Now proven:
i. Since 2010 I wrote extensively that phonological awareness deficit cannot be the cause of dyslexia. Many researchers disagreed with me and asked me for evidence. Many blocked me. I persisted because of my experience and not because of some book theory. That theory was debunked in 2017.
ii. In 2016 when I saw the quote by Pamela Snow, I disagreed with it. She said ‘‘Reading (and its corollary, writing) is a human contrivance that has existed for only approximately 6,000 years. 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.”
Every Tom, Dick, and Harry started saying the same thing.
Because Pamela Snow is a researcher no one questioned her. She was upset when I questioned her with reasons why I disagreed.
In 2020 researchers at Ohio State University wrote:
Their paper, published in Scientific Reports, focuses on a region of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA), which is used in identifying words and letters.
“Even at birth, the VWFA is more connected functionally to the language network of the brain than it is to other areas.”
The researchers found that the VWFA differs from its adjacent regions in that it is functionally connected to parts of the brain that are used in language processing, even in newborns, who have had limited exposure to both spoken and written language. The VWFA is still considered an experience-dependent region, meaning that as individuals learn to read it becomes more specialized over time. However, the findings of the study suggest that the VWFA is sort of prewired for word and letter recognition, because the VWFA has an innate connection to the brain’s linguistic faculties, even before a child has acquired language.
Read more at LINK
Discoveries yet to be acknowledged:
1. The main reason kids can’t read is because of confusion caused by kids being taught letter sounds wrongly.
In the last few years, more schools have started teaching kids the correct sound of letters i.e. teaching kids letters with no extraneous sounds.
One may now ask why kids can’t read in schools teaching the correct sound of letters. I have dealt with this in my blog. Many kids have already learned the wrong sounds of letters from TV programmes and YouTube videos and in kindergartens.
We can screen kids who enter grade one by asking them to sound out the letters. All kids who sound out letters with extraneous sounds should get intervention and be taught the correct sounds of letters.
2. Many kids in Malaysia and China now can’t read Pinyin because Pinyin is taught with initial Bopomofo sounds. The curious intelligent kids shut down/disengage from learning Pinyin as it doesn’t make sense to them. They can’t understand why fo + en = fen; po + ei = pei; mo + an = man, etc.
If this is not corrected then ‘dyslexics’ in Chinese schools in Malaysia and China will be maintained at the current level or deteriorate even further.
For those interested in reading further please read my blog posts.
My comments on an article by Global Times
https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2024/12/unlocking-potential-of-chinas-dyslexic.html
My comments on an article in Sixth Tone.
https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2024/12/unlocking-potential-of-chinas-dyslexic_26.html
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