Echoes, Evidence, and the PISA Wake-Up Call
Shouldn’t we think before accepting anything we read?
Since 2016, when I first read that “reading is biologically unnatural,” I’ve disagreed. This post shows what happens when one researcher makes a claim—and others repeat it without question. Stanislas Dehaene. Pamela Snow. David Chalk. Regie Routman. The myth spreads. The consequences deepen.
The Echo Chamber: Repeating Without Thinking
David Chalk recently commented on my LinkedIn post:
“Our brains have been wired hundreds of thousands of years to speak and interpret by hearing words, but there is no natural ability to read—attaching sounds to symbols.”
He’s repeating what he’s read from Dehaene and Snow.
Dehaene (2018) argues that the brain has no mechanism for learning to read—because oral language is ancient, and writing is recent. Snow echoed this in 2016:
“Reading is a human contrivance… only approximately 6,000 years old… the human brain has not developed specialized neural pathways to support it.”
Many researchers have repeated this blindly. But I ask: If speaking is natural, why not reading? If Tamil, Chinese, and Malay readers decode fluently, why exceptionalize English?
The University Fallout: Late Readers, Lost Foundations
Snow once wrote:
“University lecturers grapple with first-year students who don’t know how to construct a sentence—despite 13 years of English instruction.”
I’ve told her why: Many kids only figure out reading by Grade 6 or later. By then, they’ve missed years of foundational learning. They’re decoding “buh-a-tuh” while grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension slip away.
The Kilpatrick Test: What My Videos Reveal
Here’s a video of a current university student in Australia reading nonsense words from Dr. David Kilpatrick’s book. She mispronounces most phonemes. She’s not alone—I have many such videos.
Questions Snow should ask:
How did this student learn to read?
How long did it take?
How is she now writing good sentences in university?
The PISA Wake-Up Call
Snow wrote in 2017:
“Despite three international inquiries… it’s difficult to see what has materially changed in early years reading instruction.”
My response: If nothing has changed, shouldn’t we ask why not? Shouldn’t we challenge the assumptions, not just repeat them?
The world has searched for the “Holy Grail” of reading instruction for decades. They keep doing the same thing, expecting different results. Einstein called that insanity. I’ve offered the Grail—pure phonemes, early decoding—and it’s dismissed as “too simple.”
Misty Adoniou’s Assumption: “They Know the Sounds”
Prof. Misty Adoniou (University of Canberra) claims:
“We can be fairly certain that the 15-year-olds underperforming on PISA know their sounds. Phonic knowledge is not the problem.”
On what basis? She, like Snow, talks about comprehension and vocabulary—while ignoring sound-symbol confusion. It’s the same mistake, repeated.
The Global Comparison: Anglophone Failure
It’s disgraceful that 15-year-olds from Anglophone countries performed worse than students from Singapore and Macau—who took the PISA test in English. Worse still compared to students from China and Hong Kong, who took it in Mandarin.
I discussed this with Monique. She believes Singapore and Macau did well because they study in English-medium schools. I forgot to ask: What medium do Anglophone countries use?
The Final Spark
I read this tweet from Regie Routman (@regieroutman):
“Explicit, systematic teaching of letters & sounds—decoding—is necessary but insufficient for becoming a reader… We have known this for decades.”
Yes, we’ve known it. But we’ve ignored the first step: teaching sounds correctly. Without that, everything else—comprehension, fluency, joy—falls apart.
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