Different Perspectives: Tweets That Echo Across Continents
Good evening, readers. The reading wars don’t respect borders — they leap from U.S. threads to Aussie classrooms faster than a kangaroo on caffeine.
Tonight’s dispatch takes us Down Under to Narelle Lynch, a 19-year veteran teacher from Australia whose tweets on phonics pitfalls and the power of context have fueled fierce exchanges since 2020. Trained by the THRASS Institute — a multi-sensory literacy framework blending phonics, morphology, and more — Narelle champions a holistic approach: grammar, syntax, etymology, and real-world transferability over isolated sound drills.
But our digital dust-ups? They’ve spotlighted a core rift: Does rigid code-cracking stifle kids’ innate adaptability, or is it the only path to fluency?
Drawing from her archived tweets and my blog dissections, let’s unpack the tango — her steps toward flexibility, my push for sound clarity, and the unanswered rhythm in between.
🔥 December 2020: The Transferability Clash
Amid a global phonics frenzy, Narelle dove into a thread on systematic instruction, challenging the “one sound per letter” myth with this gem:
“The ultimate goal is reading and the learning should be transferable. Teaching <a> is æ and providing a book, where every word the pronunciation of <a> is æ — is a bad test. The learning is not transferable to ‘was’ — the real world.”
She followed up:
“Not transferable — ‘was, Lachlan, ball, class’. Teaching one thing and students have to overthrow the process along the way.”
Oof. I fired back in Twitter and the Reading Wars, breaking it down: Sure, a in “apple” (/æ/ as in axe, accent) isn’t the schwa in “was” (/ɒ/ as in all, awful), but why frame it as overthrow? Kids aren’t overthrowing — they’re adapting. If we model multiple mappings upfront (like in my YouTube video on multi-sound letters), they flex naturally.
Still, her critique landed punches: Why drill one sound when real books demand five for a alone? Her stance echoed THRASS’s ethos — no silos, just interconnected code.
🧩 Sequencing, Silos, and Sacred Cows
In the same thread, Narelle swatted at sequencing dogma:
“It is not helpful because the word ‘on’ (‘simple code’) is not harder to learn or has any reason to be learnt before ‘no’ (‘complex’) — both containing graphs. There is only one code and it is absurd to order words.”
Absurd? I tagged her for clarification — crickets.
As I noted, both o sounds shift (/ɒ/ in “on” like occupy; /oʊ/ in “no” like oat), but access to varied texts builds that bridge.
Narelle doubled down on kids’ precocity:
“To think that anyone would believe that children learn to read because each letter sound is covered? Funny how most children learn to read before the letter sounds continuum catches up.”
“If you are teaching a child <a> is æ apple on the ‘systematic’ (not true) continuum and they read ‘was, ball, fast, gave, came, play...’, they have read using a whole language approach, waiting for the teaching to catch up — the irony.”
This hit home in our November 2020 clash — shoutout to that Pam Kastner thread where Narelle pushed back on rigid GPC sequencing alongside Erin Harrington.
I linked it in Reading to Respond Instead of Reading to Guess, praising her context nod but questioning the “guessing” dismissal:
“‘Guessing’ — is a myth. Context often decides the pronunciation of an unfamiliar printed word for a beginner reader and not just for homophones. Is ‘home’ read as /həʊm/ or /hum/ (some, come)? Context can decide so students are not just stuck at phonics.”
Fair play — context does cue /hoʊm/ vs. schwa in “some.” But as I argued in Three Cueing Systems, labeling her a three-cueing proponent (syntax + semantics over graphophonics) risks oversimplifying. Yet she and Pat Stone read isolated words fine without cues — proof that innate decoding flexes beyond drills.
📉 August 2020: Australia’s Literacy Alarm
Rewind to August 2020: Narelle sounded the alarm on Australia’s literacy nosedive, tweeting about PISA scores tanking under “balanced literacy” experiments.
I covered it in my monthly roundup, agreeing the decline screamed for sound-first revival — but not the drill variety that ignores transfer.
Her THRASS roots shine here. In a 2021 interview on Dr. Sam Bommarito’s blog, she stressed orthographic depth:
“Here is the symbol and this is the sound, has been around for years. Can anyone out there tell me that a child doesn’t know that the letter ‘b’ makes ‘ber/bur’?”
(Noting the extra r — a THRASS quirk for blending.)
Years on, the silence stings. As in Response by Pat Stone, I nudged Narelle toward my videos a month prior — no dice.
Why block the bridge-building?
Her views challenge the phonics purists (Lyn Stone called her a “whole language apologist” in a 2020 spat), yet align with my innate-ability stance: Kids aren’t blank slates waiting for GPC gospel — they’re wired to map sounds contextually.
💬 Final Thoughts: Waltzing Past the Divide
Readers, has context vs. code sparked — or stalled — your teaching?
Drop a comment or tweet me @MichelLuqman Let’s keep the rhythm going.
Next Evening News: More global grooves.
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Luqman Michel Dyslexia Advocate | Author of Shut Down Kids [Subscribe to the Blog] | [Follow on X] My Book: Teach Your Child to Read
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