | Project Manager | Data Analysis | Mixed Methods | Psychology | Strategic Planning | Critical Thinking | Communication | Kickboxing

Luqman Michel Memorizing is not as effective as teaching ways to decode words. Learning the alphabetic principle, phonemes, Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Latin layers, syllable types etc all make the language more predictable and decodable. Memorizing really only gets you to that one word you memorized whereas, learning ways to decode gets you access to many many many words.

What do I when I come across a word I’ve never heard or seen before? If I have heard it a few times before but never seen it in print, how do I proceed?

Memorizing words might let you read by analogy but, I think, to use that strategy effectively you’d still need to know about redundancies in the phoneme-grapheme mapping.

I’m not really sure why in your blog you use anecdotal evidence to rebute neuroscience studies on differences between pathways used for language and reading. 

 

My reply:

 

Monyka L. Rodrigues, PhD Thank you for your comment. I teach phonics as well as memorising Dolch words, context clues, and how to figure out new words.

I teach phonics as you would have seen in my lessons that are FOC on my blog. However, teaching a few Dolch words in each lesson gets my student to read much faster than teaching them only phonics.

Talking about neuroscience did you read my post on How the brain learns to read - https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2022/03/dehaene-how-brain-learns-to-read.html

No one in the world knows how a kid learns to read. I use all the tools available so that any and all students will be able to read within a short period.

It is not just anecdotal evidence. Read my post on the effectiveness of rote memory by researchers. I posted it yesterday at https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2023/07/memorising-dolch-words-high-frequency.html#more

Most educators are against memorising as they mix up visual memory with rote memory. I believe you must have read about visual memory in my blog.

Feel free to discuss and ask questions based on what I have written. Let us learn from each other.

You asked: 'What do I when I come across a word I’ve never heard or seen before? If I have heard it a few times before but never seen it in print, how do I proceed?'

My blog post on how the brain learns to read will answer that question. If you are still not clear please ask for further explanation.