Ego or stupidity

 

The following email from James Chapman, in 2010, fortifies the saying by Charlie Munger that the Human mind is like the human egg.

One of my first emails disagreeing with a Phonological Awareness Deficit being the cause of dyslexia was to James Chapman. He and William E. Tunmer had jointly produced a paper stating that dyslexia is caused by Phonological Awareness Deficit.

This is a clear case of researchers who have written something and when evidence to the contrary is produced they refuse to accept it.

The following email was in response to a detailed explanation of why I thought that phonological awareness deficit cannot be the cause of dyslexia as stated in the Research Report by James Chapman. Note the date of the email.

 

    Chapman, James To:luqmanm2002@yahoo.co.uk  Mon, 27 Sep 2010 

 

Dear Luqman Michel

Thank you for your email. As a co-author of the paper “A developmental model of dyslexia: Can the construct be saved”, I stand by the article, which has received favourable comments from various people since being published in 1996. I have appended another article for your consideration, published this year in the Journal of Learning Disabilities.

 

I think we will agree to disagree, and I suggest that you submit your counterarguments in a paper for review and publication in the journals in which we have published our research. The Journal of Learning Disabilities might be an appropriate journal for such discussion. This would provide you with the opportunity to engage in legitimate academic debate.

    Kind regards

    James Chapman

The above was in response to my email mentioning the following:

For at least the last 30 years researchers have been talking about the contribution of phonological awareness to reading acquisition. The questions we should then ask are: -

 

1.      Why is the illiteracy level still high?

2.      Is there explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondence? Are children who learn English taught that many of the letters in English represent more than one phoneme (sound)?

3.      Is it a phonological awareness Deficit that is the culprit in students not being able to read? Or could it be something else?

4.      If phonological awareness deficit is what makes reading difficult then how is it that my dyslexic students can read fluently in Malay and Romanized Mandarin?

5.      Would all the students who were classified as able to process the English language phonologically, based on the above study, be able to read the following words if it was the first time they saw it and had never heard the word before? – said, island, quay, which, salmon and hundreds of other similar words.

As I have mentioned several times, all my dyslexic students can read fluently in Malay. They can read as well as any other kid.

My entire dyslexic students who read in Hanyu Pin Yin (Romanized Mandarin) can read fluently in this language. Now ask yourself why is this so? The letters used in both Malay and Romanized Mandarin are the same 26 letters used in English.

Now, I ask you, is phonological awareness deficit the problem with my dyslexic students having a problem reading in English? If so what about all the research reports by the various researchers which say that dyslexics can read fluently in orthographically consistent languages?

Luqman Michel