A Popular Method for Teaching Phonemic Awareness Doesn’t Boost Reading

 

Tomorrow, I’ll share a companion post that connects this report to the bigger picture—how confusion has been systematically marketed as science for decades.

 

A Popular Method for Teaching Phonemic Awareness Doesn’t Boost Reading.

That’s the headline from Education Week, and it’s long overdue. But the real question is: why did it take this long? LINK

 

Why Are We Still Pretending It Will?

 

Were we taught phonemic awareness in school? Not that I recall. And yet, for over 35 years, the dominant theory claimed that a deficit in phonological awareness was the root cause of dyslexia. When I began researching dyslexia in 2004, I immediately saw through this flawed narrative. I’ve since written over 100 articles and comments challenging it—until it was finally debunked in 2017.

 

But the story didn’t end there. Once phonological awareness lost its grip, the same gatekeepers pivoted to phonemic awareness. The terminology shifted, but the underlying con remained: keep kids confused, keep them from reading, and keep the market for interventions alive.

 

The subtitle of the article reads, “Teaching letter sounds might have limited effects.” Limited? That’s generous. Who’s feeding Sarah Schwartz this line?

 

Now, SOR (Science of Reading) advocates are circling the wagons, blaming the Heggerty program as if the publisher is the problem. But this is a familiar pattern. They did the same to Lucy Calkins—vilify the messenger, protect the flawed method.

 

The study cited in the article examined 13 elementary schools and found that Heggerty’s phonemic awareness supplement didn’t improve first graders’ word-reading abilities or fluency. That’s not surprising. Teaching isolated sounds without connecting them to actual words is like teaching kids to juggle syllables in the dark.

 

Michael Coyne, lead author of the study and professor at the University of Connecticut, admits the findings are “confusing.” He says phonemic awareness is essential, so why didn’t the program work?

 

Let’s pause here. If the study can’t provide a definitive answer, why publish it? And why keep repeating the same failed strategies?

 

I’ve been writing about phonological and phonemic awareness since launching my blog in 2010. I quit my job in 2004 to investigate why kids struggle to read. My book Shut Down Kids lays out the real reasons—none of which have been refuted by any educator or researcher.

 

Coyne’s conclusion? That no single element of reading instruction can transform student outcomes. That’s true—but it’s also a convenient way to avoid accountability. The problem isn’t that phonemic awareness is taught in isolation. The problem is that it’s taught confusingly, without clarity, without context, and without connection to actual reading.

 

“Kids learn what we teach them,” Coyne says. Exactly. So why are we teaching them to sound out luh-ah-muh-buh and expecting them to read lamb?

 

This isn’t just academic negligence—it’s systemic sabotage. And it’s time someone asked Coyne to join a Zoom call with me and explain why he’s still defending a method that doesn’t work.

 

Is Coyne genuinely confused, or is he playing dumb to protect the status quo?