Stop Blaming Kids' 'Poor Phonemic Awareness' — It's the Wrong Letter Sounds, Stupid!

 

Here are extracts from a Facebook comment on a post I read today.

Emma Hartnell-Baker

It’s difficult as most have poor phonemic awareness and phonological working memory.

My thoughts:

Here they go again. They teach the wrong sounds of letters and then claim that kids have poor phonemic awareness. Read one of many posts on this at: LINK

 

Emma continued:

So:

It’s not a visual memory problem

It’s a word mapping problem

“Sight word memorisation” doesn’t help, because skilled readers don’t memorise whole words visually. They store them through phoneme–grapheme mapping.

My thoughts:

Why talk about memorizing words visually in an alphabetic language. Again, I have written several articles on this. Rote memorise the Dolch words and teach kids phonics and no kid will be left behind.

Here is one of several post on this: LINK