No response to direct questions directed to Emma Hartnell-Baker

 

This is a continuation of a discussion thread on LinkedIn. Yesterday I wrote about evasive answers and today it is about not answering direct questions.

Emma Hartnell-Baker wrote:

The science of how children learn to read is fairly settled, but instruction is where the issue lies.

When children enter the self-teaching phase (Share, 1995; Ehri, 2014), they continue to develop orthographic knowledge by deducing words from context—if those words are already part of their vocabulary. Activities like repeated reading help them track back and re-code without instruction. Children who face no difficulties do this easily, often without any phonics instruction. This is precisely why three-cueing is so effective for children with good phonemic awareness—they are essentially teaching themselves phonics. And their phonics isn’t limited to around 100 correspondences.

My response now:

Where did this woman come up with such a notion about how children learn to read?

I have asked this question several times over the last few years on social media and no one responds and yet these people keep stating something as if they know it.

Questions that need to be answered are:

i.                    How did about 80% of kids who learned during the Whole Language period learn to read?

ii.                  How do about 80% of kids learn to read despite the sounds of letters being taught wrongly?

iii.               Where is the Science about how children learn to read?

Would anyone care to answer the questions I had posed to Prof. Stanislas Dehaene. LINK

Emma said:

‘instruction is where the issue lies’. However, when I ask her what instructions are taught wrong to kids learning to decode there is silence.

I have given the answers in my book Shut Down Kids and she has no comments on what I have discovered. How do we propose to reduce illiteracy if we don’t ask questions and discuss openly? We would all die soon and leave a world that would not have learned from our discoveries.

Emma said:

Children who face no difficulties do this easily, often without phonics instruction - they are essentially teaching themselves phonics.

I have said this several times in my blog. Thank God many kids somehow figure out how to read not only because of not being taught phonics but despite phonics being taught wrongly. Two examples of college girls in Perth who were taught letter sounds wrongly could read nonsense words easily. This is because they had figured out how to read. What about the kids who leave school as illiterates and are wrongly labelled as dyslexics? LINK.