Emails to and from Nora Chabazi

 

Following are my emails to and from Nora Chabazi. 

Think for yourself if the Right to Read producers are looking for ways to reduce illiteracy. 

 

Nora Chahbazi <nora@ebli.com> Tue, Dec 28, 2021, 8:30 PM

Hi Luqman,

Thank you so much for your email! I appreciate you reaching out and volunteering to be interviewed for the documentary.

Here are the questions we ask of each person to ensure that we are not interviewing many people all sharing the same information. If you will answer these and get them back to me, I will forward them to the story producer and director.

We would greatly appreciate it if you would send us the answers to the following questions:

What are the top 2 areas in literacy that you think are most important to include in a literacy documentary?

If you were to be interviewed for this documentary, what information or insights would you share? (please paraphrase in a few paragraphs)

 

Our hope with this documentary is to accelerate progress toward the goal of 95-100% literacy proficiency for children and adults.

 

We very much appreciate your interest in literacy and this project.

I look forward to hearing your answers.

Have a wonderful day,

Nora

Here is my reply.

Luqman Michel <luqmanmichel@gmail.com> Dec 29, 2021, 1:06 AM

    

Hello Nora,

Thank you for your response.

 

What are the top 2 areas in literacy that you think are most important to include in a literacy documentary?

 

1. To teach the correct sounds represented by letters.

2. To inform all kids from the onset that almost all the letters represent more than 1 sound.

 

If you were to be interviewed for this documentary, what information or insights would you share? (please paraphrase in a few paragraphs)

 

I would ask the producers why the % of kids leaving school as functional illiterates has not reduced in the last few decades.

 

Why are the producers blaming the Whole Word teaching method when many schools teaching phonics still have kids unable to read?

(Not that I am a Whole Word proponent)

 

Why is teaching kids to memorise Dolch words (most frequently used words) not encouraged? I get dyslexic kids who are unable to read even a single sentence to be able to read more than 10 sentences by asking them to memorise 5 Dolch words and one word family.

 

Listen to my first lesson. LINK 

 

If there are kids leaving school during both periods as functional illiterates - whole word and phonics - there must be some other common matter that is the cause of kids being unable to read. The reason why many kids are unable to read is confusion as a result of wrong teaching. Children are blamed for not being able to blend. How does a child blend kuhahtuh for cat?

How does a child blend luhahmuhbuh to form lamb?

 

For more than 40 years phonological awareness deficit was blamed as the cause of kids being unable to read. In 2010, I wrote several articles disagreeing with this theory as I had by then taught so-called dyslexic kids for 6 years. All of them could read in Malay and Han Yu Pin Yin but not in English. If my students could read in 2 languages but not in English how could it possibly be because of phonological awareness deficit? This theory was debunked around 2017.

 

The excuse given by the Anglosphere is that English is an opaque language when in fact the actual reason is that the kids are confused as they are taught wrongly.

 

Currently, children being unable to read is being blamed on the lack of phonemic awareness. I use the same arguments as above to dispute this theory.

We can't teach kids Korean (for example) and then question them in Japanese and when they cannot respond say that they have phonemic awareness deficit.

 

For how many more decades are we going to continue talking about kids being unable to read and blame it on poverty, comprehension, vocabulary, etc? First, teach kids to decode, and then comes vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency.

 

Listen to my following videos that explain the cause of kids being unable to re

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZnesY8O5kI

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AdR_6d20bQ&t=43s

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDPKtnbFk2s&t=52s

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjd_Wlpg-O8

 

Thank you.

I look forward to your response.

Luqman Michel

To be continued…