The Real Barrier Isn’t a Phonics Gap—It’s a Clarity Gap

                                                                      

Here is my response to a Substack post on decodables. 

While it’s true that not all struggling readers have the same needs, the statement “many struggling readers have phonics gaps” significantly understates the real issue for a large proportion of children.

 

After leaving a career in accounting in 2004 to investigate why some children read easily in Malay (a transparent orthography) but struggle severely in English, I found that the primary barrier for most persistent struggling readers is not a lack of phonics instruction per se, but the initial confusion caused by imprecise or inconsistent teaching of letter–sound relationships.

 

When children are taught the wrong pronunciations of letters—often with extraneous sounds—bright, curious students quickly become overwhelmed, anxious, and disengaged. That disengagement is then mislabeled as a phonemic awareness deficit, dyslexia, or a phonics gap.

 

Over 15 years of direct tutoring (2004–2019), I repeatedly saw that once the confusion was removed and children were given accurate, cumulative, and explicit instruction in reliable sound–symbol correspondences, even students who had appeared “hopeless” for years began reading accurately and confidently—often within weeks or months, not years.

 

Decodable texts are helpful, but only after the code itself has been taught clearly and systematically. For the roughly 15–20% of students who have shut down entirely because early instruction created cognitive overload and mistrust, jumping straight to decodables (or any text) can feel punitive rather than supportive. These children first need brief, confidence-restoring lessons that remove the original source of confusion before controlled texts become useful.

 

In short, the deepest struggle is rarely a phonics gap in the child; it is a clarity gap in the initial teaching. Close that gap early and systematically, and the vast majority of children—including the highly intelligent ones who shut down hardest—learn to read English without years of frustration.

Please read my following post in its entirety and ask yourself: How was I so confident that I could teach this child to read with just four months of lessons (three lesson per week)? LINK

Here is something from a Facebook post that is relevant. I am beginning to see more similar posts on social media. 

Julia Glencross

Help for (British, if relevant) parents to learn phonics quickly. We're both people who never struggled with reading and of an age where phonics wasn't taught to us at school. We need to learn to stop saying, e.g , "puh" and "tuh" and be able to differentiate the sounds properly. Hoping for something online (since it's about pronunciation) and of course, preferably free or cheap! We've got loads of ideas for helping our child but realise first we need to stop actively confusing them!