The Fatal Blind Spot in Phonics
The Giant Hole Nobody Talks About
Greg, like almost every phonics advocate in the English‑speaking world, believes the main problem is that teachers are not being explicit enough.
I argue the opposite: teachers are being explicit about the wrong sounds.
Watch a typical Year 1 teacher in Australia, England, or America teach the letter b.
The sound she makes is “buh.”
Every consonant gets a little “uh” stuck on the end: “buh,” “cuh,” “duh,” “fuh,” “guh.”
Why This Matters
Children are then told to “blend” those sounds:
cuh + ah + tuh = cuh‑a‑tuh → cat
buh + ah + tuh = buh‑a‑tuh → bat
That is explicit teaching — but it is explicitly wrong.
The real sound of b is a tiny explosion of air with no vowel. Linguists call these “stops” or “pure consonants.”
In languages that use the same Roman letters we do (Malay, Indonesian, Turkish, Finnish, Mandarin Pinyin), children are taught the pure sounds from day one. The result? Almost zero reading failure.
In English‑speaking countries, we teach the schwa‑contaminated versions (“buh,” “cuh”) and then act shocked when 20–30% of children cannot blend.
I have seen this firsthand:
Children in Perth kindergartens unable to read a single word after a year of “explicit synthetic phonics.”
Ten minutes of teaching pure sounds, and they read straight away.
Close to a hundred children labelled “dyslexic” have done the same.
Greg Ashman has never answered this. Since 2018 I have emailed, tweeted, and commented on his blog. He blocks, mutes, or ignores.
The Irony
In his tweet, Greg laughs at people who, when faced with evidence, retreat to “higher outcomes that cannot be measured.”
That is exactly what the phonics establishment does when you point out the schwa problem. They say:
“Ah, but some children have phonological deficits.”
“Ah, but some need more Tier 2 intervention.”
“Ah, but the phonics check will catch them.”
None of those explanations account for the fact that children taught pure sounds in Pinyin or Malay never show these “deficits.”
The River Parable Again
Archbishop Desmond Tutu told a story: You are fishing children out of a river. Finally, someone walks upstream to see why they keep falling in.
Greg and the explicit‑teaching army are brilliant at fishing children out — RTI tiers, extra interventions, phonics screening.
But they never walk upstream to see that the cliff edge is made of teachers saying “buh” instead of /b/.
What Greg Gets Right (and Why It Still Fails Kids)
Yes, children need knowledge. Yes, explicit teaching works better than discovery learning. Yes, the curriculum is bloated with nonsense.
But none of that helps if the child cannot decode the words on the page in the first place.
You can have the best knowledge‑rich curriculum in the world. If a child thinks the letter b says “buh,” he will struggle with every second word.
Conclusion
Greg Ashman is winning every argument on Twitter and in staffrooms. He has the studies, the one‑liners, and the followers.
Meanwhile, thousands of children are still drowning in Year 1 because the very first sounds they are explicitly taught are wrong.
Until someone in his camp has the honesty to walk upstream and look, nothing will change.
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Where the Debate Must Go Next
Greg Ashman has the studies, the one‑liners, and the followers. He is winning the battle of persuasion. But unless his camp faces the upstream problem — the way sounds are taught at the very first step — thousands of children will keep drowning in Year 1.
The choice is simple: keep fishing children out of the river with endless interventions, or walk upstream and fix the cliff edge. The door is open for honest dialogue. Until then, the war for children’s reading futures is still being lost.
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