Dyslexia in China (Part 3)

 

This is a continuation of my post yesterday. LINK

Here are the paragraphs highlighted in red in yesterday’s post.

As Maggie pointed out, if you cannot achieve the best grades, you are cast out.

Further, students who performed poorly in Pinyin reading tended to perform poorly in future reading comprehension tests.

Previous evidence showed that poor readers in higher grades (e.g. Grade 4) suffer more from Pinyin reading difficulties than normal readers (Yin and Weekes, 2003; Ding et al., 2015).

The Pinyin phonetic symbols are continuously presented alongside Chinese characters in textbooks until Grade 3 and are provided only when new characters are introduced.

My thoughts:

For over a decade I have maintained that curious kids shut down/disengage from learning to read in English due to confusion. The confusion is due to teaching kids the wrong sounds of the letters. If letters are taught without extraneous sounds no child will be left behind.

In China Pinyin is taught wrongly. Many schools in China teach Pinyin using the sounds of initials as used under the BOPOMOFO system. This confuses the curious kids who then disengage from learning to read in Pinyin. Since Pinyin is used alongside characters, until grade 3, these intelligent curious kids are at a disadvantage and are ‘cast out’. 

 

The pilot study showed that Pinyin reading was mainly determined by phonological awareness.

 

My thoughts:

The white man has slipped in this statement about phonological awareness in the Pilot Study. This must be done intentionally to mislead the Chinese. The problem is not phonological awareness but the fact that the intelligent curious kids can’t understand why ‘mo en’ is men; ‘fo en’ is fen. I have explained in my post at LINK.

Here is another post of a teacher from Tianjin who is corrupting Pinyin around the world with her Facebook posts. LINK

At first, I thought this way of teaching was isolated but discussions with many teachers in China and Taiwan confirmed this is how Pinyin is taught in many schools in China. My emails to the Chinese Consulate in Sabah and the Chinese Embassy in Malaysia as well as to authorities in China were not replied. LINK.

Is this a collaboration of China and the West to suppress the intelligent curious kids from being literate? Surely, the Chinese can’t be that stupid to teach Pinyin using the sounds as in BOPOMOFO. 

   

Can Pinyin early screening be implemented at the preschool stage? The answer is probably yes given the reasons above and the successful examples of English early screening in the United Kingdom and United States, each also relying heavily on PA (Snowling, 2013; Shepley and Grisham-Brown, 2019).

The screening tests identified less than 15% of students as being at risk for RD.

 

My thoughts:

 

This is another blatant lie by the Westerners. If the early screening in the UK and the US have been successful how do these researchers explain why the percentage of kids leaving school as illiterates has been about the same for decades?

How do you screen kids in Pinyin when teachers are teaching Pinyin using sounds of initials as in Bopomofo?

 

NOTE:

What is the pinyin syllable?

A syllable consists of three parts: initial, final, and tone marker. Initials and finals, not vowels and consonants as in other languages, are the fundamental elements in the pinyin system. In most cases, there is one initial followed by one final in a Chinese syllable.

Combinations of initial sounds and final sounds result in 411 possible combinations.

Initial sounds can be divided into two categories; sounds pronounced like English and sounds that are not. The first set of initial sounds are pronounced the same way you would pronounce them in English. These are b, m, f, n, l, h, and s.

The rest of the initial sounds are pronounced slightly differently than in English.